OK, my problem seems a bit different than the huge thread about crashes, though mine does result in a crash at times.
My specs are: AMD Athlon XP 2400+, 1024M samsung RAM, eVGA GF4 ti4200 8X w/128M, onboard sound and networking, 400W PSU all held together by an ABIT KD7 mobo (VIA kt400 chipset).
I’ve been gaming with this rig since I threw it together about 10 months ago and all has been great. Recently I bought Call of Duty and after struggling to install it (seems the problem was my old dvd-rom drive) it worked like a champ. I was running at high res with a lot of the bells and whistles cranked up with no problem. Now all of a sudden I’m having problems.
First, I notice when I quit CS or CoD my pc will start to respond, then hang for 10-20s, then start responding again. This would sometimes happen only twice, and sometimes it would repeat itself over and over till I rebooted.
Then, I notice little green dots appearing on my desktop background image every so often. They change postitions every so often when I move windows around and stuff. I also notice some dots (tho they arent always green) when playing CS. Every so often the pixels just seem to be the wrong color. I have a picture of the desktop here: pic . (One interesting thing to notice is in the screenshot the green dots are all over my putty window too… when looking at my screen I didnt see green dots on my putty window)
Well, I started digging around in the BIOS and on my gfx manufacturer’s website (which is fairly useless) and I decide that turning on AGP fastwrites in the BIOS can’t hurt. I do that, and lo and behold, the green dots on my desktop disappear for good (so far), and my pc doesnt hang when using windows after I play.
Now, however, CoD barely works at all. When I play in anything other than safe mode (CoD safe mode is 640x480 with all the options turned down and everything) I can play for about 30s before it hopelessly hangs and sometimes kicks me out to desktop with the gamma all screwed up. I have gotten an error message sometimes, but its a very generic “CoDMP.exe has generated errors and must be restarted” or whatever. Before it crashes I get very strange graphical happenings, like big areas of the screen get covered in strange colors as though someone grabbed, for example, a lightpost from the game and painted a big line with it. If I run around a bit they usually go away, but then another will appear someplace else. In safe mode I saw much fewer of these, but I would still hang for 30-40s every now and again… the background sound would keep playing but I was frozen in place and couldnt hear gunshots or anything like that. I played for about 2 hours last night and it crashed on me 2-3 times but most of the time it would begin to work again.
I’ve no idea what to try next. I’ve changed all the other settings in my BIOS to what my gfx card manual recommends, reinstalled the VIA Hyperion 4in1 drivers, installed the latest detonators, reinstalled CoD, all to no avail. Anyone seen anything like this?