Blue screen of death with EB 1.2

i'm having major problems trying to get EB 1.2 to work. In EB I get random crashes (blue screen of death followed by a restart) when I play custom battle, campaign and multiplayer. I've been playing this game since it was released and followed EB after the stall of the total realism mod. This has me stumped :help:

Iv'e had EB run no problem before so i'm asking you peeps to help me diagnose / narrow down any problems. I'm currently looking at a major battle play off onscreen with vanilla rome - its very ugly :laugh4: but all is running smoothly.

here is my current system: yes pretty crappy by todays standards but...

1. Xp home SP2
2. althon 3200+
3. 1gb ram
4. WD 250gb Raid
5. Lan Party ultra B2 mobo
6. radeon 9600 with 9.2 cat driver (latest)
7. pretty new DVD & CD drives
8. nvidia onboard sound

• XP - totally clean install.
• All i have installed are the drivers for the machine plus 7zip, fox reader etc
• I installed Direct X 9c again just to be sure, after graphics driver.
• I installed RTW on a seperate logical drive and copied that folder, renamed it 'EB' and installed EB into that. The trivial script is installed in its separate folder on the same drive.

I installed the latest java runtime so i could validate the install with the tool provided.. that just says various jar files are missing so do not know where to go with that at the moment.

previous to reinstalling Xp i tried installing the video drivers that came with the graphics card but that produced the same results.

I'm really eager to get playing this again - properly.... with EB and not vanilla, any ideas how i should proceed?

just though i would mention about the crashes.... it seems pretty random, i can play a couple of multiplayer/ single P games before a crash, 2-10 moves in campaign before a crash.

I dont have other games loaded and currently dont play other games other than this so i dont know how other games would play.

Try an older video driver. Also, the Windows event log may have some information about what crashed.

As, i said, i tried an old video driver and that didnt work. the card is roughly 4 years old or something and the video drivers i tried with it include the ones shipped with the card, the default XP SP2 ones that load by default and the latest drivers from AMD.

Also, if it works with vanilla RTW and not EB then surley it rules out a video card problem?

windows log is just nonesense hex etc - that machine isnt on the internet so i cant send it off to microsoft.

I had a similiar problem at some point in the past with my old laptop (512mb RAM :tongue:) and all I had to do is raise the virtual memory. Don't actually remember how to :sweatdrop:

Maion

EB taxes your system a lot more than vanilla does, so the vanilla test doesn't cut it I'm afraid. As you've experimented with various video drivers, have you also checked your memory? That's a common cause of random crashes. Run Memtest overnight to verify that your chips are fine (google it).

BTW, what Maion said about increasing virtual memory might help too; RTW leaks memory and the problem will happen sooner when you don't have enough of this. Go to the control panel => system => advanced => performance ("Settings") => Advanced => Virtual Memory ("Change"), and increase the size.

right.... thanks for that, i hadnt considered it but i think i set my memory to 'turbo' in the bios. Thats basically overclocking it. this was done not too long ago so that could be the culprit! I'll google memtest and check it out tonight. cheers.

upped the page file to highest limit - no change to BSOD

ok.... from your advice I did the following checks...

Memtest+ overnight completes 17 cycles error free. The ram timings i left on overdrive 'turbo' setting in the bios: simular to manually tweeking the timings.

Did a burn in test with Sandra - only errors that came up pertained to the CD roms/Floppy that it was trying to read/write to. Some had no disks in so I recieved an error message saying so. The Radeon card got the error: "Required display format not available. Try updating the video drivers".. Memory again passed this burn in on Sandra.

Checked My Raid Array which is about 250gb on raid1 (not stripped but mirrored) over 3 disks. A-OK

Checked temps of PC in general using sandra over load playing EB. All pretty rock solid and nothing over 55 degees C. At idle the Radeon was around 33 degees C. All voltages were rock solid with slight rises in areas when playing EB.

Any ideas where to go from here....?

Did you try increasing the virtual memory?

yes, as i put in an erlier post, i upped the page file limit to the highest it could go... made no difference.

Sorry, missed that post. Then I'm afraid I cannot help you anymore, for I've run out of suggestions.

Edit: Wait a minute. Have you tried to run on tiny unit size? I know, not very sexy battles then, but it's a good test for whether it's the amount of stuff happening that's choking your computer.