System Freezes - Please help!

[Mikuda]

Hello all!
I found Defcon not long ago and it is great game indeed, the pain is that I cannot play it..
I had no chance to finish any war yet because of sudden and totally random system freezes!
Here it goes:
It happens during a game only, usually at defcon 2 or 1 - but earlier too.
Screen freezes or goes black, everything stops to react, last few tones of sound are looping.
It can be unfreezed only by hard reset or by power button, alt+tab nor alt+ctrl+del doesn't work of course.
I'm sure it's not overheating problem because overheat makes system to RESET not to FREEZE like that,
and moreover I play a lot of other games which are far more system consuming and everything is OK (HL2, STALKER, Eve-online two clients at once etc)

I have latest 1.43 version of Defcon.
I have also latest BIOS upgrade of my motherboard, latest motherboard drivers - including onboard soundcard driver, and of course latest graphic card driver.
Here is my system:
Windows XP Professional (5.1, Build 2600) Service Pack 2 (2600.xpsp_sp2_gdr.070227-2254)

Intel(R) Pentium(R) D CPU 3.00GHz (2 CPUs)
2046MB RAM
564MB used, 3374MB available
DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)

DISPLAY (I'm using two monitors with identical settings, but it shouldn't be an issue):

Radeon X1650 Series
ATI Technologies Inc.
ATI Radeon Graphics Processor (0x7291)
Internal DAC(400MHz)
256.0 MB
1600 x 1200 (32 bit) (85Hz)


SOUND:
Realtek HD Audio output

Any ideas, suggestions, help?

Mikuda

[torig]

Can you look for a blackbox.txt file in your defcon directory?
That could potentially hold some more information which will be usefull for troubleshooting.

[ynbniar]

2046MB RAM
564MB used, 3374MB available

Mikuda

Sorry I'm not a tech so can't help, but is this a mistake...you seem to have 2GB RAM, yet you have more than 3GB available...

I suspect you actually have 4GB...

[bert_the_turtle]

...sudden and totally random system freezes!

This is almost always a hardware problem. The next likely cause would be a buggy driver. Absolutely never can a regular application be responsible for freezes. In most setups, Defcon will always use 100% CPU power (this is partly due to what I consider a bug in the OpenGL drivers for ATI and NVidia cards, and of course will affect one CPU only for you), most DirectX games don't do this. If your system isn't prepared for this, one CPU can overheat.

I'd run Defcon in a window and check the system temperature while it runs.

Something that may help (if it does, you found a bug) is to disable one CPU or make it so that Defcon uses only one CPU (I think you can do this in the task manager, but I'm not sure how.)

Lastly, it could be a sound issue. If you want to give disabling the sound a try, I can prepare a mod today (wanted to do that anyway). I'm too lazy to write up the manual instructions

[Mikuda]

Thank You for your replies!
Torig - unfortunately there is no such file as blackbox.txt nor anything like that.

Ynbniar - I have 2gb of ram, memory values beneath it are related to pagefile or something...

Bert - I'll try to check what you say (dunno how yet... )
But it's the only one application that behaves like that in my system, and I tried it many different resolutions, windowed or not, always resulting in freeze.
I'll chcek the sound... but playing it without any sound........?

[torig]

Something that may help (if it does, you found a bug) is to disable one CPU or make it so that Defcon uses only one CPU (I think you can do this in the task manager, but I'm not sure how.)

From the task manager right click a process, choose Affinity. There you can bind an application to logical/physical CPU (in case of hyperthreaded-physical CPUs). Notice windows won't always allow you to set the affinity.
If you'd gain System priviliges on your machine you could, but that would require some dirty workarounds and wouldn't be a recommended way of proceding
In order to disable "a CPU" you'd need to get into the BIOS, find hyperthreading in one of the menus, and disable it.
@bert: I've been running defcon on a hyperthreaded dual cpu machin before, and now on the dual core "core duo2" CPU without issues. Likely not a defcon bug.

Note that in the P4 3.0 Ghz, you don't have two 'real' CPUs. You have CPU0 - the real one- and CPU1, the hyperthreaded one.
A multi-core hyperthreaded CPU gives you 4 CPU's ( which is the case on my Dual PIV 2.2GHz Xeon (xeon was the only line that was hyperthreaded before the 3 GHz CPU).

Check your windows device manager for IRQ conflicts (!) too Mikuda.

Well, if defcon really crashed, it should write a blackbox.txt. It seems _something_ is crashing/freezing windows - and that it isn't defcon.
Of course, another reason could be the crash is so violent that defcon has no time to even write the blackbox.txt before the syste freeze.

Finally, you might want to inspect the event viewer. Go to start, run, type in: eventvwr and click ok.
You're looking for red cross-events named "Error" in the system log.

Also, look up programs through google that perform checks on RAM. System freezes are most likely to be caused by A/ overheating (but it's an Intel CPU. Sorry guys, I am biased in their favour on that point ) B/ faulty RAM C/ IRQ conflicts (soundcard/network card ...) D/ Very rarily in windows itself due to diskspace shortage. I've seen it happen a few times, but I'm guessing you have checked the diskspace on the OS disk beforehand.

@bert: I thought mods already existed to disable sound?
Check the mod section

[frenchfrog]

Like other people already said:

1) Drivers (but you say you have the latest)

2) Overheat: CPU, video card, ... (perhaps try playing with your casing open to see if it makes a difference)


Care to post a dxdiag?

1)'Start' windows button
2)'Run ...'
3)Type 'dxdiag.exe' in the 'Open' textbox and press the 'Ok' button
4)Once the 'dxdiag.exe' dialog is up, click the 'Save All Information ...' button.
5)Choose a destination for the file (ie: your desktop) and a name for the file (ie: 'dxdiag_info.txt')
6)Post the content of the file here.