54 réponses à ce sujet

[NialskylineR35]

How do i clear all the drivers prior to installing the one I want? This is hideous.

[Bogsnot1]

Some people swear by Driver Sweeper for this task.
http://download.cnet...4-75219868.html

[Geraldine]

Just thought I would give a little update on how I got on. Fitted my new 600 Watt PSU today and ran ME1 for 2 hours with no problems apart from some crackly sound, easy fixed by switching hardware acceleration off.

I just want to say a special thank you to Gorath Alpha for his advice, with his help the Normandy flies again!

Many thanks!

[Gorath Alpha]

So glad it's working for you. Have fun!

[Fredvdp]

Geraldine wrote...

Just thought I would give a little update on how I got on. Fitted my new 600 Watt PSU today and ran ME1 for 2 hours with no problems apart from some crackly sound, easy fixed by switching hardware acceleration off.

I had that too when I bought a new sound card. If your card is EAX compatible you can do some tweaks that allow you to play in hardware mode with surround sound and no sound glitches.

[Geraldine]

I do have a Sound Blaster 24 bit with EAX, but my graphics card is a bit of a space hog and covered the slot I usually fitted it in, so I only have one available slot at the moment and that's taken up with my SCSI card. Once I have finished setting up my Amiga hard drives (via UAE), I will get the sound card back in there. The Realtek on board sound is not a patch on a proper dedicated sound card.

[Bogsnot1]

Check this thread out, it has some tips on how to get decent sound from the Realtek chipset.
http://social.biowar...1/index/7389137
I use realtek and its definately a vast improvement after doing those tweaks.

[Geraldine]

Hey thanks for that Bogsnot1. A handy set of tweaks indeed!

[NialskylineR35]

Awesome, so apparently it was an overheating issue even though your temps were low? That seems interesting. Im wondering if i should do the same thing. My PSU is 750W but i bought it back in 2007. So I dont know whether or not buying a new one would be worth it.


Also Geraldine Which Nvidia driver version are you using now? Did the game continue running without problems? Im assuming so since you havent posted in a couple of hours lol

Modifié par NialskylineR35, 22 juillet 2011 - 07:51 .

[Geraldine]

Yes, the game is fine now. My CPU/GPU temps were fine, it was just a dodgy power supply. If yours is from 2007, it might be causing your problem too. If your getting a similar crash across many graphics intensive games (like I was) it's a possible cause. As for the drivers, I am using the latest beta ones 275.50, but the problem was not caused by the drivers.

Modifié par Geraldine, 22 juillet 2011 - 09:16 .

[Geraldine]

Arrrgh! Just when I thought all my troubles were over, my system was just wrecked by a nasty virus! So now I do have to install everything again afterall, as I never got the chance to back up Mass Effect. Drat, drat, drat! Oh well at lest I backed up my Commanders a while back. Here we go again with another mammoth Steam download.

Mmmmmmmmm, noticed good old Fry Cry laying there in the Steam account feeling a bit unloved, think I wil install that too, havent played that since two graphic card upgrades ago

[Geraldine]

On noes!
ME1 is crashing again. This was after doing a full reformat of the drive and a clean install of XP. It ran great for a few days then packed up again. I am starting to think it is either a windows update, a steam update, a fault in the CPU or a dodgy hard drive. I was so close to getting midway through the game game too

[Bogsnot1]

Could have sworn I posted a few questions here a few hours ago. Bioware forums must have eaten them.

Is it a system freeze like you were experiencing before, or is it a crash to desktop with associated error or GPF?

[NialskylineR35]

Damn that blows. Im glad I never bought my new PSU. Apparently it's not even that....Im starting to think its the game itself not being compatible with something ....I dont know what it is anymore. A friend told me that hey bought ME2 for his PS3 and he said his game was also crashing on his ps3, looked for answers online and apparently the ps3 version has a bug that was SUPPOSED to be fixed with a patch that came out BACK IN JANUARY and even to this day people are still experiencing crashes on the ps3. I think bioware/EA dont really give a crap anymore about "older" games since they are focused on just profit rather than also satisfying customers. Just like Blizzard with World of warcraft/ starcraft. Oh well this sucks...i dont know what to think anymore but seeing that Geraldine's PC started crashing again then damn =(

[Geraldine]

Yep, it's a kicker and no mistake

@ Bogsnot1, it's just like it was doing before, the screen just goes blank, can't return to desktop. Seems to happen most with cut scenes and being at the Citadel seems to increase the number of the crashes too.

One thing I did notice before it happened was the cut scenes would freeze then continue on without sound until the next part in the scene. As a precaution I also changed my firewall and virus checker. I really thought I had the problem beat, but not yet apparently. :~(

I can "test" the hard drive theory though as I still have dual boot with vista on another hard drive. If it does the same thing there, then I can exclude that at least. More when I test it.

EDIT: Same thing happened running the game on a seperate hard drive with vista. I am also wondering if there could be a memory problem too at work here? If so why would it run just fine before though? If this was happening on my miggy 4000, it might be the graphics board seating, so I will take the graphics card out and re-seat it. Yes it's a long shot, but worth a try. Certainly , I cant think of anything else to try short of a new PC or heavy upgrades to my existing one. 

