I just installed the new Return of the King game from EA Games and was all set to start playing. Right before the menu loads however, a blue screen flashes quickly (too quickly for me to see anything it says) and my computer restarts itself. I’ve updated my graphics driver and my sound driver, and I have DirectX 9.0 as well. I thought it might be the game somehow, but it works just fine on my sister’s computer. In case it’s needed, my computer’s specs are as follows:
Windows XP Home
P4 2.26GHz
768MB DDR RAM
80.0GB hard drive
Nvidia GeForce4 4200i with 128MB RAM
I’ve looked around on the technical support site for EA but haven’t seen anything that would be very helpful. I’ve submitted a question to them, but I have no idea when I’ll actually get an answer from them.
Any insights or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Your hardware certainly should not have any difficulty playing the game. I can only tell you what I would do in this instance. I would Uninstall the game, and then use System Restore to go back to the day before you installed it. I would then Scan Disk and Defragment if needed just for the heck of it and re-install the game and see how it goes. Try to use it without DX9.
This will probably help us diagnose the problem. Make sure you have some paper and a pen handy.
Go to My Computer, right click, hit Properties, choose the Advanced tab, and click Settings again by Startup and Recovery. Uncheck the box next to Automatically Restart (or something like that). Then when the error occurs, right down what it said.
I did uninstall and reinstall the game, hoping that something just messed up the first time around. It didn’t help any though. However, I haven’t run scandisk yet and was planning on doing that tonight. I’ll defragment after that just to be sure.
I tried shutting down everything unnecessary, but it still restarted the computer. I’m the only user on this computer, so I don’t think I need to worry about the administrator thing, but I’m not positive on that.
Okay, I turned off “auto restart” and here’s what the error message said.
Searching for smwdm.sys I turn up references for a SoundMAx audio card. Does this happen to be your device? You might try disabling the sound and see if the game starts. Or getting a neweer driver.
Some more basic questions. Is this a machine you built yourself or is it a brand name one? Do you have any patches that are out for the game installed? Did you get the drivers from NVIDIA or from WindowsUpdate? What kind of motherboard do you have (if you know)?
I was getting similar error messages and it took flashing my BIOS and reinstalling all the drivers to fix it. Before you do that, however, wait for people who know more than I to post. I know it’s not very helpful, but if EA tech support is like most of the tech support I’ve dealt with, you’ll get an email in 2 to 3 days saying “Update your drivers!”
Try reinstalling DirectX. It seems that whenever you update your video and audio drivers, you need to reinstall DirectX in order to have it recognize the new drivers.
Could be overheating anywhere on the mainboard or the graphics card…after it restarts, open the case, and see if anything inside is running hot - i.e. almost too hot to touch. Earth yourself first so you don’t damage anything with static. I had a similar problem and after replacing memory and the graphics card, I resorted to a new mainboard. Handy excuse for an upgrade, anyway
