why does my game keep crashing?

[onxyian]

let me first tell you what im using, so i may disuade any thoughts you may have about my system not being enough...

800w powersupply
AMD athlon 64X2 5600+ (2.8ghz dual core)
8gb Kingston Hyper X PC6400
sound blaster Xfi xtreme Fatal1ty professional
Asus EAH5850 TOP Direct CU HD 1gb GDDr5 video card
gigabit 1gb ethernet adaptor
Western digital "caviar" hard drive 300gb SATA1.0gbps
Roadrunner Xtreme service (generally 20+ mbps upload and 4+mbps download)
windows 7 ultimate

and randomly when i zone into things, airships, slayer areas and instances... the dnd client will crash. Of course it appears to be a lockup, and i have to alt tab to see the windows error message.

ive googled my brains out and there seems to be no "real" awnser to fix this.

please help? I came here from wow and was very impressed with the game except for this...

[Meetch1972]

Some people have crashing issues, others do not. Personally, the only issues I've had since U7 rolled have been 1 or 2 graphics driver lockups. Before that I had crashes on entering an instance on occasion - the main culprit was the sands.

What's changed since then:
- Went from XP (32bit) to Win7 Home (64bit)
- Added 4G to my already existing 2G
- New (fast) SSD for OS and (slowish) HDD for the rest.

... and that's about it. I have everything cranked up to max, and the OP system specs are better than mine!

So I think some things are in order for checking. These come to mind:
- Thrash your RAM with one of those testing tools. If they find something, junk the stick and try again. Also try underclocking your RAM a bit if you feel like it.
- Check the vendor site for your mainboard, to see if there are any firmware updates relating to stability issues or such. I once hit a firmware problem that prevented Win XP SP2 from booting with the exact CPU that was installed (blue screen every time even after a fresh install). There were NO issues in XP SP1. A firmware update fixed that issue.
- Upgrade graphics drivers, if there are bug fixes noted for it.
- Check the SMART status / predictive failure of your hard drive(s).
- Maybe shrink your swap size, or turn off swapping to your hard drive altogether.
- Move to a low population server and see if it behaves during off-peak times.

Issues have also been linked to memory leaks when switching between toons - if you need to do that more than a couple of times, restarting the client helps in those cases.

Hopefully something here might help, or some other piece of advice appears which will do the trick. Either way, I wish you the best of luck in resolving the issue.

[Antheal]

I've only had problems since the last update.

Every dozen-or-so zone changes, DDO will simply crash on zoning into an area (be it wilderness or tavern) and require a restart.

[Meetch1972]

Something else comes to mind... defrag. It's an old technique, but could still have the desired effect. If you have carved up your hard drive into partitions, drag the DDO folder off wherever it's installed to another partition, defrag the partition it came from and drag it back...

It might also be nice if there were a checksum tool we could use to validate the software is the version it's supposed to be (looks like it's built into the client start, but would be nice to have a manual check).

[onxyian]

ive done all that you have mentioned.

i'd like to note this is still happening and it also happens randomly when speaking to an NPC.

[Delt]

Check your dndclient.log (in the DDO Unlimited folder) after a crash. If it reads something like "Not enough virtual memory or paging file quota is available to complete the specified operation" -- congrats, this in an error that hits a lot of people. It's a shame more people don't complain...instead they get in the habit of simply restarting the client every once and a while. Maybe if more complained, Turbine would finally address it.

The only thing I have heard of that has helped some people is reinstalling with the standard res version of DDO (I haven't bothered to test this myself).

The NPC crash is kind of odd, so it may be your crash is due to a different reason. Again, checking the log file will help clarify.

[Missing_Minds]

ive done all that you have mentioned.

i'd like to note this is still happening and it also happens randomly when speaking to an NPC.

crashin when speaking to an NPC... you know what was causing that for me? A dying video card that was also over heating.

[Meetch1972]

crashin when speaking to an NPC... you know what was causing that for me? A dying video card that was also over heating.

... or an overheating video card that can be revived by applying fresh thermal compound. I did mine around a year ago and it lowered the temp over 10 degrees C compared to just having all the dust blown out. It's been stable since.

Cranking down the graphics settings is one way to test this...

[Corus]

I was having same problem, frequent crashes when changing to new maps - Searing Heights, out into Sands from the town, out into GH from the camp.

I switched graphics option from DX10 down to DX9 and those crashes have pretty much completely stopped.

I still do get a random crash here and there, maybe entering a quest, but it's like once a week now rather than several times a day like it was.

Hope that helps you.