Vista/Dell Memory Parity Error

[Thierry]

Hi !

No, I'm not spamming an OT Thread on general technical problems.

It's just that sometimes I get a Blue Screen of Death (they still exist I swear !) in VISTA, only when playing DOM III.

No other application ever crashed VISTA with this message (not to say that no application crashed VISTA.. A bit less stable that my old XP, but not a nightmare).

So I'm very curious why I get this message. Generally when clicking on turn report : you reached a new level in alteration (or something like that) BANG !

It's been several month that it happened to me and ammount to 95% of my reboot in VISTA, at least a few times a week.
I was unable to find any problem with my RAM checking it at boot sequence. No other application complained...

Has anyone encountered this problem with DOM 3 ?

Who horrored marked my DELL ???

PS : Of course it's a retail version of Dom 3, VISTA and err.. DELL yes

[Dedas]

Often it is hardware related but this kind of thing could also be the cause of a virus infection. Can you give us the details of your BSOD?

[archaeolept]

i'd reinstall dominions, just in case there's something corrupt with it. When do you get the blue screens? during new turn calculations or while viewing battles or what? If the latter, I'd certainly look around for updated video drivers.

I'd think a driver issue would be the most likely cause of a memory parity error. d/l and run from a pre-windows environment either microsoft's memory tester or memtest86. Dell's own hardware tests are fairly weak; probably because they like their under-warranty hardware to pass it

[Thierry]

Thanks for your insights.

I never got those during turn calculation. Always when going from one screen to the other.

Generally from clicking on the turn summary screen.

what buggers me is that if I have a real RAM issue, my whole PC is unsafe. Still I only got problems with Dom3. That's weird !

I'll try a reinstall of Dom3 that's certainly an excellent idea.

I check my RAM through the bios boot menu : no failure... Except for DOM3, my VISTA is quite stable. I never experienced something strange (for VISTA !) with it.

[Ornedan]

The BIOS RAM check doesn't really do a comprehensive test. Get some Linux livecd and select the memory test boot option (aforementioned memtest86). Leave it running for a full test cycle, which should take an hour or two.
Ubuntu install disc can do it. Just remember to not select the install option unless you really want to :P

[archaeolept]

or you can d/l a copy of the ultimate bootcd and run memtest, or MS mem test, or other useful hardware utilities, from that.

dell's mem tester is very very weak.

What sort of dell computer are you using?

also, reset your bios to defaults if you have not already. an incorrect or corrupt setting could cause this issue.

[analytic_kernel]

I think archaeolept's earlier suggestion about the video drivers (or Dedas' suggestion: hardware; in particular, video card) is worth checking into. Dom 3 is likely to hit the main memory in the same places as any other application, and so you would expect other apps to trigger memory-related problems as well. Thus, I would consider a problem with the main memory to be less likely. (Still wouldn't hurt to run memtest86, though.)

If the crash happens when you are about to view a battle from the turn summary, then 3D rendering could be triggering the problem. You might want to try another program that uses 3D rendering in hardware, particularly one that does it via OpenGL, and see if that can reproduce the crash.

Also, like Dedas said, details of the BSOD could help narrow down the problem.

[Thierry]

Thanks everyone for the suggestions.

I hardly ever play action game, so my drivers are probably not to date. Still Dom3 never crashed in the fight screen.

I'll download the utilities and test my memory and let you know if it was a real hardware problem or Dom3 install.

[Edi]

Update the machine BIOS as well. That can eliminate a surprising number of problems. Together with a driver update, disk defrag and a chkdsk routine would be the thing to do and also the memory tests if you like to go that way.

[Agema]

I have occasional video driver failures during Dom3. Mind you, I get video driver failures during virtually any game since I upgraded. Enough to make me want to go back to the rock solid nVidia 6600GT at times...