Quake, War2, Starcraft all crash?

[Eli]

I have three systems here, and this problem effects two of them. On both of these systems Quake, Warcraft 2, and Starcraft all run for a while then spontaneously drop back to the desktop at random points. It's really frustrating, since Quake might run fine all night long on one occasion or it might die after a few minutes on another. Both systems are completely different, although both the sound and video cards are similar (different Trident and Crystal chipsets, latest drivers). I have tried different driver versions for the video and sound cards, as well as a giant fan blowing into one of the systems, and they both still crash. Any ideas? I'm giving one of these to my handicapped brother so I really need to get it stable. Thanks.

System 1
P75
32 meg FPM ram
Trident 9440 based video
Crystal 4235 based sound
Acer PCI NIC

System 2
Cyrix P150+
32 meg EDO ram
Trident 9685 based video
Crystal based sound
Generic ISA NIC

[Eli]

Any ideas gentlemen (and ladies)? The next thing I'm going to try is pulling the soundcards, unless someone has a better idea...

[Gutter Ball]

Maybe your "cache" is shot? I just fixed my friend's computer with a similar problem. He doesn't play games, but it would happen while he was using Word, Netscape etc. Sometimes it would boot him back to desktop, other times it would just hang. Dunno what else it could be http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif

[Eli]

The L2 cache? I can't see it being bad on both motherboards... They're completely different; one a socket 5 and the other a socket 7. Do socket 5 boards even have an L2 cache?

Of course, I may be thinking of a totally different cache than yourself...

[Gutter Ball]

My friend has a socket 5 Pine mobo running a p166 and his cache looked like a small piece of ram http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif Maybe your cache is built on/non expandable?? Wonder if there's a utility to test it? Good luck!

[Eli]

I don't think either one has an expandable/replaceable cache on the motherboard. Even if they do, I can't see them both going bad at the same time. I'll try pulling cards this weekend...

[voogru]

get more ram

[Eli]

32 megs each should be more than adequate for these systems, especally considering that neither has any unneccesary background tasks running.

[Gutter Ball]

I ran Starcraft on a P100 with 16 megs of EDO ram and a crappy ATI and it worked fine. Eli, did you get the latest patch for the games? For Starcraft/Broodwar, there is a patch v1.06 I think that might fix the SC prob.

[This message has been edited by Gutter Ball (edited 08-31-2000).]

[Eli]

Offhand I can't remember what they are patched to. I'd guess 1.4, maybe 1.5. My main system has the same patch and has none of these problems. It would be worth the download to patch them again anyway though. Thanks for the suggestion.

For now I went into the "Advanced Graphics Settings" and turned the slider down two notches in both systems. So far they've been running multiplayer Starcraft for a couple of hours and neither has bowed out yet. I'm crossing my fingers that they're still chugging along in the morning...

[Eli]

And the P75 bows out a couple of hours later. The screen flashes the desktop in some odd colours then dumps me back to it, without a trace of Starcraft. I'm starting to hate this thing.

Edit

A different non-Trident video card in the P75 doesn't seem to help much. Quake 2 just dumped me back to the desktop. I just disabled it's NIC to see how long it lasts. Gotta start somewhere...

[This message has been edited by Eli (edited 09-01-2000).]