railroads system crashes my comp

sandman · Post by **sandman** » Mon Nov 13, 2006 11:19 pm

i have some major issues with this game, its completly impossible for me to even enjoy this game since it randomly crashes the computer at random intervals. patch 1.01 did nothing to fix this. sometimes i can run the game for several hours without any issues and sometimes it just takes 15m of gameplay to crash the computer.

whats happening in the game is that screen completly freezes on me and after a couple of seconds the sound just starts to repeat the last sound over and over, so the sound is like "RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR" over and over. and after about 1-2m the graphics card looses the signal so the monitor intitates the sleep function. when theres no signal going to the monitor. and in the end i have to hold down the power button to power down the machine. 1 time the computer actually didnt do a complete crash so i got to se what the hell was happening, and what was reported in the logbook is that graphics driver wpfb_nv4_disp has stopped responding and the only way to restore the functionality of this driver was to restart the computer.

my computer specs are as follows
P4 - 3.2 GHz HT
1GB RAM - Dual Channel
Geforce 7800 GS, 256MB RAM with 93.71 drivers
40GB,2x250GB disc drives (game install drive is an 250GB harddrive with 80 GB free disc space)
Creative Sound Blaster Live! Value

i also tried the thing with limiting the game to only 1 cpu since my processor is a HT one.

whats wrong with this game?

rsuttles58 · Post by **rsuttles58** » Tue Nov 14, 2006 12:33 am

hey Sandman. I have a very similar system as yours and I am having the exact same problem. I called the 2k games support line and told him I have the patch and everything else and he told me the only thing that he could think of was to return it and get a different copy.

sandman · Post by **sandman** » Tue Nov 14, 2006 4:57 pm

lol, what kinda an answer was that from their part. get another copy, what good will that do since all copies are identical to each other.

well im getting a new hardware for my computer in a couple of days, im hoping that this problem goes away and that game crashed just because my specific hardware.

Bleser · Post by **Bleser** » Tue Nov 14, 2006 6:01 pm

I also have the 7800 GS AGP card, not sure of what version of drivers I am using (I'm not at home), but I haven't had this game crash on me ONCE, patched or pre-patched, and I've played for up to four hours at a time.

I know this doesn't help you, but it might give you some hope. I can look up my driver version and maybe you could try that. I have a P4 3.0 GHz HT and have not disabled the second virtual processor (since I don't have any issues).

How old is your Windows installation? Have you had a different video card (ATI maybe?) installed prior to the 7800 GS? If it is frustrating you that much then I would back up and re-install Windows and go from there.

sandman · Post by **sandman** » Tue Nov 14, 2006 6:09 pm

my windows installation is pretty new actually, did an reinstall in the middle of june and ive never owned an ATI card, nVidia all the way

Bleser · Post by **Bleser** » Tue Nov 14, 2006 10:34 pm

I'm using ForceWare 91.47 with my 7800GS. Give those a whirl maybe?

Also, are you overclocking your video card or processor? Even if you bought a "pre-overclocked" video card you might try running it at its reference speeds for a while and see if the problems go away... could be a heat-related issue.

sandman · Post by **sandman** » Wed Nov 15, 2006 11:25 am

no overclocked CPU or GPU, and the GPU isnt pre-overclocked either
if its an heat issue then why doesnt any of my other games react in the same way as railroads does? i have no issues with other games.

my CPU heat is around 45 celsius and my GPU is at 48 celsius when ever theres any load on the system.

custardo · Post by **custardo** » Wed Nov 15, 2006 12:21 pm

I'm using a 7800GS AGP too, with Forceware 84.21. So far no stability problems with the game (either before or after the patch). However, this is my second 7800.. The first one caused certain games to crash regularly, and it ran much hotter than this one. When it crashed, my monitor typically came up with the "no signal" message, and if i rebooted quickly enough. the PC actually booted without a display signal at all.

Aramus · Post by **Aramus** » Thu Nov 16, 2006 9:13 am

Had similar stuttering music and computer lockups (with a 7800 GT). Updating the nVidia drivers for the video card allowed me to play a (long) evening without any problems! YAY! the game is actually fun! ;O)

Also switched to playing in windowed mode. helps with the alt-tabbing...

d53642 · Post by **d53642** » Thu Nov 16, 2006 9:46 am

Also if you can make sure your fans are running okay on the card. Both of my 6600 NVIDIA cards the glue that held the fans in place let go and my brother in law had the same card but released with a newer looking fan half the time the fan never spun on it. I switched to water cooling and gave him some nice OC fans I purchased and he isn't having problems anymore.

sandman · Post by **sandman** » Thu Nov 16, 2006 11:33 am

my issue has resolved itself after my hardware upgrade. got myself a new Soundblaster X-Fi card

i still get these "freezes" ppl are talking about on this forum, but now after around 5-10s everything returns to normal. with my old soundcard my computer system crashed, just like i described. im guessing it has something todo with the sound drivers, since the "newest" sound driver from creative is over 3 years old(guessing they stopped developing better drivers for the Live! series)

Bleser · Post by **Bleser** » Thu Nov 16, 2006 1:08 pm

sandman wrote:my issue has resolved itself after my hardware upgrade. got myself a new Soundblaster X-Fi card i still get these "freezes" ppl are talking about on this forum, but now after around 5-10s everything returns to normal. with my old soundcard my computer system crashed, just like i described. im guessing it has something todo with the sound drivers, since the "newest" sound driver from creative is over 3 years old(guessing they stopped developing better drivers for the Live! series)

Glad to hear you got it taken care of. We were all so focused on the video card being the issue and we were barking up the wrong tree.

sandman · Post by **sandman** » Thu Nov 16, 2006 3:07 pm

so did i

, i was about 80% certain it was my graphics card that did the system crashes, but i had a small suspicion that i might be the soundcard.

brst · Post by **brst** » Fri Dec 22, 2006 9:02 am

Hi everyone...

I have bought the game 1 week ago, and still have not played for 10 minutes without a system freeze. I use a 15.4" Toshiba Qosmio laptop with 1,7 GHz mobile pentium processor, 1 GB RAM, Geforce Go 6600 graphics card, 60 GB HDD, up to date Windows XP Home SP 2. After about 5-10 mins of game play in North Eastern scenario, the computer just freezes, responding only to a hard reset. I have installed both of the 1.01 and 1.1 patches, and nothing seems to change. It is really annoying to experience such a problem, because I can't think of any decent solutions. Has somebody got any idea about what the origin of the problem might be?

Bleser · Post by **Bleser** » Fri Dec 22, 2006 1:55 pm

brst wrote:Hi everyone...

I have bought the game 1 week ago, and still have not played for 10 minutes without a system freeze. I use a 15.4" Toshiba Qosmio laptop with 1,7 GHz mobile Pentium processor, 1 GB RAM, Geforce Go 6600 graphics card, 60 GB HDD, up to date Windows XP Home SP 2. After about 5-10 mins of game play in North Eastern scenario, the computer just freezes, responding only to a hard reset. I have installed both of the 1.01 and 1.1 patches, and nothing seems to change. It is really annoying to experience such a problem, because I can't think of any decent solutions. Has somebody got any idea about what the origin of the problem might be?

I'm sorry you're having trouble. I'm one of the lucky few who has actually never experienced a lock-up in this game.

I would simply suggest going to nVidia's Web site and installing the latest video drivers. Also be sure the rest of your drivers are up to date. If that doesn't help, maybe do a clean install of your OS.

Pretty generic suggestions, but that's all I can think of. I think one member on here said that turning logging on in the settings file reduced his crash frequency greatly. Doesn't make sense... but who knows.