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Author Topic: Davidhoff having tech problems  (Read 442 times)

willhoff

Davidhoff having tech problems
« on: March 07, 2011, 04:25:02 pm »
Hi, I'm using my brother's computer to type this.  Some background first:  When Tralek was at the Sederan Drach Quest, he walked up to everyone in Audira and all the lag caused my computer to freeze.  I relogged and when I came back my screen was still frozen (like a screeny of where I was at in Audira) and it looked like my screen was a water color print that some kid had splashed water on.  Visuals were all mixed and rainbowed and whacked.

Anyways, I logged on with Griff and he was fine.  So, I relogged with Tralek and he seemed fine too.

Problem is that later I was trying to look on the internet and yahoo and such and now I can't retrieve my "favorite" sites and can't access sites in my cookies or visit other sites.  I'm getting blue-screen-dos error messages saying I need to reinstall or check the installation of new software or hardware.  Norton says its shutting down windows.  Some of my icons on my desktop look like they have acid sheath cast on them.  I'm really not sure how extensive the problem is right now.  Its kinda hit and miss what I can look at and what I can't.  I'm not even sure my problems are related to the Audiran Freeze but I'm guessing it is.  I suspect my video driver got eaten, but I'm no Tech.

Any suggestions might help me.  I'll post back when I know more or to respond to questions.  I'm probably gona have to call Norton to do a virus scan, but I'd love to save the $100 they charge for that  :)

Appreciate any help,

Davidhoff
 

willhoff

Re: Davidhoff having tech problems
« Reply #1 on: March 07, 2011, 04:48:57 pm »
Update: Here's what the blue-doss-error message screen says:

~~~beginning of error message ~~~

A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer.

If this is the first time you've seen this Stop error screen, restart your computer.  If the screen appears again follow these steps:

Check to be sure you have adequate disk space.  If a driver is identified in the Stop message, disable the driver or check with the manufacture for driver updates.  Try changing video adapters.

Check with you hardware vendor for any BIOS updates.  Disable BIOS memory options such as cashing or shadowing.  If you need to use safe mode to disable or remove components, restart your computer, press F8 to select Advanced Start-up Options and then select safe mode.

Technical Information:

*** STOP: 0x0000008e  (0xc0000005, 0x805515a1, 0xa983f1c4, 0x00000000)

Beginning dump of physical memory.
Physical memory dump complete.
Contact your system administrator or tech support group for further assistance.

~~~ end of error message ~~~

Don't know if this helps any of you with my problem..but that's what it says.  So, I got that message when I just tried to start my computer, and then I had to hit the kill button to turn off my computer.
 

Acacea

Re: Davidhoff having tech problems
« Reply #2 on: March 07, 2011, 04:56:24 pm »
Not to ask the stupid question, but do you in fact have adequate disk space (whether or not you should have more than is reported)?

Install anything that needed drivers recently? What operating system are you running, can you boot to safe mode, etc?
 

Dorganath

Re: Davidhoff having tech problems
« Reply #3 on: March 07, 2011, 05:05:38 pm »
The STOP 0x0000008e error is usually indicative of a hardware problem.  You may be looking at failed/failing memory, but given your description of the visual effects on your desktop and in-game, I'd actually guess that you may be looking at a failed/failing video card.  About all you can do there is replace it and hope that's the problem.

It might be worthwhile to take your computer to a technician and have it more thoroughly diagnosed that what can be accomplished on forums.
 

willhoff

Re: Davidhoff having tech problems
« Reply #4 on: March 07, 2011, 05:45:22 pm »
Thanks Dorg and Acacea for the responses.  Let me see if I can get into safe mode and check the disk space available.  I have not installed any new software or hardware on this computer except for Layo updates ;) .

If I was to go buy a new video card, what card would you suggest I get that would be compatible with Layo?  Also, is the video card something you just plug in the hard drive, or is it something more difficult?

