Random Freezing

[salandar]

It's me again

Windows XP has been running pretty good for me lately, minus one thing. About 30 minutes into a game, MOHAA for example, I will completely and totally freeze up. Well, the game will freeze up, and then I have to cntl-alt-delete out.

This was happening numerous times yesterday afternoon, so I got sick of it and reformatted my entire HDD again (BTW, F Disk wouldn't work with Windows XP and the DOS Command Window)

After I reinstalled everything ~ ms stuff, mb driver, sound driver, graphics drivers, etc ~ I start playing MOHAA again.

Only to freeze 30-40 minutes into the game again.....I thought it might be overheating or something, but my cpu temp is at 51c. I really don't know what it could be, but if anyone has a suggestion, please let me know!!

[AllGamer]

Actually it's running out of MEMORY, and to be specific, it's running out of SWAP SPACE, which mean you don't have ENOUGH RAM.

i used to have this kind of programs before with 3D games.

now that i have 2 Gig of RAM, i never get those messages anymore, nor it slows down to freeze 30 min to an hour into the game.

try adding more RAM to your computer.
buy the most RAM you can affort.

they are extremely low now in days.

[salandar]

so 512mb of memory isn't enough? Every game that i've ever played, never needed more than that, and i've never had that problem with the RAM actually filling up. Then again, I've never had all the highest settings on a game run as smooth as my computer does now.

I thought that the memory modules would continue to dump memory as it took more in ~ kind of like a hose ~ water goes in one end, is temporary "stored" in the hose, and then squirted back out.

Also, I thought that the swap space was the medium between the RAM and the HDD, with is about 2gb of swap space being reserved on the HDD for this. I'm not sure if the swap space is the issue, but i may be wrong

[The_Shafer]

512 MB of RAM is plenty.

The_Shafer@hotmail.com

The_Shafer

[AllGamer]

Holy ****!, that's a very nasty setup man.

you should not need more than 10% of your RAM space, or 200 Mb whichever is greater for you SWAP size.

if you are in WinXP or 2K, SWAP doesn't even need to be running, but 2k is dumb so it still kinda needs it.

if you are in Win9x, then SWAP is about the only thing, stupid windoze will use to do your chores.

Windoze in gerenal has a terrible memory management, weather you have 32 meg of RAM or 1000000000 Terabyte of RAM, it will still want to read the SWAP first!!!! how stupid is that. reading a HDD takes fu****ing much more time than reading from the RAM.

anyways... back to the ...

any SWAP size larger than 512 meg on your HDD will actually worsen the performance and access time.

another thing that can help you , is by Adjusting your AGP Aperture Size.

play around with it, and the 2x / 4x AGP settings

my AGP aperture is set to 32 meg, and that's goood. since i have 64 meg on the video card

[salandar]

agp is set at 4x, which is what my mb and geforce 4400 supports.

What is the difference between swap files and page files? And, in the case where I have 512mb of ram, what should these be set at, or can I even change the settings for these?

[AllGamer]

SWAP = PAGE
PAGE = SWAP

SWAP = 9X
PAGE = NT

i'll set the size to 200 first and see if any game complains.

you might have to bump it to 300 meg, cuz you only have 500 meg of ram

i wouldn't settle for anything less than 1 Gig of ram.

[salandar]

It's not the memory ~ I had goodmem running in the background and when MOHAA farted out on me, I still had 350mb of Ram left....

Any other ideas?

[The_Shafer]

Like I said, 512MB is plenty.

The_Shafer

[AllGamer]

of course it's not the RAM, it's the System Resources, not the Swap space

System resources is like 100k of memory in windows, and if that is used up, you are screwed.

[The_Shafer]

So it could just be as easy as going to start -> run and then typing msconfig. Going to startup and checking what programs you want to start up at boot, and what ones you don't want started up. For the most part that is a quick easy fix...if that's the problem. Nevertheless it'll help.

The_Shafer

[salandar]

only thing that boots up on startup is fuzzy logic....I just reset the system swap file to 400mb ~ it was at 1.2gb before..

Time to go slaughter a few more germans and see if I crash again

[Strat]

My guess is either CPU or GPU heat, if you're OC'd. Post back with temps if you can.

[salandar]

GPU doesn't give a system temp., but my CPU temp is at a stable 47c ~> 53c max.

I am concerned about how close my AGP slot lies next to my processor ~ and with the Volcano7 HSF, the air is actually blown down on the processor, instead of up through the fan. This means that the hot air might be collecting/blowing around that area. BUT, i have the PS intake and exhaust right there, plus another exhaust fan sitting to the left of the volcano7 hsf....

[Strat]

Maybe the ambient temp inside your case is slightly too high........... maybe an intake fan above the CPU and vid card would eliminate the crashes.


The way to test if this helps is.... take the side panel of the case, then position a desk fan blowing onto the mobo/cpu/vid card.............if lock ups stop, then its the temps and you need a side-case intake fan.