Games crashing my system

[Dazbo666]

I've recently upgraded my system, and for a while everything was running really well...
but recently, when I try to run most of my games, the screen goes black/blank and my system freezes. The only way to reboot is to restart the system, cos even Ctrl-Alt-Delete does nothing??

The games appear to have installed properly, but refuse to load up??

For info, RTCW loads and runs just fine, but Vietcong, Splinter Cell and a number of demos freeze my system??

Just to confuse things further, EVERYTHING else on my system runs perfectly??


The system is XP2600, Volcano 9, 2 x 512mb PC2700, MSI KT4VL, HDD, DVD, CDRW....etc etc

[jkrohn]

Hmm, what gfx card do you have in there? Do you have another one you can swap out?

Have you tried reinstalling the display drivers?

Jkrohn

[Dazbo666]

Currently got a 128mb Radeon 9500 in there, so I'll try reinstalling the drivers for that first...
I've also still got my 32mb AIW too, so I'll try that next, if reinstalling the 9500 doesn't work.

Still seems strange that RTCW works perfectly, but most other games don't ??
.....thanks for the prompt response - any other suggestions out there??

[jkrohn]

Could also be a DirectX problem.

Run dxdiag and run the test in that to see if anything fails. If that could be the problem, tyr updating directx.

Jkrohn

[SoltoN]

upgrade to DirectX 9b as well as the Catalyst 3.7 Drivers from ATI ( http://www.ati.com ). that should help

[Dazbo666]

Think it's already got DX9 (but not sure of the version, a or b or whatever), but still running the drivers from the original installation disk AFAIK.

Will check out the Catalyst drivers this afternoon, and uninstall the old, then reinstall the new ones when I get home later today


4 Oct - EDIT: Well I checked DirectX, and everything seemed to be OK there - ran all the DirectX tests, and passed ...
So I uninstalled (and even removed) the gfx card, rebooted, reinstalled the Catalyst drivers that came with the card (only about 5-6 months old), and everything I've tried so far seems to be running as normal again!!
I guess it must have been a corrupt or missing file???

...But anyway, thanks for the advice!!

[Dazbo666]

Just to say thanks for ya help guys - I had a day off work yesterday, an spent a lot of it replaying most of the maps on UT2003 !!

This is now one happy FPS fan!!