What can i say? This is my Impulse Blog!
Well let me start off by saying this problem really hasn't bothered me that much be4, but in my new game i just started, and in the last few hours especially, this problem has increased tenfold. in the last 4 hours, GC2 has completely crashed my computer to reboot over 10 times, semmingly completely at random.

I've posted some bugs be4, so i hope the devs will take this to heart. I'm not an average computer user, i work with them for a living. I'm running GC2 on my personal workstation, it's a powerhouse machine. There aren't any spec issues. All my drivers are always up to date. I don't have any spyware or adware. And i'm meticulous about what i let run in the background.

At first, these crashes happened only once every 2 or 3 days, but as i said, now i can't go 15 min without one. Something is definately wrong here guys. Whatever files you need, i can provide. But it's making the game unplayable (i hate that word, but i'm afraid in this case it's true). I've seen this problem brought up occasionaly on the forums, and it seems they are increasing. So i hope you SD guys will please take a second look at this problem.

Sincerely,
A Loyal GC Fan.

Comments (Page 3)
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on Mar 14, 2006
You can seriously doubt thats your problem all you want. But if your drawing more then 18amps on the 12 volt rail that enermax unit will trip and reboot. The 12 volt rail on the EG851AX-VH has a 14/14/16/18 split...
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1933038,00.asp

Your issue is either your power supply, your ram, or your ATI drivers, take your pick.
Its not the game, or it would be happening to a lot more people....
on Mar 14, 2006

I"d suggest turning down the anti-aliasing and seeing about putting the afinity onto a single CPU and seeing if that helps it.

It is definitely an odd thing.

on Mar 14, 2006

Have you tried checking your hard drive for bad sectors? Also, if your virtual memory size is larger than the space you have available on your hard drive, that could certainly cause crashes.

on Mar 16, 2006
OK, sorry for the long delay, but i had a busy couple of days there. So i'll get to everything as i read down the list. So here goes.

Post #27 - CariElf: Yes it was with AA off, i deleted me prefs.ini file and restarted the game, the only thing i changed was me resolution. (i set it back up to 1280x1024)

Post #28 DeltaGorno - My Card is a FireGL, not A Radeon. Technically i *could* force the catalyst drivers to work on this card, *but* that would make my card worthless as a FireGL. So... meh.... Anyways, those are the most uptodate FireGL Drivers. Tho i have no doubt that the catalyst drivers they're based on are older than the newest ones, but that's not much that can be done about that i'm afraid. ATi isn't going to release new FireGL drivers b/c i asked them to. I did turn off automatic reboot, so we'll see if i get BSoD next time. I'll be sure to report the message.

Post #30 Arcanum - I will try that and report back with the results.

Post #31 Ibnarabi - As i said, i KNOW it's not the problem b/c i was monitoring all my stats with ASUS Probe the entire time i was playing my last game. The +12V line didn't even come close to 13V, much less 18. I was ALSO running a probe on the memory at the time. There were absolutely no anomolies. The memory is working perfectly. As it should be. it's quality stuff.

Post #32 FrogBoy - Tried with the AA, no help there, still have yet to try the affinity, trying that next.

Post #33 CariElf - My last check showed no bad sectors (that was about 4 days ago, i check once every month, run virus and spyware scan every week), on all 6 HDDs. I checked and i have 10Gb free on the drive i'm running GC2 on, and the PF is set at 4Gb.... I could try defragging the drive, but that's a pain in the @ss (it's a 250Gb drive), and i doubt it would really help.

This is really a stumper for me. Anyways, i'll be back with some results later.
on Mar 16, 2006
Cool.  We'll be here. My money is on the CPU affinity at this point.
on Mar 16, 2006
okie dokie, tracked down the problem it would seem. So, i disabled auto-reboot. Well after 45min of play, i got another crash, but this time, i got a BSoD with some info:

The problem occured in Ctoss2k.sys
An attempt was made to write to read only memory.

Ctoss2K.sys is a Soundblaster driver. So i am investigeting solutions now. Anything you guys can offer?
on Mar 16, 2006
So only thing i could think of was to reinstall the Driver Update for my card. Which i've done. And to my surpsise (even tho it's the same update i already had) Ctoss2k.sys changed file size. Sooooo I guess we'll see. Will it work? Cross your fingers. I'll letcha know.
on Mar 16, 2006
Drivers, drivers, drivers. This game is really the most driver-sensitive software I've seen in quite a while
on Mar 16, 2006
I had problems with my Sound Blaster as well, update drivers didn't work for me so I went with disabling the card and enabling my on board sound which worked fine for me.
on Mar 16, 2006
it's worked for several hours now... but might i direct CariElf and Frogboy's attention here... It's another game ending bug i've run into just now

Link

on Mar 16, 2006
It's always been sound for me in all my other games. It got to the point that for Civ 4 I tore out my Audigy 2 and gave it to a friend of mine and started using my onboard MB sound. Sad, eh? But I haven't had a sound related crash since. Hmmmmmm?

Just so you're aware, I had a bug that crashed my game too, and Cari figured it out, I had updated the game originally with the direct download from the site and the second patch I used Stardock Central...something about that didn't jive and after I removed everything and just installed it all at once using SC, it's like magic. Magic!
on Mar 16, 2006
Bingo! Amazing what a BSOD can actually tell you sometimes, glad it got sorted in the end
on Mar 16, 2006
i have an Enermax 660watt PSU, i seriously doubt that's the problem


Random rebooting general is a power supply starting to fail. Even the most expensive ones fail upon occasion.

on Mar 16, 2006
well that might be true, if the random rebooting was ocurring, purely at random.. But it wasn't, was it? it was only happening while playing GC2...


random rebooting is certainly not always caused by a PSU, in fact, it's not even the #1 cause. There are a great many things that can cause random reboots. In fact the most common causes aren't hardware related at all, but software or OS related.


And as far as PSUs failing, Of course they do, i've been building computers for years. I've seen them turn into fire and smoke balls when plugged in. I know they can fail. AND I KNOW WHEN THEY'RE NOT You really think i could have built my own system, god know's how many times over, and posted all this stuff, and not know when somethings a PSU failing, or something else? I pretty much asserted my belief it was software related from the beginning. And it was. At least it appears to be thusfar.

P.S.
Sorry if i seem to have come down hard, but i've had a really cr@ppy day, and that post was just a straw on my back. Sorry.
on Mar 17, 2006
Well it didn't work, i had another crash. This time no BSoD. Just a Crash, had to reboot manually.
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