Another Update: Decided to try playing around with the settings within the game. Turning the graphics settings down a tad and running it within a window seems to improve it's stability, but I also noticed that some times the game throws out the mouse pointer to the desktop. This is easily fixed by just clicking on the window again. Could this be the problem in full screen mode and causing an unrecoverable crash?

Anyways I am going to run the game today for a hour or two and see what happens. If it crashes I might be able to generate a crash report, which is what I have been looking for to try and get to the bottom of this problem.

Modifié par Geraldine, 29 juillet 2011 - 11:45 .

[Geraldine]

Still crashed (without generating a report), after a good while though. Ok back to square one. Tried the oldest drivers I could find for my 9500GT. Still crashes.
To sumerise, tried a different OSs (XP SP3 & Vista), tried a different hard drive, tried a clean install of XP with a fresh install of ME1 and upgraded the PSU. The only things left are the CPU or the RAM. Perhaps Bogsnot1 was right, maybe my CPU is past it.

[Bogsnot1]

One way to test the ram would be to swap the modules around. That way if its in the higher memory areas of the second chip, it would then become the higher memory areas of the first chip, and theoretically crash more often because that memory range is being accessed more frequently.

Couple more questions;
When the game crashes, if you press escape and move the mouse around, do you hear the sounds of it highlighting the menu options?
When it cashes, can you press CapsLock, and does the light on your keyboard go on and off with it?
Does the light on your monitor change from the "power on, receiving signal" colour, to "power on, no signal" colour. Note that not all monitors do this.

[Geraldine]

I decided to do the caps lock key test. I started it up and it ran for an hour, then another hour and then for 3 more hours! OMG it's fixed itself, I thought,..............then it crashed,... Oooh this game is driving me nuts!

Anyways finally, the caps-lock key didn't light up. The monitor is always receiving a signal and does not power down. Sometimes it's a plain black screen, sometimes the screen goes bright depending on what the majority background colour is being displayed just before the crash and sometimes it's a frame of the game which is frozen with the odd pixel out of place. Totally weird behaviour, but thank you Bogsnot1 for your advice. Do you have any other ideas? What does an unresponsive caps-lock key indicate?

I will try swapping the ram sticks and see if that does anything. Can ME1 run on 1 gig of ram with XP?

EDIT: Tried swapping the RAM sticks, crashes just the same. I took the graphics card out and re-seated it. Cleaned connecters with IPA (Isopropyl Alcohol) before re-fitting (this usually works on my old miggy), but no go.

Modifié par Geraldine, 30 juillet 2011 - 10:46 .

[Bogsnot1]

Unresponsive Caps Lock means a complete system hang at hardware level, and its not a software crash taking you to black screen.
ME1 can run on 1gb of RAM under XP, but expect it to pause for loading fairly often, and not to give the best performance. It will be good enough to test under.

The way it sounds though, based on the results of those little tests, is that we are looking at a CPU or motherboard related problem.
One thing to try, is if your BIOS has a setting for "Load Failsafe Defaults", or something similar, do that on the off chance that its a dodgy setting in the BIOS causing the grief.

[Geraldine]

Thank you again Bogsnot1, I will have a look at the Bios. This could be a possibility as a few months back I replaced the motherboard, plus all the game time I spent before this with ME1 & 2, was done on the old motherboard. Yes, this is worth looking into.

Modifié par Geraldine, 31 juillet 2011 - 11:13 .

[Geraldine]

Reset the Bios to default and the results were immediate, a massive drop in frame rate and another crash, but this time ME1 hung on to generate a crash report! Yaay at last! Anyways it said:

STOP 0x000000EA THREAD_STUCK_IN_DEVICE_DRIVER

This could be down to these old drivers I tried before, so I will try re-updating them again to the latest ones. The Bios, as it turned out, was setup for optimised performance now its running on factory defaults. This might explain another thing I noticed was that the hard drives are running much cooler now than they were. I guess their transfer rates have dropped using the default Bios settings as the game takes longer to load now than it did. I don't care about this as long at it works as my old spectrum taught me all about patience when loading games LOL!

More, once I update the drivers again. I hope this finally, FINALLY nails the problem

[Bogsnot1]

Aah, the good old Spectrum. Remember the good old days when 128k RAM was worth gloating about, when your peasant friends only had 64k on their Commodores?

[Geraldine]

Ok, trying to address the severe loss in frame rate and that "thread stuck in device driver" error. I have upped the latency settings within the Bios to max (240 I think) it was on 32 and the game was stuttering a lot. Even with this problem though, that weird hard crash thing is gone, so you were correct Bogsnot1, many thanks, it was dodgy Bios settings. Now I just (hopefully) need to find the right ones. Trust me to forget fitting a new mobo That is what threw out all my previous settings

[Geraldine]

Another update, finally, a good 4 hour session with ME1 with no crashes! Only glitch now is the game tends to slow down after it has been running for a while. Also, I was unaware ME1 had any DLC before going on this forum so I snagged both of them and installed them. Bring down the Sky is quite good, reminds me a little bit of a mission in ME2. Have not tried the Pinnacle Station DLC yet, but yes after a lot of fighting ME1 is back!

[Bogsnot1]

Good to hear. Took us 3 weeks to work it out, but some good news in the end.
Now go and enjoy killing Geth