I was playing SimCity 4 last night and clicked to perform a particular operation, and the machine froze; the sound suddenly went into an infinite loop on the last note of the music that had been playing, and no keys would respond. I shrugged it off as “gremlins” and rebooted. Decided it wasn’t worth the hassle to repeat the actions I’d performed on the city, so I tried HALO instead.
As the game booted up, one of the many splash screens froze, and the dramatic music that plays over the flashy video came to a stuttering grind. Basically the same error - computer just locked up while trying to walk and chew gum at the same time.
I defragged all three hard drives (the RAID-0 and the 120GB backup drive). I rebooted and underclocked my CPU. I performed a chkdsk on the RAID since it’s had problems before, but found nothing wrong. I even checked my HDD cables’ connections and arranged them a little more sensibly on my motherboard (RAID on the RAID IDE channel, 120GB on IDE1 with the CD drive, IDE2 and RAID2 empty).
Problem persists; pragmatic professional pleads: fix foul-up, free functional furniture for fun!
Power supply is 350W with plenty of juice on all rails. I last modified the RAM and CPU (almost a month ago). I installed all-new RAM and a 35W Athlon 2400+ XP-Mobile that I’m running at 1.6GHz (down to 1.4GHz while I stabilize the system). At 1.6GHz it runs around 43C. At 1.4GHz it runs around 41C. The system has been stable for a month, and ran SimCity 4 and HALO flawlessly for several two-to-three-hour sessions before this problem came up.
If you are having problems mainly in graphics intensive applications (like a lot of games), take a look at your video card.
I had some capacitors go bad on a 3-d video card. The machine would work fine in most Windows screens, or Explorer, but would lock up in games.
There have been some known problems with a batch of capacitors that were build a couple of years ago. If that’s your problem, you should be able to get a free replacement (probably a rebuild) for the card from the manufacturer.
I’ve further isolated the problem: it occurs only when starting HALO (Sim City 4 works fine) and the problem started after Sim City 4 glitched. My pet theory at the moment is that Sim City 4 was using a graphics library when it crashed, accidentally overwrote something in that library, and HALO requires that library to start. I have uninstalled and reinstalled the game, but the problem still persists; I have not yet tried reinstalling, patching, and then running the patched version.
Since the patch claims to fix a known “crash on startup movie” bug, it’s possible that my machine has now become susceptible to this bug, somehow due to Sim City 4 being stupid. It’s further possible that patching the game will eliminate this problem.