Will get back when I know more.
 

willhoff

Re: Davidhoff having tech problems
« Reply #5 on: March 07, 2011, 06:02:23 pm »
Ok, I'm hitting F8 when at my desktop but its not going into safe mode.  I can access my Control Panel, but couldn't find where to look for disk space status.  I guess I could look to see what video card I have currently installed, but not really sure where to look for that either.  Knowing what I currently have as a video card might help in figuring what to replace it with.  Oh, and to answer Acacea's question I'm running Windows XP for operating.

Thanks
 

Acacea

Re: Davidhoff having tech problems
« Reply #6 on: March 07, 2011, 06:35:20 pm »
You can go to "My Computer" and either hover on or right click the drive that says C: to see how much free space out of whatever total you have. If you right click you will need to click "Properties".

The F8 to safe mode actually needs to be done while the computer is starting. You have a pretty slim window of time to do it - if you are looking at the "Windows XP" loading splash thing you missed it; it's like the last thing before you see the logo. If you're watching the text scroll by while it's booting up you'll see it go by... depending on the PC it could be like playing Whack-A-Mole. You don't need to be in safe mode to check your disk space, or to see what kind of card you have.

For info on your video card, click Start, then Run, and type "dxdiag" without the quotes when the box comes up. A diagnostic tool will come up, and if you click the "Display" tab it should at least tell you exactly what you have even if it doesn't tell you anything else useful.

Because forum Q&A is a lot of "try this" "didn't work" "what about this" "didn't work" "download this tool and tell me what it says" and the like, if you have trouble digging around you are probably better off taking Dorg's advice about having someone physically look at it... Most people are like "do you have another card? Try swapping it!" or "try taking out a stick of ram and running a memory test on each" or something. Most forum people (me anyway, not necessarily Dorg) are just trial and error people. ...With search-fu.
 

Dorganath

Re: Davidhoff having tech problems
« Reply #7 on: March 07, 2011, 06:41:25 pm »
Quote from: Acacea
Most forum people (me anyway, not necessarily Dorg) are just trial and error people. ...With search-fu.

Nah...Trial and error is still the best way ultimately, unless something shows very clear signs right up front. :)
 

lonnarin

Re: Davidhoff having tech problems
« Reply #8 on: March 07, 2011, 07:06:15 pm »
Quote from: willhoff


If I was to go buy a new video card, what card would you suggest I get that would be compatible with Layo?  Also, is the video card something you just plug in the hard drive, or is it something more difficult?



Good question there.  Since Neverwinter is so old, backwards compatibility can be a real pain.  I recently tried upgrading my nvidia GTX 220 card to a newer GTX 400+ model and it worked WONDERFULLY... on all games except my one-true-love Neverwinter. (and by Neverwinter, I mean LAYO)  The frame rate was ATROCIOUS! (300+)  Reinstalling drivers, tweaking the settings, etc just would not work and when I checked out the forums of Nvidia, ( Neverwinter Nights - MASSIVE FPS drop - NVIDIA Forums) I found that all their GTX 400 series cards had some problem recognizing cloaks and bowstrings.  I kid you not, everything went smoothly until somebody wearing a cloak or drawing a bow came up and it was so choppy you'd think it was running on an Commadore 64.  This issue had been persistent for many months/years, so it seemed Nvidia wasn't going to fix it anytime soon.  For Neverwinter, avoid Nvidia GTX 400 series like the plague!

In fact I already had a bad taste in my mouth over Nvidia's previous troubles running other true loves, Piranha Bytes' Gothic I & II.  Somewhere between the OpenGL days of early 2000's and the new era of DirectX monopoly they just dropped all backwards support for these awesome games on both their old 220gtx series and again on the 400+ GTX series, rendering the games utterly unplayable.  I can understand a lapse of a few months of non-support, but we Gothic fans had been petitioning Nvidia to fix their compatibility with this series for almost THREE YEARS.  I kid you not, the top issue in their support forum was Gothic I & II not working, had over 150 THOUSAND views, 17+ pages worth of people asking them to fix it for over 3 years.  The reps at Nvidia just kept saying, "fixed in next update" and the fixes never came.  We stayed up all night, in the kitchen, by the telephone, watching the driveway till 3 am in the morning and the fixes never came!  The only real support came from Russian hackers who spoke very very little English but still posted DLLs and hacked EXEs to patch the problems, which worked on a handful of chipsets, but most of us were stuck on the "in the next update" or "um, this forum isn't *technically* run by Nvidia (though we're the only tech forum for Nvidia in existence, and we have Nvidia reps who work for us post to it)"  Three years of disappointment and you'd think I learned my lesson, eh?  I figured the 430gtx would solve the issue but no dice... and somehow the 430gtx couldn't handle Neverwinter, which was just fine on my old 230gtx.

