BTW keeps crashing system

[hsmwrv]

BTW keeps crashing my system mostly in less than an hour playing, not crashing to desktop but rebooting Windows! And the worst of all, the crashes left no log on either Window event viewer or BTW log. I've tried everything on the "Fix-it list" post that might have suited my situation, but nothing solved the problem.

Please, any suggestion might fix the problem would be really appreciated.

Dell Inspiron 1420 with Core 2 Duo 1500Ghz, 2G ram and nVidia 8400 GS @ 128MB on Windows XP SP3.

 

[ori]

welcome to the posting side of CFC

this does not sound like a problem that is directly caused by the game. I guess there is some kind of faulty driver or hardware in play.
There are essentially two possibilites:
1) the power supply to your mainboard overheats and you loose power for a short time
2) something else causes an error and windows decides to reboot.
do the following:

1.


Right-click My Computer, and then click Properties.

2.


Click the Advanced tab.

3.


Under Startup and Recovery, click Settings to open the Startup and Recovery dialog box.

4.


Clear the Automatically restart check box, and click OK the necessary number of times.

5.


Restart your computer for the settings to take effect.

now the next time this error occurs (unless it is 1)) windows should display an error message - most likely a blue screen without rebooting automatically. Please note the error and post it here

 

[hsmwrv]

Thanks Ori for the suggestions!

For 1), BTW does produce a lot heat. However, other games or applications never caused the system shutting down no matter how hot the system was. So far, BTW has been the only one.

For 2), I've disabled the Automatically restart option. It somehow didn't work when the problem came. Windows just shut down without giving a blue screen or any error message. I haven't experienced other system crashes that could cause a blue screen, so I can't tell if only BTW did that.

 

[ori]

if there is no error message now in the event manager - then its not the operating system that is shutting the computer down - but the hardware. the most common reason for this is an overheating graphics card. Does the computer make louder than normal noises before shutting down?

 

[hsmwrv]

if there is no error message now in the event manager - then its not the operating system that is shutting the computer down - but the hardware. the most common reason for this is an overheating graphics card. Does the computer make louder than normal noises before shutting down?

Not really. Sometimes the computer shut down while not being very hot or noisy.

 

[ori]

I had this happen once with a faulty power supply - it just restarted for no apparent reason. However I wm not saying that this is the case with your machine. There are just two things:
1) its all but impossible to troubleshoot an error without a hint at what causes it (such as an error message)
2) there is no way that the game itself is causing a hard shutdown without windows recording some king of error message.
The most likely culprit in your case is some hardware component with a fault - that is triggered by the game accessing (a normally completely legit) part of that piece of hardware. Either by putting a lot of strain on the machine - it does tend to cause a lot of work for the graphics card - and some of them cannot handle the load - so that might be a problem. Another possibility would be a faulty memory address on your RAM chips or ... the list can go on for a while I fear