WA crash within 10 min!

[ykurashi]

Here's a problem thats been driving me insane with trial and error issues, whenever a group of us play worms offline in a form of 6 different teams, my whole laptop crashes within 10 minutes! however when I tried playing on my own or with just 1 other friend offline everything is fine!
btw i'm connected to my LCD hdtv using DVI (by screen clone)

My specs:

Fujitsu Siemens AMILO M3438G - Pentium M 760 2 GHz
Graphics Processor / Vendor: NVIDIA GeForce Go 6800 - PCI Express x16
Video Memory: DDR SDRAM - 256 MB
2 gb DDR Ram

[ykurashi]

I'm running
Windows XP home edition

Nvidia Driver
ForceWare Release 90
Version: 93.71
Release Date: November 2, 2006
WHQL Certified

Resolution at 1024X768

By the way tried connecting with S-video on my old crt television same thing...

[SilPho]

The television connection shouldn't make a great deal of difference, but out of curiosity, I assume the same error still occurs when you try to play the game on the laptop screen.

Does it crash with 3\4 or 5 teams or is it only 6 that makes a mess of it?
Does it crash in deathmatches when there are lots of teams on the field?

[franpa]

try turning off all power saving features within windows itself and in your laptops BIOS.

[ykurashi]

Although the time my laptop crashes/shuts down completely is consistent (approx. 8 min after starting a match/hot seat) usually the number of teams in an offline game are 6, there no other modes in which I play.
My power saving features are off in windows, have to go and check the bios though.

However, the first time this occurred me and only 1 friend of mine tried playing worms after everyone has left for 2-3 hours and had no problems whatsoever.

I've been reading up on possible scenarios, could my nvidia desktop application or the fact that directx 9.0c disables directdraw by default have anything to with this?

Been racking my brain to think what made this begin all of a sudden, could've been the upgrade of my Nvidia forceware recently from version 70 something to 93.71

Haven't upgraded WA since version 3.6.26.5 came out a few months back, so it can't be that.

This is a major crisis as worms tournaments on thursday nights are a big deal to all of us, thanks for all your help in advance.

[bonz]

Could it be your laptop overheating? Do you have stability issues with other programs?

W:A uses almost all CPU ressources, a problem that still occurs on some systems.
I know of KRD who gets problems with his laptop overheating.

[KRD]

That would be me. |:<

It definitely sounds like a heat problem to me. Especially since you mention it happens less if there's a smaller number of people in the room.

Don't know what your particular model looks like, but I have seen one or two Fujitsu Siemens laptops before and the fans in them seemed quite effective to me. Very loud, but effective.

You need to make sure the fan holes on the laptop aren't blocked by pillows, soft furniture, clothes, human flesh and stuff like that. Also, unless it's a brand new laptop, there's a good chance it's pretty dusty inside. Dust often makes a massive difference, in laptops far more than in desktop computers. What most people do is they once a year take the laptop to a geeky computer store where they open it and clean it with compressed air. Some people do that on their own, but I never have personally, so I'd rather not encourage you.

Another thing that seems to happen pretty often from my experience is fans outright dying. If you do take it to a service for an air job, ask them to check if all the fans are still working while they're at it.

Anyway, as a test you could try placing the laptop next to an open window [assuming it's as cold outside where you live as it is here] and firing the game up. Then report back here with the results.

[ykurashi]

Could be the fan, my laptop is only about a year old model, its been able to take much heavier games, although when the pc crashes the bottom does seem really hot. How come after a year of playing worms this just happened now? I checked there's no dust, How can I prevent the fan from over heating?

OK, so took my laptop to the shop, they checked it out, fan was fine, plus cleaned it out with air spray just to make sure.

Came back home, ran worms same thing, only this time I killed the volume and listened to the fan, it started working full force&tough at around 5 minutes, 5 more minutes the laptop shut down.

I rememebred the first weekend this occured, we stopped playing worms, then I recall after restarting the laptop for maybe the 5th time that night, something popped up after restarting that said it was being disabled, not sure but it could've been related to Nvidia.

Anyways someone mentioned that worms uses up most of the pc resource and makes the fan go on full blast, you are right about that, now... is there a way for me to make worms stop sucking up so much resource or anything you can think of to stop making the fan go nuts?

Does anyone think this could be relevant to the fan overheating? Is there an Nvidia version any of you reccommend?

[bonz]

Have you tried placing the laptop to the open window providing more cool air?
Also place it on a hard, flat surface (table without table-cloth) and extend those small legs to raise it or jack it up with somthing at the rear corners.

[Dando]

A blocked heatsink is usually the problem. But to be honest I have never seen the inside of a laptop. Don't use them.

My cpu throttles and vibrates when it gets too hot. I had same problem. It was the heatsink blocked with loads of dust that was the problem

[yakuza]

Try making an ISO and mounting it on a virtual drive.

[ykurashi]

I actually do run worms off of a mounted virtual drive, and I run it off the network. There must be something thats making worms suck up a huge amount of resource off the cpu more than before, because it never behaved like this.

So now I've finally narrowed down the problem, worms is taking massive resource causing the cpu to overheat, maybe lowering its priority from windows task manager?

Gotta figure out how to prevent this, and bring Armageddon back to my weekend competitions!

[CyberShadow]

What about other games? Most games out there eat up 100% CPU while running.

[Dando]

did you test the heatsink?

and cybershadow is right. Most games will use as much cpu as they can. if your processor is hyper threading/dual cpu, selecting 1 cpu (in the affinity setting) will definately help.

[ykurashi]

What I have is an Intel pentium M processor, so the setting 1 cpu solution is out.

Whatever application was disabled in one of those many reboots seemed to have solved the WA issue, something is triggering the fan to be set to full blast, I need to determine what that is.

So what's up guys? is there an application out there that can control WA from overtaking the cpu usage completely?

[CyberShadow]

You could try an utility similar to this: http://www.cpuidle.de/

[ykurashi]

CPU Idle didn't work :( cleaned out my fan and bought fan tray to place underneath the laptop, now instead of overheating in 10 minutes it takes 20/maximum 2 rounds.

Tried to lower the priority of worms for cpu by using task manager, thatsolved the problem, but frames in game kept skipping.

[KRD]

Here's another program that does a good job throttling CPU's down. You should read the documentation carefully, because I'm not entirely sure it works on all chipsets and processors. It would make sense if it worked on the majority of laptops, though. The "Battery optimized" mode throttles my AMD Athlon64 3000+ down to 800MHz, so the fan never has to kick in.

http://www.diefer.de/speedswitchxp/

[CyberShadow]

Tried to lower the priority of worms for cpu by using task manager, thatsolved the problem

That doesn't make any sense. The Windows process priority setting allow the user how much CPU should the operating system allocate to a process compared to other processes. A process which eats 100% CPU should heat up your CPU just as fast when running on "Idle" or "Real-time" priority.