Archived from groups: alt.games.civ3 (
More info?)
On Sun, 12 Sep 2004 02:23:15 GMT, Xeno Chauvin wrote:
>You may be right now I can't play Age of Empires as it hangs almost as soon
>as I open it.
>PTW will only go about five moves when it hangs.
>Strange though as the machine is working fine when I use Page Maker and
>Corel Draw
>with some sizable files.
Xeno,
I'm the guy who reported a similar experience with C3C, and I have a story
that you may find interesting.
I used to see the BSOD on rare occasions and always at the end of a turn,
resulting in a corrupted auto-save file. Like you, I felt certain that the
problem was somehow related to Civ3, because my machine had never crashed
like this with any other program. It puzzled me, however, because under XP
the BSOD is usually an indication of a deeper problem. The NT kernel
protects the rest of system quite well from badly written programs.
Then, a week or so ago, I began to see the BSOD much more frequently in C3C,
and now it happened in all sorts of situations. This made me think that
there had to be another explanation than a simple bug in C3C. After all, the
program code was the same as it had been all along, unless my installation
had somehow become corrupted.
I decided to try to find the cause of the problem through elimination. My
machine has been moderately over-clocked for over a year without any
problems, but I know from experience that the BSOD often means hardware
issues. Not really expecting any improvement, I turned down the clock to the
standard setting, and much to my surprise, the problem vanished.
Too high a CPU-clock usually translates to too hot a CPU. I had ruled out
that reason, because I knew that I had run games before that I thought to be
much more CPU-hungry than C3C, e.g. Microsoft Flight Simulator, but the
evidence made me think again.
Clearly, when the game waits for your next move, it doesn't put nearly as
much strain on the CPU as many other games. However, when it does its
calculations, the CPU is momentarily very busy, and the CPU temperature
rises. Usually, these periods aren't long enough that the temperature
reaches alarming heights, but the end-of-turn calculations of a "big" game
might be enough to cause a CPU failure. If I had an increasing heat-problem,
this could explain why I saw it first during end-of-turn.
I opened the box and found that there was quite a lot of dust on the
CPU-cooler's profile. I blew it away, closed the box again, and over-clocked
the CPU again. So far, I haven't seen the BSOD.
I guess this obscenely long story boils down to this piece of advice: Make
sure that your CPU isn't running too hot. What you've written in the thread
is consistent with a CPU getting hot when asked to perform a lot of
calculations in quick succession for a period of some length, something
which probably doesn't happen in Page Maker or Corel Draw.
--
Best regards,
Henrik Dissing
(e-mail: hendis AT post DOT tele DOT dk)
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