Need for Speed: Most Wanted Crashes

[Yer Mom]

Running 1.8ghz p4 with 1 gig DDR-RAM, rather slow hard drive, but it gets the job done, radeon 9200 256 mb vid card.

Currently crashes after or during a race, simple blackscreen->desktop crash.

Thought it might be curropt HD, but not sure exactly. Any thoughts? More info?

[TychoCelchuuu]

If it's just Need for Speed, it's probably just the game's fault. Patch it to the newest version; other than that you can't do much.

[Yer Mom]

Patched it already. It's not the games fault because the game runs fine for a bit, and then crashes. Their only related problem that's been reported is crashing on splash screen, which is just after loading.

Any other ideas?

-Mom

[TychoCelchuuu]

It's the game's fault, dude. Battlefield 2, Source engine games, and every once in a while Warcraft III: they all have crash bugs. Getting complex games to work on every single computer on earth is tough. Don't expect a 100% success rate.

[Yer Mom]

I have confirmed that it wasn't the game. My video card, believe it or not, had dust on it that was causing it to over heat. The dust was located between the cracks on my heat sink, and it was absorbing the heat, and holding it on the heatsink. Yesterday, I tried to run NFSMW and my comp froze, I turned it off and registered the heat on the video card and the heatsink.

Vid card was nearly 110 degrees and the heatsink was pushing 130. They norm at 75-85ish.

Not any damage sustained to my card, though. If anyone has a heatsinked video card you might want to check the dust between the cracks of the heatsink. It can cause slow performance in games, apparently.

-Mom

[TychoCelchuuu]

So somehow only NFS was heating up the card?

That's odd. What other games do you play?

[Yer Mom]

NS and Gunbound atm. Nothing too graphical. NFS is very graphical, and very fast paced. Explains the heat atleast.

-Mom

[TychoCelchuuu]

Oh, well, there you go. You had a BF2 signature and BF2 will heat up your card like NFS will, so I figured if it was just NFS crashing it was the game.

But yeah if NFS is the only graphics intensive game you play then overheating would be it

[Yer Mom]

Well, no. I checked the temperature while playing the game, and now it registers the same normal temps, but is still sluggish and crashing. I also installed NS last night out of boredom from a CDrom and the game is really glitchy. I can load it up, but the fonts on the menu text are all encrypted, as well as error warnings. Wondering if my CDRom drive might be to fault. Also, I installed and loaded it before HL was finished downloading. It lied to me about being finished, so I thought it was when I installed NS. I figure this might be the fault of my NS rather than the CDrom, but I wonder still the same. When I reformatted my PC, I had to reinstall windows installer, which I've never had to do before. This led me to believe that it was a curropted HD, but nothing else is giving me problems.

Task Manager: Kernel: Total-53k Paged 42k Nonpaged 10832
Physical Memory is at 1047984 ; Available is 750k, and system cache is at 564-5k.
CPU usage registered 0% to 10% fluctuating. 153mb PF usage. Kernel is spiking 4% while usage is spiking 7%.

I had several virtual memory messages early on in the reformat, but I changed my page file settings to let the PC decide, and they disapeared. Wondering if my HD/Bios is curropt, or maybe the ROMs on my mobo. Any ideas?

It's a DVD-CDR. Wal-mart brand, nothing special. Rather quick, but rather cheap as well.

-Mom