Majnun Posted March 28, 2006 Share Posted March 28, 2006 First off, if any of the moderators here have a problem with me posting any of these links feel free to delete them and leave the bits that are ok here. I'm just trying to be helpful and the Official tech support boards are worthless so this seemed like the place to put it. I happened to read a post on the official tech support board before it flew of the front page into oblivion (so to speak). Apparently the game does not play nice with HP printer drivers running in the background. So if you have an HP printer...disable it's drivers or even uninstall them and see if that helps. If it doesn't you can always just reinstall them. Another thing that may be irrelevant (I haven't read about anybody having this problem with this game...yet). Your firewall &/or antivirus may be conflicting with the game. I've never had a problem with the antivirus (I always just turn it off before playing anything). But Gothic 2 Gold Edition will *not* run at all with my firewall installed (Agnitum Outpost free firewall). And I mean...installed at all. I had to actually uninstall the firewall completely (not just turn it off) before Gothic 2 Gold would run. No idea why since it's an offline only game...and didn't try to make a connection of any sort. Anyway, like I said, it may not be an issue with Oblivion (it isn't for me) but it might be something to try if you can't get the game to run at all. If you have an nVidia card you definitely should read (and do) this:http://www.elderscrolls.com/forums/index.p...howtopic=282064I'm using the 84.21 drivers though, no need to bother with those beta drivers unless you've got one of the new cards that it adds support for. Edit: I was WRONG...definitely update to the new Beta drivers...my fps went up quite a bit more than just using that coolbits tweak on the old drivers). If you feel comfortable tweaking your .ini file then you might have a look at these links. http://www.elderscrolls.com/forums/index.p...howtopic=285612http://cycophant.50webs.com/OblivionTweak.html Just remember *always* make a copy of the un-messed with .ini file in case you hose something up badly. And it's the one in the My Documents folder you want...not the one where the game is installed. Last thing is for people who do get it to run but have lots of lock-ups or crashes. After you've covered all the other things (meeting hardware req's, up to date drivers, etc) on other thing might be overheating. Two good (and free) programs you might get are SensorsView and SpeedFan. They both monitor the various sensors in your puter and can tell you the temperatures of your CPU, motherboard, hard disks, etc. THey're very small programs but I wouldn't run them while Oblivion is running. But when you crash to desktop you can immediately run one of these programs and see if the temp is thru the roof. SensorsView is here:http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=4859 SpeedFan is here:http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=337 I prefer SensorsView but that's just me. And you can trust that site (no viruses, or spyware or any of that crap). Hopefully some of that babble will help someone. After looking at the official tech support forum I realized how lucky I am to have got the game to run with almost no problems. Oh, here's a third .ini tweak list. I was going to just link to it but the guy's site exceeded his bandwidth...so here ya go (hopefully he won't mind): Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dc4bs Posted March 28, 2006 Share Posted March 28, 2006 I don't know if it will help anyone else but I greatly reduced system lockups by simply turning off "autosave on travel". For some reason, the simultaneous saving of the game while the new section of the game was loading immediately after walking through a door would sometimes cause a bus hang on my system especially if I tried to move (WASD) before the "autosaving" message on screen went away.. After disabling autosave, I got a 4 hour, lock-up free session. Doesn't seem to be any problem with manual & quick(F5) saving. Possibly a motherboard firmware/XP driver update may help this issue but I havn't tried it yet. -dc4bs Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dc4bs Posted March 31, 2006 Share Posted March 31, 2006 OK, upgraded the BIOS to the current rev and upgraded the drivers for IDE, SATA, AGP, Sound card (Audigy) and the video card (ATI X800) and it did no good at all... 5 minutes into the game and the same hardware lockup occured. Again. Ugh. In my googling for anything that might be related to my system crashes, I stumbled over a refrence to an obscure ATI radeon card issue. It said if you have a Radeon card (Catalyst drivers) and you have system memory usage set to "Best performance of: System Cache" it can sometimes cause lockup/crash issues with 3D games... I set it back to the default setting of "best performance of: programs" as reccomended instead of system cache and haven't had a lockup since. Only played a few hours so far but it looks promising. The setting is in "control pannel / system properties / advanced (tab) / performance (settings) / advanced (tab) / memory usage". If you have a radeon card, have memory usage optimised for System Cache as I did and are experiencing hardware lockup issues while playing Oblivian, try setting this to "programs", reboot and see if it helps. I'd be really interested to know if this solves a problem for anyone else out there. :) I'll post a followup in a day or two as to wether I've had any more lockups while playing. Here's hoping. -------EDIT: Yeah! 6 hours of play so far with NO hardware lockups! Looks like this is in fact the fix! -dc4bs Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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