Computer Freezing playing Games

jonnybadd

Hey, having some problems running games. Basically the computer freezes about 5-15 seconds when I connect to a game of CoD2 or BF2, meaning I have to do a hard shut down. I recently formatted and before the games ran perfectly. The older games I have (CoD/UO, Unreal 2k4, AoEIII, and C&C Generals) all run perfectly. Running all the latest drivers for GPU etc. Attached is the dxdiag file with my system info. If any other info is needed just ask.

Any Ideas how to solve this?

Ruu_Old

Is it just when playing games or do you notice it at other times?

bus77

Only thing I can think of is that onboard AC97 Audio, used to cause some games to lock up on me. 'EAX Conflicts' or somthing. Try disabling 'EAX' in your games sound settings, or reinstaling the soundcard drivers.

jonnybadd

Ruu wrote:

Is it just when playing games or do you notice it at other times?

Yup, just when playing games, cod2 and bf2, every other game I have runs perfectly.

bus77 wrote:

Only thing I can think of is that onboard AC97 Audio, used to cause some games to lock up on me. 'EAX Conflicts' or somthing. Try disabling 'EAX' in your games sound settings, or reinstaling the soundcard drivers.

Disabled it and still having the problem.

When trying that I noticed that the computer doesnt actually lock as such. I have a keyboard which has an lcd display of your cpu/ram useage and when the game froze the cpu usage shot up to 99/100%. Is this extra information in anyway usefull?

Squall

Did you install more up to date GPU drivers when you did the format?

I think I remember reading somewhere that alienware has its own version of Nvidia drivers. It might be worth going to their support section and getting the drivers from their downloads section (I think you need to set up an account to do this)

(Ive done some googling and cant seem to find mention of custom alienware drivers... I cant for the life of me remember where I read this but I cant see my suggestion doing much harm so if you can give it a shot)

jonnybadd

Yup, I installed the latest when I formatted then roled back to the next oldest set cause I think CS 1.6 has some problems with the latest drivers. I thought origonally that may have been the problem, but I updated again last night and still getting the problem. Off to work now but I'll try the alienware thing when I get in. Cheers.

challengemaster

hows your ram and ram usage?

Anti

I would recomend you download a few benchmarks. like 3dmark 2005 and 3dmark 2003. aswell as super pi. Run them a few times and see if they freeze or lock up.

I have a funny feeling its a psu problem. Have you recently upgraded to a new graphics card ? or added a few new hdds ?

Ruu_Old

Have you adequate cooling in your system?

jonnybadd

No recent upgrade, the only thing I did was added the old HDD from my old computer but that was when I first got the machine a few months ago and it was running fine before I formatted.

As for the cooling I can only assume thats the problem now that nothing else seems to have worked, but again it was working fine 2 weeks ago.

Ri_Nollaig

jonnybadd wrote:

No recent upgrade, the only thing I did was added the old HDD from my old computer but that was when I first got the machine a few months ago and it was running fine before I formatted.

As for the cooling I can only assume thats the problem now that nothing else seems to have worked, but again it was working fine 2 weeks ago.

i had a simaliar problem before, it turned out to be chipset drivers. did you ensure yours are uptodate following reformating ?

jonnybadd

Right just done the three benchmarks suggested:

Super PI: Did the [32M] one in 37M 56S

3DMark03: around 15,000 3dmarks

3DMark05: around 8,000 3dmarks

No problems with any of the programs

EDIT: Was just playing CoD2 there, works fine if I'm on an empty server, still crashing when I try and join a populated server. But I noticed that although the game crashed I could still alt-tab and the window selection thing comes up as normal, however cod stays maximised at a stand still meaning all I can do is a hard shut down.

jonnybadd

Ri_Nollaig wrote:

i had a simaliar problem before, it turned out to be chipset drivers. did you ensure yours are uptodate following reformating ?

Seems to have done the trick. Cheers dude and all who helped out.