I quickly returned the card to Best Buy and swapped it out for my new ATI/AMD Radeon HD 5670 card and could not be happier with my purchase.  First of all it was the most powerful PCI Express card I could find that still had a standard installation, no extra cables to link to the power supply, no dual-linking cards for better performance (though I could if I wanted to), just plug it into the PCIexpress slot and install the drivers and its done.  

It still has a few issues of course, like I still have to turn off shiny water for Neverwinter, and the default resolution settings for Dawn of Discovery were a pain to see through until I calibrated by resolution manually.  But unlike Nvidia's forum where my only allies were Russian hackers, ATI simply told me how to get around my issues.  I love my card as it was in the 100 dollar range and still allows a playable max-settings of Crisis I, still lets me just use a PCIexpress port with no added fuzz and blows the tar out of GTA IV and Fallout 3 with medium-high shadows at 1600x900. Definitely worth the 110+tax I paid for it half a year ago.

Now I know my issue with Nvidia was an isolated issue and that there are plenty of you on here that were lucky enough to purchase decent chipsets instead of the two stinkers I've dealt with, but I make it a personal issue to warn people about how Nvidia treated me and the millions of Gothic & Neverwinter fans worldwide.  Even if it was just an issue of how these cards interacted with our official Nvidia-ready motherboards. (my motherboard has the NVIDIA GeForce 9100 integrated video card for emergencies, and its marketing boasts optimal support for other Nvidia cards)  They told us "in the next update" for about 3 years on two titles, and the other one they just said "hey man, it's an old game! whatta you expect?".  

I wouldn't mind them peeing in my RPG-Cheerios quite so much if they hadn't shelled out big money to put their personal logo in the splash screens of said titles!  They gave me a personal guarantee of "Best played with Nvidia!" on those games, and they totally dropped support in less than 6 years of paying for that advertisement.  If a video game graphics company is going to use their money and their influence to vandalize my favorite games' splash-screen with their personal guarantee that it will not only work, but work better than any other brand in the world, they better well deliver as promised!  That's 8 seconds of my life wasted by their splash screens every time I started up those games, only to have it go choppity choppity click whirr boom, pixelflux on me, to be frustratingly restarted again and again and again, fuming as I stare at their accursed emblem as its actively mocking me.  Laughing at me.  Waving a fistful of dollars and splashing a high quality cognac into my face, paid for with my own blood sweat and tears.  It's because of that I shall never forgive this evil corporate entity known to mortal men as Nvidia, and possibly Cthulu Ktaga to others.

In their defense, I never did get far enough to see the Gothic I & II Nvidia splash screens, so at least I retained those 8 seconds.  All I ever got was just one quick glimpse of the Nameless hero, pleading for mercy as the necro-pixels devoured his countenance faster than orcs to an all-meat buffet.  And then nothing.  The poor little guy deserved better.

And so do you!  Avoid Nvidia like the plague, get an AMD/ATI!  Or anything else for that matter.  I will never forgive them, ever.  They crossed a line that they shouldn't have crossed and can never come back from.  It's like, Yoko and Ringo, baby.
 

lonnarin

Re: Davidhoff having tech problems
« Reply #9 on: March 07, 2011, 07:46:53 pm »
Back to topic *wheeze* sorry about that man.

