Okay, Bismark, maybe you can help figure this out.Follow

Here's the deal: My old mobo went out on my computer. It was replaced. Windows had to be reloaded, along with FFXI and everything else. However, my computer has suddenly become gimp: even in lo-res mode, if I play FFXI for more than about a minute or two it locks up or restarts automatically. As you can imagine this is frustrating beyond words; I've reinstalled the graphics drivers to see if that will help, and I'm gonna test that out shortly.

Any ideas as to what could cause this? I'm beginning to think that Baron Samedi may have something to do with it.

What's the temp of your GPU core and is the GPU fan still running? Whatever caused your mobo to die could have damaged the GPU fan. That would be consistent with the PC running fine in 2D (Windows apps) but when you go to run FFXI in 3D (even low-res) it would cause the GPU load to go up and the core temp to skyrocket if not otherwise mitigated.

Newer drivers could have made it run a bit cooler.

Can you open the case and see if the fan is still spinning? Even if it is, it may be damaged/defective/impeded so that it's putting out a low RPM. If the air above the GPU feels really hot or if the heatsink (if metal) is hurt enough that it burns your finger when you touch it (don't worry...it won't even be a first-degree burn) then I'd be concerned about the HSF.

I'd run the PC minimally just to be safe. If it's a overheating issue, everytime you run it to the point that the PC shuts down is like rolling the dice for permanent damage.

Test the ram. You may have bad clusters in it. Each time a bad ram cluster is accessed whatever process (application) accesses it usually locks up and dies and the PC usually blue screens and dies. Does your PC BSOD or display any other errors upon shutdown? IF so could you provide those errors here?

Also you may wish to check your event log for any starnge errors. When a process dies it usually dumps an error there. What you wanna do is is your computer crashes take note of the time then navigate to Start>>Control Panel(or Settings depending on which version of windows your running)>>Administrative Tools(You may have to switch the view back to classic control panel view if our running a home version of Windows)>>Event Viewer

In the event viewer check the application and the System binders for events that occured right before your computer locked up. Your computer usually drops a blue screen hexadecimal error code and an event ID code with a description in the event log. Both the hexadecimal code and the Event ID from the event log entry can usually be Googled to at least give you a rough idea of what your dealing with, and usually several solution paths to correct your issue.

The only other suggestions I have is to check your video card, sound card,a nd mother boards websites and see if they have any know compatability issues wuith each other and get the latest firmware updates.

Also check to make sure that your CPU is firmly seated in the motherboard and that its heatsink/fan is correctly attatched, and that both your RAM, and your Grapics card are firmly seated in the board, because it may be a contact issue with the pins in any of those devices.

Hope you get your issue resolved. If you can provide an error code or event ID I can probably help you get your issue fixed. So if you can come up with one and Google doesnt yield the solution post it here and ill chekc my references for you.

Later,

Gob

Gob, is this what you're looking for?

Error code 100000d1, parameter1 eb5b40f7, parameter2 000000ff, parameter3 00000000, parameter4 eb5b40f7.

Event ID is 1003

It finally crashed once I was chatting with you in-game (a tad ironic, lol), and it spat that out after it restarted.

Edited, Sun Dec 4 17:14:39 2005 by rayado

Can't believe I forgot this in the thread, but here is the system info that POL itself generated for the hardware on my system.

Edited, Sun Dec 4 17:26:48 2005 by rayado

Even further edit: guess it would help if the image was actually readable. lol

Edited, Sun Dec 4 17:27:45 2005 by rayado

I ran the DirectX diagnostics, and they didn't find anything wrong, and it didnt' crash my computer. I'm still leaning towards something overheating.

Also while reading about the error message on Windows' site, it mentioned how to turn off the Auto-shutdown when a system error takes place, but I'm really afraid that this would cause instant and irrepairable damage to my system.

Edited, Mon Dec 5 01:41:20 2005 by rayado

yeah thats what im looking for, but not all of it. I need the source of the error as well. IE. You research and eventlog error with the source and ID (My fault. I Should have asked or it in the initial post) example/ Source:Dcom ID:100003

Anyways im going ot get some breakfast. There is an Egg MCmuffin with gobs name on it.

Well, I got a new error tonight after about 1 1/2 hours of uninterrupted playtime: the ipnat.sys driver was blamed for crashing windows with a stop 0x8E error.

My problem: what the heck does this driver manage, and how the heck do I turn it off?

I supposed I should have asked this before, but have you scanned your PC for viruses/trojans/adware? My preferred apps are Norton Antivirus (I have 2005, but 2006 is out) and Ad-Aware (free download). It looks like ipnat.sys is sometimes replaced with malware for exploitation purposes.

You could also run System File Checker (built into Windows) to see if that's the original.