WoW Petopia Community

My pc has me baffled. I sent it to get fixed,but the problem remains. When I try to play WoW or any other game it freezes and blue screen crashes. If it does it a few items it makes a horrible beeeep when I try to start it again. I have a Nividia graphics card and I heard they had a bad bug with XP. I've updated the drivers twice already, ran virus scans in safemode, sent it to get fixed and they guy just said it was all the graphics drivers and it should be better now (it wasn't). Anyone more knowledgeable able to give me any suggestions? I'm considering just wiping the whole thing,but I'm hesitant because I'm not 100% sure if that will even solve the problem.

blue screen to me indicates way more than graphics card. It indicates hard drive failure. I could be wrong but thats what happened to some previous computers I had just before the hard drives went kaputz.

Is your computer overheating ?

Can you provide specifics on your graphics card and the driver version you're using? My boyfriend can try to give some suggestions after he knows that, he's the IT tech. x)

Does it blue-screen immediately or after a while? The latter would be overheating, but if it crashes immediately, I'm more suspecting other bad hardware or a driver issue ...

A blue screen can mean a host of different problems and do not always directly reveal the actual cause of the problem. If you could post the message you get someone might be able to help you further.

This is best done by going to the event viewer, start, run, type: eventvwr.msc. In the system log you should see an error entry relating to the blue screen, you'll be looking for something that says STOP:..... that is what you need to post so people can try to help you work out the problem.

Good Luck.

SgtMakkie wrote:A blue screen can mean a host of different problems and do not always directly reveal the actual cause of the problem. If you could post the message you get someone might be able to help you further.

This is best done by going to the event viewer, start, run, type: eventvwr.msc. In the system log you should see an error entry relating to the blue screen, you'll be looking for something that says STOP:..... that is what you need to post so people can try to help you work out the problem.

Good Luck.

This. It's impossible to tell until you post the error. It could be memory going bad, a graphics driver, and many other things.

It's really strange now it's turning itself off at random as well. The error said something about Windows I never get to read it cause it shuts itself off real fast after. It might be overheating,but it looks like all three fans are working. It's an older alienware. I don't suspect a memory problem because its at 0% disc compression or something and there isn't much on it. I'm not sure about the graphics card it's a GeForce something either stating with a 6 or 8 I'll look it up more when I get a chance it works at random and it's not cooperating at the moment. I really appreciate all the advice or suggestions. I think I'm going to wipe it later tonight see if it works when I put things back on and if it doesn't send it to get fixed again and hope for the best. Sniffle I wanted to make more ponies and karkin fan art. I hope its fixable cause with all the hospital bills i have theres no way i cold get another at the moment. Guess I just keep my fingers crossed for now.

I'll try what SgtMakki suggested too as soon as I get home tonight. My poor baby I hope its not just getting too old.

The shutting itself off DEFINITELY sounds like a hardware issue, and most likely overheating. I had similar issues when my power supply fan broke. A few blue screens of death, and then it would just shut itself off. I think someone mentioned somewhere where you can actually find the error report saved on your hard drive. Try that. I also would say wiping it doesn't sound like it'll fix it. If it's shutting off, I'd say you're most likely looking at an overheating issue. Any strange smells in your room since this started? When my power supply started melting cause the fan broke, there was one that I didn't notice until it was already FAR too late (I was already getting shut downs just a few minutes after powering up). Smell turned out to be the plastic bits in the power supply melting :/

Incase you missed the instructions above, I'll repeat them in step by step form for clarity:

Click Start Menu
Click "Run..."
In the box that pops up type "eventvwr.msc" (no quotes)
A window should open.
Now, if I'm following Makkie correctly, Click "System" on the left list.
Look for what Makkie mentioned, something to do with "STOP"
Double click an item to pull up the full error details
Copy paste them here so people can help

Bulletdance wrote:It's really strange now it's turning itself off at random as well. The error said something about Windows I never get to read it cause it shuts itself off real fast after. It might be overheating,but it looks like all three fans are working. It's an older alienware. I don't suspect a memory problem because its at 0% disc compression or something and there isn't much on it. I'm not sure about the graphics card it's a GeForce something either stating with a 6 or 8 I'll look it up more when I get a chance it works at random and it's not cooperating at the moment. I really appreciate all the advice or suggestions. I think I'm going to wipe it later tonight see if it works when I put things back on and if it doesn't send it to get fixed again and hope for the best. Sniffle I wanted to make more ponies and karkin fan art. I hope its fixable cause with all the hospital bills i have theres no way i cold get another at the moment. Guess I just keep my fingers crossed for now.

