New Card, New Problem

[Anya]

My 6month old gaming computer decided to die :mad: The repair guy said it was a faulty video card and replaced it. As they were out of the same card (6600) he put in a better card, GeForce 7600 GS. I did check Phil's list, and this is a supported card.
The game plays for roughly 45 mins and then freezes. I can't pinpoint anything in particular, the population varies, what I am doing varies. But not only does the game freeze, I can't get back to windows. Pressing the window key doesn't work, nor does Ctrl Alt Delete, so I have to hit the restart button. No error message comes up.
The card came with the 84.21 driver, so I updated that to the 91.33, but that hasn't helped. I have tried playing another game for the same length of time and that was fine, so I don't think the new card is overheating.
Any thoughts? Of course DxDiag decided not to give me the long list everyone else has, but take me to a table instead, so here is my basic info:
Widows XP Home edition, Service Pack 2
Memory 1024.5
Harddrive 160 gig, with 140 spare (loads of space :) )
Processor Pentium 4 Speed 3216
Nvidia GeForce 7600 GS 256 ram
DirectX 9c
Driver 91.31
Sound Realtek AC 97 Audio
Driver 5.10.5770

The sound was playing merrily away while everything else was stopped :rolleyes:
Any thoughts would be appreciated :)

[Anya]

Quick reply Phil :) Glad you are here! Not getting the text was just me, there was an option to save....I just missed it!
Hope you can see something in it, I'd hope it won't be a major problem as this should be a good machine.

[Anya]

Thanks Phil :)
The monitor may be an issue. It was configured for the last card, maybe they changed settings when they tested the card. I'll dig out the book and see what it says.
I may as well get the latest .net framework and DirectX, it probably can't hurt :)
At the moment the computer is being defragged, once that is finished I'll see what I can do about the monitor and test it again. I shall get very good at this demo :D

[Anya]

Yay Phil :D We've done it :D
I've got through the demo....and Ceasar thinks I'm capable :) I was so pleased to see the final screen :D
I was still working on your earlier suggestions. I had done the disk cleanup and defragged. As you were concerned about corruption, I thought it worth uninstalling and reinstalling the demo.
This was all that was necessary :) It played beautifully, and I still took as long as I usually do (3 years and 2 months) to complete it. I also had all the weather effects, so I know it's working well.
The monitor book was no help, so I've done nothing on that front yet.
I will wait on the full game now, before updating the .net framework or anything else. That it is working is enough :)

Given the time differences I was lucky you were up, I had thought this was one of those things that would take days to resolve, I'm so glad it wasn't.

I now have to consider reinstalling my other games....just in case they too do not like the hardware changes!

Thanks again :D

[Keith]

The hard lockups you are experiencing could indicate another problem on your system. You may have a bad memory strip or strips in your system. I had a similar problem with lockups once and it was tracked down to a bad RAM strip.

You may want to run a memory testing utility on your system.

http://www.memtest.org/

[Anya]

Good point Keith. My last computer issues were caused by that same problem.
I'll certainly keep this in mind. If it happens again I'll take the machine back and make the tech's test the memory....it's still under warranty so I might as well get some service while I can :)
After all I went through you won't believe how happy I was to see that "phone home" screen I was complaining about in another thread :) I will wait until I'm sure the computer is stable before I try the fix you gave me.