Guild of Writers

So... sometimes, when I play Uru, my computer shuts off. No error message, no crashing... it has power one instant, and no power the next. And when that happens, the only way to turn the computer back on is to shut down the power strip to which my computer is connected and turn that back on.

This problem only occurs when I play Uru.

I haven't been able to attribute this to any single action or part of Uru. It happens in original Uru:CC Ages, and it happens to Ages that Drizzle haXXed into the game. Sometimes it happens when I'm running around. Sometimes it happens when I'm reading a journal. Sometimes it happens when I'm doing nothing at all. I've been able to get is as much as a couple of hours of uninterrupted play, and as little as a minute or so.

It's probably worth mentioning that, of the things I do on this computer, Uru uses up the most processor time by far.

Any ideas what is going on?

Two possibilities could be due to your pc or graphic card overheating or your powerstip automatic fuse is overloading.

It would help if you told us what kind of computer your playing with.

Try to share the maximum infos.

It could maybe also be a driver issue - did you try upgrading it to the latest version?

This is quite possibly related to a problem I've been having with Uru and my new computer and video cards, all of which are quite powerful and should run Uru without any problem.

However playing certain Ages, especially those converted with Drizzle and some fan Ages, will make my video driver crash. If I was using XP this would have meant a blue screen. Vista 64 detects the crash and restarts the driver, which results in my screens going black for 1 to 15 seconds. This happens at seemingly random intervals.

When this happens, if I go back to the desktop there is a bubble message saying that the driver has crashed and has been restarted. A Google search on the exact message turns out hundreds of results. Unfortunately it appears that it is a generic message and there is nothing either Microsoft, Nvidia or ATI can do about it. Different causes are possible:

unfortunate combination of motherboard, chipset, memory, video cards, video drivers, DirectX;
hardware problems in one of those;
too much overclocking;
bad memory refresh rate;
bad programming;
too heavy load on the video cards;
etc.

Solutions that have helped some people had no effect on others. For some, this happens in all circumstances. I am lucky, I guess, this only happens with Uru for me.

Hmm, interesting... yeah, if no other games cause this, then my guess would be video card as well. *All* video cards have bad drivers, so you cannot assume that a top-of-the-line card would do better, unfortunately. (Of course, some are much worse than others.) My particular card dies horribly in a few Ages, including Er'cana and Odema, though if I go in 1st person and always look down, I don't crash in Er'cana :P

But then you'll head straight into walls and trees!

But then you'll head straight into walls and trees!

Didn't realize those were trees? So to debachle the root system to enjoy the game...I need to DO WHAT?...

This computer is an HP Media Centre PC m380n. It uses Vista 32. (Considering that it's an HP, it's stayed intact remarkably well. )

The video card is NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GS. The driver is 8.16.11.9107. It was installed on September 27th of last year.

Other stuff I should mention: This game worked fine on this computer prior to the Vista installation. I didn't encounter this problem before installing Drizzle, but Drizzle was installed shortly after I re-installed Uru CC (a week at the most), so that's not a terribly reliable sample.

It's been a while since the problem started, but now that I think of it, I'm pretty sure I had a few months of problem-free use with Uru and Drizzle. I can't remember if the problem started after September 27th or not, though. I installed Drizzle sometime in the middle of February.

Over years of supporting PC's I've seen something similar three times (Not URU but one program killing a machine stone re-start.

The second one and the one easiest solved was a main chip overheat only occurring on a peak processing situation. (Solution remove fan clean chip and fan new thermal paste re-seat fan)

The second one was a PSU under powered (Custom built machine) (Solution Swapped out PSU for a 400W)

The third was a Graphics driver issue the card had the latest drivers (Solution went back to an earlier driver)