SL randomly freezing/crashing

At (seemingly) random times during my SL gameplay, the game will freeze. This will not only freeze the application, but my entire PC as well, causing me to do a forced reboot.

I've read other threads discussing something similar to this, but seeing as the general solution is to 'install the omega drivers' (which I've tried, and doesn't work), I decided to create a new thread discussing this issue.

Please help.

The only thing that was chekced when I went into the preferences was "Disable Far Clip". I unchecked it, and proceeded to play the game.

I got a good hour in of gameplay, when it froze yet again.

Therefore, this is obviously not the problem. Any other ideas?

I'm getting the exact same issue. I play and, at random intervals, the game freezes. What's very strange about this is that the music stream generally keeps playing and I can move my mouse around. The game, however, doesn't take any input at all anymore (doesn't react to clicks or keypresses) and is frozen solid. I play on XP and CTRL+ALT+DEL doesn't bring up the Task Manager either.

At that point, I'm forced to reboot too.

I have an ATi Radeon 800Xt (with the Catalyst drivers from the 17th of May) on a fast 3Ghz machine with 2Gb of RAM, therefore, I play with most options checked. I'll try unchecking the shadows to see if it makes any difference.

Very strange and spoils the experience. My trial ends in 5 days. If I can't fix this by then, I probably will not subscribe.

Wendel

Shadows got broke , i dont remember when, they dont really do much anyway, disable that if you have it on.

Local lightning can be very pretty, but its a real killer of your pc, i gotten quite a few crashes with that one on and doing multiple things, decent on sims with no neighbours tho and not too many AV's

But i never gotten a complete pc freeze , mostly just the 'hello crashlogger'.

Not to sure what you should try, Music stream is something i prefer to play in winamp (you can grab any music url by looking in debug)

Crashing can be hard thing to figure out why, so many things to check, SL tend to make my machine run very hot but i never experienced any freezes cause of heat yet.

Things that helped some
clearing cache
defragging drive
turning down Maximum bandwidth
turning off Avatar Vertex program

Theres probably more but its kinda tricky to figure out what to do, good luck

I am having the same issues with crashing, and it seems to be shadow related--and as far as saying shadows don't make a diference!?!?! try modifying your avatar's nose in game with no shadows to define it...shadows are huge and should be fixed if they are this broken.

I tried 2 things tonight:

- Disabled shadows
- Played in windowed mode

I played for a bit more than an hour without a lock up. Tomorrow, I'll try to keep the shadows off but play in full screen mode. But shadows might indeed be the culprit.

Wendel

Same thing has been happening to me... and it is becoming very frustrating... not a good way to show the 7 day trial.

Will i keep my subscription if its an unstable game? no...

Heres hoping i can get a fix

Im a furry i cant see my "nose" since its under loads of prims,

Shadows are a minor thing for me, its been wierd for a awhile, ever seen the shadows under your AV, they are plain odd. (do AV'seven cast shadows?)

Never seen a prim cast a good shadow either, seen some nice faked one tho hehe.

Shadows aren't even the damn problem for me, the creator of the thread. Like I said, everything is unchecked. Shadows are turned off, and it STILL crashes. The music does not keep playing, I cannot move my mouse....EVERYTHING is frozen.

How hot is your video card getting, Laeow?

Yeo, might want to check that, SL drive my vid card alot hotter then most of anything i play, constant strains and pushes it, i reach 140f (60c) quite easy with SL up,.

I did notice one thing when i changed psu 350 - 550w , that it dropped quite abit on ram heat (gpu) , i had to switch back to my older psu (blew up) and it increase alot, running bit thin on this tho,,

Do you know the temp on yours? , mine is pretty bad right now but i dont crash
60c gpu
55c mem (this was 35-40 top with the 550watt)

It never goes above 50. When it does, an alarm sounds, so I should know.

By the way, it's an ATI Radeon 9000.

Okay, and your CPU and RAM? Do you know which motherboard you have?

Sorry, I don't know any of my other specs, other than that I have a 2 gig processor. I put the computer together myself, but that was quite a while ago and I didn't take care to remember the specs.

Hmm... my next suggestion was going to be that you make sure you have the latest chipset drivers for your motherboard, and to check what the newer BIOS updates do, but this makes doing that tougher.

Do you have any stability issues in any other software? Do you play games like Quake, Halo, Everquest? Anything like that?

I've never run into any similar problems with any other software.


I'm relatively sure that I've got the latest drivers, as I did an update recently. Sometime around last week.

Wait, you used Windows Update to install the new version? You need to actually install the drivers downloaded from your motherboard manufacturer's website, and the video drivers you get from your video card's chipset manufacturer's site. (Or the Omega drivers, if you're running an ATI and are so inclined.)

Windows Update will NOT install the correct drivers you need.

Yes, I'm aware of this.

When I said 'update', I meant updating all the chipsets, drivers, etc.

If i have no trouble running the latest games on my computer Other than This game, then why should i blame my computer and not This Game?

Seems this is always the case in these circumstances to blame the users hardware. Granted i know there are thousands of ppl playing this w/o trouble, but really if i can play everything else fine... then why would i suspect my hardware/software is the culprit and not bad code on SL's side.

Shadows are off btw,
Ive never ran into anything that not just crashes but requires a full restart like this game.

Sorry for the attitude, i'm just grumpy this morning.

Oh, sorry. I just assumed you meant Windows Update when you said you weren't sure of the motherboard. I shouldn't have jumped to conclusions. Would you be able to find out which motherboard you have?

Unfortunately for us all, SL is not other software. The most critical difference between SL and say, Half-Life 2 is probably the method SL uses to rapidly swap texture data in and out of memory.

In all honesty, stability problems with SL are rarely a hardware issue, and when they are, it's usually electrical or thermal, and almost certainly not anything like bad RAM or defective processors. The reason it's so important to find out what hardware your computer is running is because the most likely cause of problems tends to be video and motherboard chipset drivers.

When it's not, and it IS a problem with SL, building a repeatable case frequently relies upon establishing a common thread between either hardware (As in the case of a specific video card failing when confronted with shadows, say) or users performing the same action. ("I open the find menu and my computer crashes."

The fact that it's actually locking your system and requiring a reboot indicates that it's probably something similar to what Laeow's seeing. In my experience, SL crashing is fairly common; SL locking your computer is not.

What CPU, motherboard, RAM and video card do you have?

I'm here on my laptop, sitting next to my PC with the side off. I've read some of the writing on my motherboard, and from what I can gather, its got an Asus A7V8X-X.

Other things that might be important to note is that it runs on integrated sound, and it uses a Netgear Wireless PCI adapter.

Edit: I should try running SL on my laptop as well, to see if the problem might lie somewhere in my network. If it runs perfectly fine on my laptop, then the problem most likely lies with my PC.

Hmmm, are you running SL on a wireless connection? If so SL has lots of problems related to wireless networking. Try running wired.

You also said the Omega drivers didn't work... did you mean they didn't cure the problem or you couldn't get them to run on your machine? If you can't get them to work on your machine then there is a serious problem somewhere since the Omega drivers are just tweeked ATI drivers and should work.

I had this very same problem with my 9800, the only way I fixed it was getting a Nvidia 6600GT...

I cannot run on a wired connection. All of the available wired connections are going to much more important things, and my only choice is to run wireless.

The omega drivers ran on my machine; but they did not fix the problem.