Diagnosis help

Merlin · Post by **Merlin** » Sat Aug 27, 2005 9:44 am

As some of you know I was trying to clean up drivers and ended up having to re-format my hard drive. Well the 2 games I play, Never Winter Nights and Half Life 2 are both crashing. I have looked in the event viewer and under the NeverWinter crashes it doesnt list a cause but with HL2 it says the memory at X referenced by x could not be read. Microsoft help center says that some program doesnt have access to drivers or that the drivers are in the wrong place. My problem is I have no clue WHICH drivers this could be. I have a complete new install following the Re-format of ALL my drivers. I have checked everything I know to check and I still get these crashes. I have also had 1 or two full system crashes that when I reboot gives an error message saying something about drivers as well. The message warns of firewalls and Anti viruses installing drivers. The only firewall and anti virus I have is from the linjs here....ZA and AVG

I ran Memtest and got 0 errors I have had windows search for drivers for all the devices on my system and still no go. Any help you guys can offer????

killswitch83 · Post by **killswitch83** » Sat Aug 27, 2005 12:41 pm

Sometimes outdated drivers, when running on certain graphical drivers on some games, can cause this. My question is what graphics card are you running, because I got a feeling that if you're running the driver that came with the card, there could be an update to that driver that fixes critical errors. Just could be an incompatibility issue between the driver you're using now and the graphical engine used in the games; also, faulty device drivers can cause BSOD's in Windows (believe me, I've had it happen before when I had my old ATI Radeon 8500 and I had the very first version of XP Pro installed; it didn't like that ATI driver at all, and whenever I would go to play a game, or right after I got off a game, I would get it (wasn't a memory reference error, it just gave a general error). But, after I downloaded the new one from their site, it all the sudden stopped. That would be the first thing I would do personally, considering you probably reinstalled the same driver you had previously installed. If that doesn't help, and you have a spare vid card, do some trial and error testing to make sure it isn't hardware. Let us know something.

Merlin · Post by **Merlin** » Sat Aug 27, 2005 3:01 pm

All the drivers I have installed came from the websites of the Equipment. The Video card is a Radeon 9800 Pro I bought on e-bay. I had this problem before I got this card which is why I was trying to clean drivers. As it happened I got this card only a few days before the Crash that required me to re-format. I had just put this card in and I used Driver cleaner to remove the Chipset Drivers and re-installed them.

killswitch83 · Post by **killswitch83** » Sat Aug 27, 2005 6:25 pm

Well, assuming Windows is installed properly and everything else, I would start looking at hardware. It would be a good idea to get your memory tested, as you said that the error you're getting with HL2 is a memory reference error. Also make sure you have the latest game update installed too. Otherwise, this is a slight bit out of my league.

Merlin · Post by **Merlin** » Sat Aug 27, 2005 8:08 pm

I have ran my memory through memtest 86 ( the latest version) and got no errors. I would try my old Vid card but it was messing up with VPU recover errors and such...thats the main reason I got another one.

killswitch83 · Post by **killswitch83** » Sat Aug 27, 2005 8:16 pm

I see, well the only other thing I would know is make sure the cooling solution for your Radeon is a good one (ramsinks, aftermarket VGA cooler, etc). That and make sure the rest of your hardware is in good order.

Merlin · Post by **Merlin** » Sun Aug 28, 2005 1:36 pm

The card has no aftermarket cooling at all. I will work that angle and see what happens.

killswitch83 · Post by **killswitch83** » Sun Aug 28, 2005 2:07 pm

It would most definitely help because the GPU and memory chips tend to get really hot, especially during gaming. Arctic cooling has a good solution for your 9800pro here. I know blake's using the NV silencer 6 rev. 2 on his eVGA 6600GT, and he seems to think it does well. As far as ramsinks go, I'm not too sure on who I would go with, but probably a solution from Thermaltake or Zalman, as they tend to also have good cooling solutions. Good luck with it man.