In any case, my biggest advice to you when shopping video cards is to first compile a list of your favorite games from greatest to least, Neverwinter at the top of course.  (and by Neverwinter, I mean Layo) Then visit the tech support forums of every one of those games and take a look at which cards have the most persistent, unfixed issues for your favorite titles, especially those cards you're considering.  Also note how long those issues have persisted, and what kind of response the card manufacturers' support forums have offered.  I don't mind bugs that are fixed promptly, no manufacturer is perfect.  Cross reference the forums of your favorite games with the cards you have an eye on. The frame-rates and the GHZ and VRAM are secondary to the results and the reliability of the product.  It can have all the frame-rate in the world, but if the card and your motherboard and the driver support for it aren't a good fit, it can go bloody yonkers.  And above all purchase from somebody with a good return policy, and as soon as you install that card, make a weekend to test-drive your games library to avoid any pitfalls that can spoil your purchase.  If it doesn't work, don't be afraid to scratch, bite and claw your way to an exchange, quick as you can under the return policy and bearing full documentation of your receipt in triplicate.

Also you should get a diagnostic like Dorg said first, because it might not just be the video card ;)  Have you tried reformatting the machine recently?  Air-in-a-can the insides and make sure the fans are ventilating properly?  Sometimes overheating issues can cause these kinds of memory failures, other times its something as simple as a loose chip or cable.  The computer spirits work in mysterious, binary ways.
 

Dorax Windsmith

Re: Davidhoff having tech problems
« Reply #10 on: March 07, 2011, 09:35:30 pm »
On a good note, Layo is a server game so you don't need that computer to play with your characters although you won't be able to recover your in-game notes because those files are stored on the computer played on when written I'm pretty sure.
 

xsweetpeaxs

Re: Davidhoff having tech problems
« Reply #11 on: March 07, 2011, 10:55:03 pm »
Heya, so earlier today I emailed the IT guy at my school.. Hehehe. I am trying to paraphrase what he told me. I am not familiar with all of what he is saying but I am sure you are. He said since he can't visually see the problem, he isn't quite sure but here are his thoughts:

1. First of all, he said it might be the memory issue. What you can do is pull out each memory stick and test each one at a time to see if your computer works ok. By elimination, you can see if your memory is faulty or not.

2. If you think it's your video card, he said to go buy another cheapo to test. Or, if you have a spare, just plug it in to see if your computer will run.

3. If the memory is fine, and the spare video card still doesn't solve the problem, and you don't have anything important on your system, try reinstalling and see if that fixes the problem. He thinks potentially a virus/spyware has corrupted some Windows file and therefore causing your system to not boot properly.

Okay, now hand over that $100 consulting fee. Hahaha. ;)
 

willhoff

Re: Davidhoff having tech problems
« Reply #12 on: March 07, 2011, 11:47:19 pm »
Pretty funny there xsweetpeaxs..what's your paypal account info?  :rolleyes:

Thanks everyone for the help.  I think the problem is worse now, my computer wont stay on for more than a couple minutes (in regular mode) with out going to blue screen (then all I can do is hit the kill switch).

I was able to go to safe mode (thanks Acacea).  I have 38GB free of 74GB total on my computer.  So memory seems to be ok.  My display/video driver seems to be a "ialmrnt5.dll" (version 6.14) in regular mode or its a "vga.dll" (version 5.01) in safe mode.  I also opened the machine up and cleaned the dust inside and out...it was pretty messy.

Even in safe mode I have these lines of green dashes running across the bottom of my screen, so makes me think its still a video issue.

I have gotten more blue screens too.  Various error messages were 8e (using just the last digits), 24, 50, f4 and 0a.  Some of the blue screes said "bad pool header" or "IROL not less or equal" or "page fault in non paged area" or "a process or thread critical to system operation has exited or terminated".

So, now I'm worried it might something more serious than just the video card.  Maybe like xsweetpeaxs said, virus/spy ware corrupted my windows somehow.  *sighs* I think I'm going to call up Norton tomorrow and have one of their techs remotely access my computer and diagnose it.  They've been pretty good in the past.  Or, I might try to buy a video card and install and see what happens, not sure yet what I'll do.