I'll try what SgtMakki suggested too as soon as I get home tonight. My poor baby I hope its not just getting too old.

I'm talking about RAM, not hard drive. RAM and the room/compression on your HD are two completely different things. You can get STOP errors from RAM going bad, so until we know what the stop message says.... yeah.

Ohhh scary, there are a lot of events,but u guys want the ones with the red xs right? I'll see if I can post them. I think it might be the fan thing though, I did notice a strange smell lately and the last time it was repaired the guy mentioned something about one of the fans being finicky. I only just remembered tho they all have lights that indicate if they're working and they're on,but that still might be it.

I'm not even sure how to post these right so please bare with me.

"The ForceWare Ip service got hung on starting"
"The ForceWare application Manager got hung on starting"
There is a few of those that repeat if that means anything to you guys it makes no sense to me unless its a few times when my norton failed to do stuff,but then worked the next time i tried.

Those are more likely to be symptoms of somethign else being broken. Scroll down the list til you find the ones that happened just BEFORE your machine last shut itself down. One of them should have the "stop" info in it.. there wil be a code, like Stop error XC2345 6543 6A456 or something similar.

Strange smells + computers are probably bad in general. The power supply has it's own fan, generally, which would be inside it's own little box inside your computer. That's what went on mine. I would maybe suggest having a different guy look at it? If you took it in for blue screens and power offs.. and they just said it was vid drivers and sent it back after saying the fan was finicky, I'd suggest trying another repair shop for your needs.

Sounds to me like it might be your PSU, because running a game would make the graphics card draw a lot more power, which could cause any number of problems. The first thing Id do in that situation is check if your PSU is "strong enough" for all your components power usage. You should find the neccessary specs in the manuals and on a sticker on the PSU.
Im not very familiar with Windows, though, but it seems to me like the ForceWare stuff might just be daemons crashing, which shouldnt matter that much. Its very possible for it to be indicative of a problem, though.

Also, have you tried downgrading your graphics card driver?

I'm not really sure how to downgrade my graphics card so I haven't tried that yet. I'm gonna send it off again to a different guy and ask him to check the PSU and the graphics card itself specifically among everything else they do just in case. If it gets up and running again I am gonna make u guys so many fan arts for all the help

Without hearing the beeeep for myself I can't say for certain, but I would venture that when that happens the system has discovered what it considers to be a faulty RAM module, and disabled it. So, if you hear the beep, check in Windows how much memory is reported (Right-click on My Computer, select Properties, I think that's where it says it). Compare that to how much you should have. It might be off by 256Meg or so, that's fine, but if it's off by more than that, it would definitely point to a faulty RAM module.

Anyia wrote:Without hearing the beeeep for myself I can't say for certain, but I would venture that when that happens the system has discovered what it considers to be a faulty RAM module, and disabled it. So, if you hear the beep, check in Windows how much memory is reported (Right-click on My Computer, select Properties, I think that's where it says it). Compare that to how much you should have. It might be off by 256Meg or so, that's fine, but if it's off by more than that, it would definitely point to a faulty RAM module.

If you believe that the memory may be at fault, I suggest running Memtest 86 to check.
http://www.memtest86.com/

I just got my pc back from getting the fan taken care of and got a blue screen right away. This time I managed to catch the stop report thing. It said
The computer has rebooted from a bug check. The bug check was; 0x100007f(0x00000008,0xb8340d7,0x00000000,0x00000000) A dump was saved in C://windows minidump00511-01.dmp.

I also have 2558Mbs of RAM

Would wiping it fix that? ...sigh technology hates me.

Sounds like a hardware issue or a bad driver. Have you tried going into Safe Mode ?

Start by getting the very latest drivers for your mboard/cpu/video/sound/network etc. Then one by one re-installing them. This might help narrow down the problem, also try to run whatever triggers the crashes after each upgrade.