Looking for a(nother) solution...

from Sins Forums

My apologies for bringing yet another crash-related thread into existence.  I did my research and scearched this forum top to bottom, electron by electron, byte by byte. But none of the solutions to similar problems helped me.

Here is the problem: Entrenchment is crashing approx 1 hour into a game to everyone's favorite Blue Screen, followed by a restart of the computer.  Vista than indicates that there was problem with my graphics driver and offers to check for solutions online. At this point I doubt that is the entire story. It is interesting to note Vanilla Sins runs fine, its just the Entrenchment expansion that does not.

Here are the solutions I have found on the forums, and tried to no luck so far.

1) Updating Graphics Driver - No luck

2) Rolling Back Graphics Driver - No luck

3) Use Particular Driver editions - Found two different NVidia Drivers claimed to work with Sins/Entrenchment here on the forums, neither solved the problem

4) Downloaded Microsoft Patch from http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=940105 - Already had it installed apparently

5) Disable Bloom Effects - Never had them turned on (play vanilla sins with it turned off; did double check it was off however)

6) Lowered Other Graphic Settings - tried it, still no luck

7) Attempted various combinations of above - nope

8) Tried all above solutions a second time - still no, but yay for the scientific method.

My Machine is as follows: Dell XPS 410, Intel Dual Core-6600 @ 2.4 GHz, 2 GB RAM, NVidia 7900 GS (currently with driver 7.15.11.6371 installed), and Windows Vista 32-bit. (Windows Experience Base score is 5.3, processor being the limiting factor)

I have a hunch that a new graphics card might be the solution (mine does only have 256mb of memory), but would like some second opinions or perhaps a fresh idea.

technical
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Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top

Two more things (yes I'm the first to reply to my own post - I'm used to talking to myself)

I did reinstall (from Impluse) both Sins and Entrenchment. You can add that to the above list.

Additionally I just located some more threads concerning similar strange behavior including: lagging, slow frame rate, freezing, minidumps, and other misc problems.  Those threads established that it is the NVidia 7x serives graphics cards in combination with Vista as a commonality between 90% of people reporting issues, myself included.

NVidia claims thier latest drivers fix the problems. HAH! Pardon the editorial laugh. I think the problem is a team failure;, with Vista, the drivers, the graphics card, and the game all playing a role. A chain is only as good as it's weakest link.

I read that people are having great luck with NVidia 8x series. So I think I will invest in a new graphics card, I been looking for an excuse to do this anyway.

Other ideas are still welcome, if nothing else they might provide solutions to others having problems similar to this.