I called the Geek Squad at Best Buy and they said that once you start getting the "blue screens" the best thing to do is system reinstall, which he says basically makes your computer like you got it from the factory.  I'm thinking those guys are really lazy and dont want to spend the time diagnosing...I don't trust them.  I'm also bummed about having to reinstall all my favorite programs, haks, cookies, etc. and I'm worried about losing files.

So, I'm gona sleep on it and make a decision tomorrow afternoon.  Thanks again for the help everyone.

Davidhoff
 

ystrday

Re: Davidhoff having tech problems
« Reply #13 on: March 08, 2011, 12:31:09 am »
Or you can ask your sweet, loving, generous brother to buy you a new computer. ;)
 

Chazzler

Re: Davidhoff having tech problems
« Reply #14 on: March 08, 2011, 08:25:26 am »
To me the latest bit of info from your last post, David, sounds like your Graphics Card's internal memory chips (Video RAM), has come to the end of it's days. This always causes crashes and stranger than strange graphics on every occasion (color lines, weird looking symbols, textures in game getting messed up real bad, etc).
The way to solve it, is simple. Get a new graphics card :)
 

Masterjack

Re: Davidhoff having tech problems
« Reply #15 on: March 08, 2011, 08:53:33 am »
In defense of the geek squad guys. A system reinstall on your computer is usually the most cost effective way to fix issues. It cleans up any bugs, viruses or program issues with one fix. IF they tried to figure out the exact cause of the problem it could take many hours going through all your programs and inspecting your hardware. vice one hour to do a system reinstall on your computer.

So would you like to pay for one hour of service for them to do a system reinstall or an unknown amount of hours for them to diagnose it?

To me it sounds like a video card issue but with you not being able to access your favorites makes me question that a bit. As your favorites has nothing to do with your video card.

Now if you tell us the make and model of your computer I'll see what I can do in figuring out what the issue is. I'm thinking I may be able to talk you through on fixing it yourself. I'm home all day today and will keep an eye out for your reply.
 

cbnicholson

Re: Davidhoff having tech problems
« Reply #16 on: March 08, 2011, 09:33:12 am »
I'm with Chazzler, video memory or an overheating video processor is my call.
 
 Sure fire way to test without costing you a cent is to check if you have onboard (a second video output on the mainboard), pull your current video card, reattach your cable to the onboard and boot up, see if that fixes your issue.  If it does, you've isolated the vid card.  Good luck.
"Give a man a mask and he will show you his true face." 

Oscar Wilde
 

Hellblazer

Re: Davidhoff having tech problems
« Reply #17 on: March 08, 2011, 10:01:29 am »
I just had to buy a asus engt240 1 gig ddr3. neverwinter nights works perfect on it.

I would have bought something more powerful, but since it's the third card this year I have to bring this comp to the hardware store to get the mobo checked up. But with the work I have at the moment, I just can't.

Anyhow short story, the video card I just linked you, works for nwn and many other things. The drivers that comes with it might need to be updated. I updated mine and I have no issues with zebra horses, purple shadows or shiny humanoid walking in the street.

willhoff

Re: Davidhoff having tech problems
« Reply #18 on: March 08, 2011, 04:00:33 pm »
Wow, really thanks for all the help everyone!  Special thanks to Masterjack for offering to spend time to walk me through.  I'm not quite sure what cbnicholson was saying about reattaching the cable to the onboard, but it does sound like the easiest test.  Unfortunately, I'm limited in my familiarity with these terms and the internal workings of my comp.

I think what I'm going to do is go by Best Buy and buy a new video card and plug it in and see what happens (I'm sure there's more to it than that, but I'll figure that out).

I'll post back with my results.  If this doesn't work then I'll go from there I guess.
 

Hellblazer

Re: Davidhoff having tech problems
« Reply #19 on: March 08, 2011, 04:33:57 pm »
Bassically what cb is talking about is you should check to see if you see an other connector that looks exactly the same as the one on your video card and plug your monitor cable on that one. Then take your video card out and boot your computer. If there's an other video connector on your computer it's because your mother board came with an on-board video chip.

 

anything