Bit of a little weird computer restarting issue.

[Fury99]

I just recently started playing guild wars again, fresh install and everything and I'm getting a bit of a weird restarting issue.

It seems that every so often playing the game and most often during cinematics that my PC will hard restart, I've tried tweaking various game settings and the restarts seem most frequent if I'm also running and using some other program ie MSN, Firefox, Steam etc, if the program is idling in the background there can still sometimes be restarts but its more infrequent.

I can sometimes replicate a restart by entering a specific cinematic with firefox open and then run the same cinematic without it open and have no problems, othertimes even with everything closed except GW I will sometimes get a restart anyways.

I'm pretty sure its not a hardware or heat issue at this point, having never had the problem while playing WoW, TF2, various other steam games, bioshock and also running stress tests (orthos, memtest, 3dmark etc) overnight without incidents. I also don't get a windows dump when it crashes, suggesting that its most likely software related. Temps are generally <45 cpu, <55 gpu loads.

Current specs:
AMD Athlon X2 5000+
Gigabyte MA-78GM-S2H
9600 GT
2GB DDR2 800
Old Audigy 2 SE

I've done clean installs of my video card drivers and sound card drivers and I'm thinking it may be a dll dependency error, perhaps the game is trying to access a dll from a different location then the one that other programs may be using but I'm having a hard time tracing which dlls could be the problem, if anyone has any utilities or methods for troubleshooting software errors like this any help would be appreciated.

Thanks much!

[fuzzybunny]

probably best to post this on the guild wars forums.. I'm not sure what expertise a tf2/cs:s server forum can offer on a software specific issue..

[Fury99]

There's some good tech heads here :P I figured I'd ask if anyone has had experience troubleshooting dll-related issues

[BrAy]

errr wheres the delete butten?

[luckylpf]

You're right on with everything so far mate.. but the one thing you didn't factor in that I would need to know... unless I didn't see it.
What windows are you running? Xp, or vista?
I don't think it necessarily has to do with having open firefox whilst your doing something else. It very well just could be a shared dll file or something simple as that...
I would have to get into your registry and play around a bit.
Which leads me to another thing... or rather a recommendation on my part.
If it IS something as simple as a shared dll, or a registry fubar, you might want to try this program out.
http://www.ccleaner.com/download
I had a similar problem with my Wow account randomly restarting when I had a few programs open... but I never could narrow it down to the culprit.

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE back your registry up if you
do anything to it.

Haha, yes it is very easy to fubar your registry if you don't know what the hell you're doing in there.
I used ccleaner to justify my thoughts and it was a shared dll file.
I launched back into wow and no problems from there.
I know this topic is about GW but I've personally never played it.

Hope this helps at all... because truth be told... I never got any questions that I could help with on the gibs forums.

So I wish I could be of help here on these forums.

Wish you the best of luck

Tyson

[GreenEnvy]

If there was nothing in the error log, it means Windows didn't have time to even record something crashed. Thats either a major software fault, or a hardware issue.
First suggestion, would be to try another power supply. I know other games don't crash, but certain games will stress the GPU differently, and can pull more power.
I had a similar issue where every game played fine, but 5 minutes of crysis and my pc would either shut right off or reboot. put in a bigger psu and all was well.

[Levichan]

You can shut automatic reboot on crash in the F8 Windows menu before Windows loads.

You will then be able to read the blue screen of death.

But I suspect four things:

-Game specific crash (I suggest you google to look for people with similar problems);
-Overheat of your hardware;
-Hard disk drive bad sectors where game is installed, or hard disk drive is damaged;
-Bad memory (RAM).

[Fury99]

Hi guys, an update:

I did try CCleaner but was unable to find any shared DLLs and the problem still persists.

It is unlikely to be a hardware component at this time, I've tried three different PSUs and run numerous stress tests to push my hardware components without fail, so I'm thinking it is probably related to some kind of driver issue. I've reinstalled DirectX, chipset, video card, and sound card drivers from fresh cleans and it hasn't helped the situation any.

Does anyone have any experience with using regedit to trace dependencies and possible culprits to this type of issue?

Oh and automatic restart is toggled off and I still cannot receive a blue screen.

Thanks for the help guys!

[Xzinum]

or a hardware issue.
First suggestion, would be to try another power supply. I know other games don't crash, but certain games will stress the GPU differently, and can pull more power.
I had a similar issue where every game played fine, but 5 minutes of crysis and my pc would either shut right off or reboot. put in a bigger psu and all was well.

I'd go with an underpowered PSU that is at fault as well.

I know you tried 3 different PSU, were they all at the same wattage? Try something bigger if you have the means to do it.

[Fury99]

They were different wattages, and in good working order, it seems very unlikely to be a PSU issue as that wouldn't account for more instability when running firefox, the power draw would be identical, I had suspicions that it was a memory error originally but I tried running with one stick removed and had an overnight memtest run with no issues. Besides, I'm fairly certain that memory errors would result in windows giving a dump but I'm not getting that either. There's still the slight possibility that its a chipset based error, maybe northbridge, but then again, that seems unlikely since the incident is isolated to entirely within guild wars. (I have never been able to generate a reset without running guildwars despite playing more taxing games on this PC in the past).

Thanks again guys ^_^