winspww2 crash to desktop after 5 mins

[ranXerox]

I had this problem earlier and downloaded the game again, updated it. It worked fine maybe 2-3 weeks and again it acts strangely. Loads fine but after about 5 mins of setting up groups in the beginning of a game, it crashed to desktop without any error signals.

It seems that crashing happend mostly in map-screen. I finished my last pbem-game with a friend and there were no problems whatsoever. But now we are starting a new one and when i try to lay my troops in the map, it crashes down whenever I zoom out in screen or after waiting some minutes. The game works fine in others aspects, playing is fine and menus, but troops deployement map makes things go wrong..

any helps?

[Mobhack]

Have you read the sticky post at the top of the forum, entitled "Where to Find Help" and specifically item number 7 in that post?.

Cheers
Andy

[ranXerox]

Yes but it didn't help. Sounds are not the problem. Game has been working just right before. Last time it did this I uninstalled it and reinstalled - and it worked ok. Now it does the same thing again, crashes down in deployement map. All the others areas of the game are working perfectl, sound on.

I noticed weird stuff on the screen just before dropping down to desktop. In deployement screen, about half of the screen did go black, and in the left upper corner there was a black square, and in it, one hex on the center. All the land counters(hexas) in the map flashed in it. After doing that about 5 seconds, game crashed down.

Any similar experiences?

[Arralen]

You might have a thermal problem.

WinSPWW2 (and WinSPMBT) are coming from DOS and don't "idle" in the way Win32 programs normally do, but run with 100% CPU even if you're doing nothing at all.
You may notice that in the task manager.
After some minutes, either the temperature of your CPU itself get to high, or the case temperature gets so high the graphic card starts acting up.

And then again, 100% CPU isn't the same as 100% CPU. That the problem only occures in the deployment screen might be the case because the "waiting for input"-routine is different there from the one used in the rest of the game, but the devs are the ones to ask 'bout that.

Try removing the side cover and cleaning the fans/heatsinks ..

[Mobhack]

Well - if it happens after some time then you reinstall, and the problem again takes some time to happen again then reappears then something is probably wrong with your machine.

I will assume your machine meets the minimum specifications for the game as set out here (game requirements). If not - that needs addressing.

I would suspect you may have some sort of disk drive problem -lost clusters etc or possibly even a bad sector. I would try a defragmentation of the drive and a surface test as well.

cheers
Andy

[Arralen]

There seems to be an issue with the deployment screen - I was able to "produce" as similar effect on my machine - and it surely meets the minimum specs
CPU Typ AMD Athlon 64, 1800 MHz (9 x 200) 3000+
Motherboard VIA K8M800/K8N800, AMD Hammer
Sound VIA AC'97 Enhanced Audio Controller
RAM 1024 MB (PC3200 DDR SDRAM)
NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT (128 MB)
W2k SP4rollerup

.. and it is rock-stable, normally. Only thing I have to watch out for a high temperatures ...

After "idling" the game for over an hour (sound enabled)with 100% CPU, what turns of the AMD Cool'n'Quiet, I had bought my forces and went into the deployment screen.

~15 minutes later, while re-assigning headquarters and looking at unit info screens, a small (5 pix?) strip of the background map was drawn streched out to the right screen edge, and the game nearly "froze". In fact, it ran extremly slowly (apart from the sound, which was ok IIRC). It took 3-4 minutes for the game to close the unit info screen (obviously, the mouse-click which I did after the "freeze" was properly registered). While the screen was re-drawn, the monitor de-synced for a split second.

For the whole time, the mouse pointer was 100% responding, but despite running in windowed mode I wasn't able to get either the task manager up or the game closed properly via any means - I guess everything would have worked, if I had waited an hour or so. Did a hard reset.

Simply re-loaded the game, went into the deployment screen and everything was fine.

After a while, though, I noticed single pixel errors in the background of the unit info screens => graphics RAM getting too hot ?
CPU was @47°C, the GPU reached 52°C, what shouldn't be too much, though.
Case temp went to 40°C, due to the CPU running at full 1.8Ghz (instead of 1.0)
Sadly, I have no means to measure the temp of the graphic ram ... .

Edit: Dang! Just noticed I'm in beta-tester mode again, but I'm not a tester for this game at all ...

[ranXerox]

I had some problems with my HDD, other games crashed as well and one week ago the whole system went down. I had to reinstall Windows and all other programs as well.. Windows just didn't load anymore, not even after trying out all possibilities(safe load, last known usable settings, removing sp2 from recovery console, fixing boot sectors in recovery console, installing Windows over old one).

HDD seems to be fine now, so I think too many jams(and resets) just escalated into that earlier meltdown. I also lowered my overclocks a bit to prevent faults in memory access. My system crashed because of faults in page file(kernel inpage errors), so it's possible also that overclocked cpu and memory caused faults in page file = bad blocks). I had no problems with overheating before, run my system for almost 2 years with same overclocked speeds. So I think(and hope) the problem was due both overclocking and several bad jams that ultimately screwed it up permanently.

Well, system been running less than a week now perfectly, winspww2 too

Well I have another problem, i started a new post for that one.