EQ2 locks up my computer.Follow

I'm no expert on these things but what graphics card do you have?

I'm no expert on these things but what graphics card do you have?

I'm no expert on these things but what graphics card do you have?

I'm no expert on these things but what graphics card do you have?

I think we have a record for multiple posts, lol

I don't know what type of power supply I have but, I have a Radeon 9600 pro 256mb graphics card.

Sometimes there are problems with mixing different vintage memory modules. The only way to debug this kind of memory fault is to run with different configurations. I would recomend pulling your older modules out of the machine and run with just the newer ones.

Not necessarily - and in most cases, probably not, unless you have a high-end specialty case designed to monitor power usage.

Anecdotal evidence: When I moved in with my girlfriend, she had a system that she'd been using, and her ex had been upgrading with his old parts while they were married (He liked playing FPS games, she liked puzzle games, so the arrangement worked out for them - one purchase equaled two upgrades). He moved out of the picture, I moved into the picture. Her system goes through several upgrades, including adding another hard drive, replacing the mobo/cpu, and getting a better video card.

So, one day we were having a problem with my system having graphical problems. Since we had functionally the same video cards, just from different manufacturers, we swapped video cards to see if that was the problem, or if it was something else. Her system suddenly refused to boot - wouldn't even get to POST, it's just simply dead. After far too much poking and prodding trying to figure out what's wrong, we finally figured out that the problem is the power supply, which we figured had just finally given up the ghost. We bought her a beefy new power supply, and when I went to take out the old power supply, I finally noticed what the real problem was: She had a 165 watt power supply running a middle-of-the-road Athlon system. It shouldn't have ever run at all, but it did.

And why did swapping virtually-identical video cards make it suddenly die? Mine had a tiny little fan on it, hers didn't have one... the added power drain from the tiny little fan was the proverbial last straw for the overworked PSU.

So, yeah. Power issues are a definite candidate for the culprit here.

Edited, Tue Nov 15 18:41:59 2005 by Nekojin

Most systems are like that. The system will either run, or not run... if the power draw ends up being too much, it'll just shut down, sometimes catastrophically. And the cause can be anything... from an idle hard drive spinning up for access, to an unused peripheral card going online. Hers was just a case (no pun intended) of total overload.

Generally speaking, though, a computer that doesn't have enough power to run all of its peripherals should shut down going through POST, since it generally does a test of all integral components at that point.

My girlfriend's system's most recent problem was also a power problem - one of the power coupling splitters we had in it had bad wiring (talk about a monster to troubleshoot, oy!), and her hard drive would, at intermittent intervals, just stop getting enough power to spin for extended periods of time.


That's unusual. I was going to ask if it was drawing power from your PC, or if it used an external power supply, but I think I know the answer - it was a hand scanner, not a flatbed, right? =^_^=



Get a good industrial-strength rubber band... or if you can find them (they're still pretty new), find an appropriately-sized Box Band. They're basically like two rubber bands fused at right angles. But make sure you put some insulation between the PSU and the band!

Hold it right there, you've already identified the culprit.
You have an ATI Radeon 9600 video card. You absolutely, no fooling, need to change drivers BACK to Catalyst 5.2, first removing all traces of your current (and much newer) ATI driver. Yes, newer drivers than Feb 2005 will absolutely lock up ATI 9xxx series video cards, giving VPU errors, long pauses, and complete lockups.

Here's what to do, because ATI no longer has the Catalyst 5.2 "classic" drivers on their site; curiously, you can get 5.10 catalyst (it fails), 5.08 catalyst (it fails) or 4.xx series catalyst (no idea) drivers. You MUST download the ATI driver "complete uninstall" utility, which removes all traces of your existing driver.
Put it someplace you can find it
Now google with phrase "Catalyst 5.2 classic" and find the site for 3D guru. Get the "Catalyst 5.2 classic". Forget every other version, it won't work for more than 20 minutes, especially when crafting. 5.2 is rock solid. You don't need to ***** with your AGP speed sense like the forums suggest at Sony; I have my fast writes disabled, but FastGART x8 detection is running just fine on my system, an ASUS P4S800D motherboard with ASUS branded Radeon 9550 video processor. If you check SOE tech support, theres hundreds of people complaining about lockups, they ALL have Radeon 9xxx video cards and default or latest drivers. In this case, updating the driver makes things worse not better. You must go BACK in time to 5.2, and none other.

RAM, power supply issues, sun spots (it could happen), faulty ground wiring in your building are all nice tries, but I'll put my money on you are experiencing the common and easily solved ATI 9xxx series lockup.

So, run the ATI "complete uninstaller" after downloading the new (old) catalyst 5.2 driver. Restart the machine. DON'T agree to let Windows automatically install "the correct" driver for you. Cancel out. You're in 640x480x16c VGA mode now, and everything looks terrible. GREAT! Halfway there!!

Now run the Catalyst 5.2 "classic" install, which will put you back at high res etc. It will try to auto adjust to the highest res your monitor supports, which is technically a mistake for EQ2. Set the video back to 1024x768x32bit so that you dont have lag trying to draw too many pixels
(do the math: 1024x768 == ?? 1280x1024== ?? 1600x1280 ==?? 1600x1280 / 1024x768 is about 2.5 times as many pixels, meaning your frame rate is 2.5 times LESS at highest res you can squeeze vs a modest but acceptable res.

Now in ATI control panel never go in and force anisotropic filtering to any value but "application preference", else if you later foolishly turn on "bloom effects" you'll get yet another lockup. Forget "quality" performance profile in game, as that ALSO turns on bloom effects by default, although you can toggle it off manually if you poke around. These bloom effects happen frequently while crafting, and theres another set of effects that occur near water that are dangerous to you.

All that said, you wont lock up again once you go to Catalyst 5.2.

You Nvidia users, and ATI X(anything) series users will experience zero issues with latest driver, although you can still get into trouble if you set performance to "quality" inside game.

Enjoy
- GS