World of Warcraft Has Defeated My Computer
Posted on March 10, 2007
4 Comments
[Updated at the bottom!]
Last weekend, I reloaded World of Warcraft for yet another try. I’ve been playing and quitting once or twice a year since right after it went live. It’s not that I don’t like it, I just tend to run out of the necessary free time…
However, this time I’ve been having dismal problems. Every 5 - 30 minutes my computer locks up hard. The sort of lockup that you have to hit the reset or power switch for. I’m a bit puzzled as this is the only computer that I’ve ever used to play WoW and I’ve never had these problems in the past.
What’s changed? Well, since I upgraded the boot drive, I’ve had to enable the onboard Silicon Image SiI 3112 SATA RAID Controller. That had never been enabled until I bought the Raptor SATA drive. Oh, and the floppy drive was also installed and enabled as part of this last install. Otherwise, this is all the same old hardware that worked fine the previous installs. It is a very fresh install of XP, for what that’s worth.
What have I tried?
- Various versions of nvidia drivers
- Current, beta and Microsoft’s flavor for the 6800 GT video card drivers. Currently on the beta version (frankly, I noticed no differences between them)
- Current and the updates via Microsoft update for the nforce2 stuff (primarily sound)
- Monitoring temps
- the CPU in this rig has always ran hot (AMD 2500+ Barton core) and I’m not seeing anything out of character for it (low 50’s C when in game).
- I worry more about the GPU. At rest it runs at 67. In game it seems to head up to about 70. That’s just a hair under the “yellow mode” zone according to the nvidia temp monitor. I have no idea what normal is as I’ve never monitored this card. Same monitor says not to expect it to go to slowdown mode until 120 so I haven’t worried too much.
- BIOS settings
- Enable/disable AGP 8x vs AGP 4x mode.
- Enable/disable AGP Fast Write Cache
- Various AGP Aperture sizes from 64 to 256MB
- Assorted combinations of all of the above
- An hour or two of the Microsoft Windiag memory test
What happens when it blows up? It looks like a technicolor-static screen. Mostly white, but with many colors. Sometimes if I hit ESC enough times it’ll reboot. Usually I have to hit the big button. The sound will often go in a sound loop (but not every time).
Nothing gets written to the Windows Event Viewer.
I’d like to make this work, but a day full of searching hasn’t moved me much further. If you have any ideas, drop a comment — I’m all ears!
[Later]
As I was pondering drivers and vague notions of conflicts, I recalled that this motherboard (Asus A7N8X Deluxe) has two ethernet cards built-in. One via the nforce2 chipset, the other 3com based. I’d been using, for whatever reason, the nforce2 NIC. On a whim, I swapped over to the other.
I was in game for at least 2 hours since then without a crash. Could it be that simple? I guess tomorrow I’ll have to dedicate myself to testing this machine with WoW, eh? 
[Later Later]
Nope, that wasn’t it. Crashed out this morning. About to toss in the towel.
[Later McLaterPants]
It was heat! Read more.
Tags: hardware, mmrpg, support, World-of-Warcraft, WoW
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4 Responses to “World of Warcraft Has Defeated My Computer”
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Try use motherboard/graphic card with PCI-Express
You pay and I’ll play!
But yeah, my machines are considered retro these days. Ah well.
Well, you probably already know this, but I recently learned that because WoW doesn’t write anything to the registry, you can copy your entire World of Warcraft folder to a CD and simply copy it back to ‘re-install’. This assumes you have a clean software install in the first place (ie: no corruption in the game itself to begin with, and you’re just facing hardware issues).
Rather than spending hours and hours reinstalling and re-patching, you cna just dump everything back into a World of Warcraft directory from your CD (or whatever media), and whammo…you’re completely reinstalled and even maintain all your addons and settings.
I have a friend who uses a separate computer just for WoW. If he has an issue, he’ll reformat the hard drive, reinstall the operating system, and dump his WoW CD back onto the computer and he’s up and running again.
I know that doesn’t address your specific problem, but maybe it will help in the process if it saves you some time reloading.