Inconsistent PC crash

[Scleameth 19]

So my intent was to spend the long weekend gaming - specifically playin' BGI.... Nope

 

While playing, my pc would suddenly reset. I thought that BG might not be compliant with XP and started playing around a bit with Nvidia settings and desktop resolution. No change. The exe eventually became corrupt and I had to reinstall BG. I copied my saves and... same thing. Now I'm thinking "perhaps I can tweak my tweaked BIOS settings a bit"... no go. It seemed as though the game was crashing while loading a specific sound file (was not the case), so I defragged the hard drives, which gave me some time to catch up on some reading... and reading... and reading...

No positive result after defragging, so I thought the only option now is to reinstall windows and perhaps try windows 2000 while I'm at it. This is where the real fun started.

When booting from the CD the pc would be stable for a while and then crash at random stages of formatting. First time ever I've encountered such errors. So I tried installing XP - same thing. Just before giving up and thinking my hard drive is now a paper weight, I checked the CPU fan and radiator-thingy - It was packed with dust and I thought that the pc is overheating (my motherboard can not monitor the temp of the CPU..). One vacuum cleaning exercise later the pc is back to normal !

 

If you've bothered reading this far and the sollution was not obvious, please make a mental note - it might just come in handy one day.

[Katran 0]

One day how about right now. I live in the center of the city and have been having the random crashing porblem for some time. Thank man of to do some PC cleaning. *Come dust it is the last day of your free fan ride*

[Schot 407]

Haha, go get those dusty buggers Kat! Nice tip there Scleameth. Glad it all worked out for you. I vacuum my pc every once in a while. I'm on a very busy street with lots of dust coming in through my window so I have to clean my pc fairly often compared to the norm.

[Yaga 1]

duuude if this is the baldur's gate I, then ive experienced the same problem some time ago .. you need to update the game and it will run smoothless. But good luck on finding those files though, cuz they are kind of old The update fixes alot of DX errors spesifically vs corrupted save files. A.o. stuff as well

 

Also, there was a setting in windows that was by default set to reboot whenever a serious system error occoured. I dont remember excactly where it was located .. hum

 

 

ponder ponder, install bg2 .. hum .. and gothic 2 .. hum .. or neverwinter nights .. or planescape torment .. puuuh .. ponder

 

 

EDIT: ok, looked around for that annoying auto reboot crap .. go here, start, my computer, properties, advanced, startup and recovery (settings) .. see the box about "system failure" .. "automatically restart" is marked on default .. turn this off ..

 

the result next time is that whenever u get a system error caused by your os or programs .. the machine will freeze (ih. you have to restart), or the machine will just exit to windows (you may need to remove the hanging process manually though) .. or in very rare cases the machine will still reboot, but thats usually a hardware thing .. or you can have these extremly "rare" blue screens with alot of memory adresses which tells you diddlinadda (ih you have to reboot, but you got technical explaination in blue color atleast.. )

 

BTW .. post 100

[Katran 0]

Well I have to say that the files for baldur's gate are still out there and there are more then you need.

I used yahoo and on the first result that I clicked it took me here. Here is the page and there is all the updates that you need:

 

http://www.fileplanet.com/40798/section/Baldur's-Gate

[Scleameth 19]

Thanks Katran and TBE - I bought a BG pack which consist of BGI + Tales of sword coast & BGII + Throne of Bhaal. I read that the BGI updates are included in TotSC but there is a patch I downloaded for installation after TotSC.

I also disabled the restart on error thingy, but I got those darn blue screens, most of the time had some error about NOT_GREATER_OR_LESS_THAN.... sounds like some CMOS program read error if you ask me. They also had the great advice of 'Disable cashing of BIOS memory' - whooohoo, nice tip but it did absolutely nothing at that stage.

Fortunately everything seems to be stable now (touch amazon forest).

[Yaga 1]

Have you tried google the spesific error message you get displayed on the blue screen? statistically there is always some who have gotten the same

[Scleameth 19]

naaah, I don't have an internet connection at home and honestly it didn't cross my mind at that enfuriated stage... luckely everything is ok now.. I've put google to good use before with some registry errors I got on my work pc. But I had a hard time finding sollutions to my Sun-Java vs. Apache vs. Tomcat errors... but in the end you just have to read, read, read and read some more...