MC82 said:
I have the World at War Collection (EF2 Gold, RS Gold, WF Gold), and when running them on WinXP (on an Athlon 64 3500, 1GB Ram, ATI Radeon x800 256mb vid card, Soundblaster Gamer), the games like to work for about 10-15minutes, then either the sound starts looping and the game freezes, or the game just freezes out of nowhere. If I get lucky I can alt-tab out, open the task manager, end the game, and then cannot get it to start again until restarting the computer. If unlucky, it freezes the pc entirely and I have to pull out the power cord to fix it. No idea what to try here, but it should show how much I love these old games that I keep trying to play them regardless!
Hi MC,
The sound loop problem has been discussed before and is inherent in the game. The consensus was Microsoft's Direct X upgrades after Talonsoft stopped patching the game. Someone (I don't recall who) experimented with rolling back their version of Direct X and it seemed to resolve their problem. I've never heard of it causing any other problems other than sound looping though.
As for the game freezes, first make sure you have the current patches installed. Jason Petho has tons of instructions regarding this all over the forum. Second, consider uninstalling and reinstalling the game, in case of a corruption of some kind. Third, make sure your graphic card driver is current (if it is, consider rolling back to an earlier driver as an experiment, sometimes it helps). Same for your sound card driver.
It's really hard to diagnose this stuff, but reread all the suggestions in this post and try some out. I know the game works on XP systems and doubt it has anything to do with the Athlon chip, although...(I just thought of this) computer freezes can also be caused by overheating. Open the case and vacuum out the inside, making sure all the vents are unblocked. Make sure all the fans are running. Did you purchase the computer or build it yourself? If you bought it from a reputable manufacturer, nevermind, if you built it consider a better heat sink. If your computer freezes ONLY when playing the game, then I doubt this is the case.
Any other problems with devices, especially USB? If you have a ton of USB devices connected and turned on, try turning them off when you play, like printers, scanners.
Any errors (check the event log)? Any other computer problems you've been having that you haven't mentioned 'cause you didn't think it related? Check for spyware? Viruses? Do you have any kind of system mechanic installed? Something that can check for registry errors? (There are free ones out there that you can try). How full is your harddrive? Did your computer come with the 1 gig RAM, or did you upgrade yourself. If so, double check you got the right kind of RAM and that it's seated correctly [long shot]. also, it's possible you have a bad RAM chip. There are free testers out there. Go on google and do a search.
This is a good place to start when troubleshooting:
http://www.pcpitstop.com/
Hope something in here helps.
Good luck,
Dave