Total Freeze Lock Dead PC [Archive] - Team17 Forum

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Lyndon
15 Sep 2006, 17:25
During occasional games in W:A, I have been having complete freeze outs. My Entire PC locking up, the screen freezing, music turning into a repeating beep, mouse still. Its only happened during Worms Armageddon, but could be due to the new Nvidia update I installed alittle while ago.
Anys thought id report it, I cant recreate it cause its seems to be random. I do have some of the replays in which it happened. Ill try them out and see if my pc crashes watching them.

Muzer
15 Sep 2006, 18:53
Try turning the music off. If the CD is partially damaged in the bit where the music is, the game may play, but when it gets to a bit of music data that's not there, it freezes.

Lex
16 Sep 2006, 03:23
How do you know this, Muzer? Have you seen that happen?
Anyway, Lyndon, are you sure this hasn't happened outside of WA? Do you play any other CPU-intensive games? This sounds like your CPU is overheating. In your BIOS, you may have a CPU-overheat setting which determines what your computer should do if the CPU overheats. On my old machine, by default, this was set to "throttle", which is what your PC sounds like it's doing.

Dando
16 Sep 2006, 04:32
Random is not a word to decribe a PC fault. It has definate cause. It may appear random, but in 1 way or another , it will not be;)

franpa
16 Sep 2006, 06:06
from what i know a skipping audio disc consumes god like amounts of cpu power... (a disc that is so scratched it gets caught in a small infinite loop)

Lex
16 Sep 2006, 07:32
No, Franpa. That's not what is happening here. When the machine freezes, the same video data is being sent to the monitor repeatedly, which makes the monitor continuously display the same image, resulting in a "freezing" effect.
The same thing happens with the audio. Audio data is sent in small amounts to the speakers by the sound card (or motherboard, if you have on-board sound). When the machine freezes, this same data gets sent repeatedly to the speakers, resulting in an extremely short looping sample of the audio you were last playing.
Neither of these effects use the CPU at all, as they are just vegetable output from the video and sound cards. It's like when a chicken continues running after it has been decapitated. Its brain is no longer connected to its muscles, but its nerves are still interpreting signals.

franpa
16 Sep 2006, 10:42
yes and a locked pc could be caused by all cpu time being spent trying to skip a bad spot on a audio disc.

Dando
16 Sep 2006, 22:35
In my experience, programs are usually well made so that if there is an audio problem, only audio is affected.
In a good program, music should not make the game stick.

franpa
17 Sep 2006, 03:38
yes (agreeing with dando)... and i have a better example (to demonstrate MY above post).... if you have a really scratched data cd and try to copy corrupted stuff off it.... sometimes it will spend minutes spinning the disc up and down trying to read it... when this happens most people will notice that most parts of windows lag a fair bit.

Muzer
17 Sep 2006, 12:08
How do you know this, Muzer? Have you seen that happen?
Yes, lex. I had to get a new WA CD. That is why I have 2. an only-just-playable-if-you-have-music turned off (now rectified with wormkit), and a perfectly fine version.

Chip
17 Sep 2006, 12:25
To determin whether this problem really is related to the music on the CD: Go into "my computer" and browse through the CD and then play the music files and see if they play.
If the CD is that damaged that the music becomes dodgey then your media player would pick this up too but more of a "struggling to load the track" or "skipping or stopping in parts" rarther than the computer crashing.
P.S On my really old computer when it had problems with the CD Drive - when it couldn't read the CD, it would bring up a blue screan saying "please insert the WA CD"
But that was the CD drive beeing dirty instead of the CD being damaged.

franpa
17 Sep 2006, 13:25
entirely dependent on how the cd is damaged.

Dando
18 Sep 2006, 20:24
Yes franpa is right chip, media player may even play it correctly, or the fault so small it is unnoticible. The game however is a different story. But I suppose it is worth a shot.

Vader
18 Sep 2006, 20:45
Random is not a word to decribe a PC fault. It has definate cause. It may appear random, but in 1 way or another , it will not be;)
Some problems can not be reproduced. Similarly, some problems are caused by a variety of steps to reproduce which cannot be determined within a feasible timeframe.
In QA terms, these problems can be considered to occur "randomly".
To clarify, you are correct but there are cases when despite the fact that something specific is causing the problem, that action cannot be determined and is considered random.

franpa
19 Sep 2006, 02:25
also, the game more then likely does not have a way to bypass scratches in the disc... where as a media player would have methods of bypassing scratches.

Dando
21 Sep 2006, 01:13
yeah vadar I was just being mean:)
Anyway there are many things to test before considering it too hard to wor out precisely what is causing it..so still some hope here:)

HariSeldon
24 Sep 2006, 01:38
I run my copy through an ISO mounted by Daemon tools. I like loading into the game in a bout 3 seconds :)
Only scratches I need to worry about are bad sectors.

Muzer
24 Sep 2006, 08:58
Well turn the music off anyway. There might be some bad sectors, or the CD you copied off might've been scratched.
EDIT: BTW, you do own the original CD, right? Or did you download some illegal pirate version?

Plutonic
24 Sep 2006, 18:25
urrrr, that wasnt the same person... HS doesnt have any problems running the game.
To me it sounds like an overheating CPU, but it could be any faulty hardware realy. I once had a dell that would do that after a while but if you took the sound card out it didnt crash, and that was with 3 different sound cards and all IDE slot combinations.

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