W7 Crash while playing WoW

[Rychen]

Howdy!


This isn't my machine that is having this issue but the person that I am fixing it for isn't exactly the most Savvy with technologies so I figured I'd come and ask for the pro's help to get this figured out.

From what he says, he was playing WoW the other day and was in a zone where the graphics aren't too heavy or demanding on the machine but it is one of the newest zones so it does look pretty. Well, he walked around a corner only to have his Graphics card puke all over the HDTV that he uses as his monitor. Broken, miscolored geometry falling out of what would be the normal graphics, sound froze and stuck in a loop and the colors continued to freak out. He shut it down needless to say and tried to turn it back on, from there he says that it got to W7 Loading screen and that took about 4-5 minutes to finish up which is abnormally long and then once it got to where it loads up his desktop normally the machine just shut down and would not go past that as he tried multiple times.

Now, I just put this machine together for him about 3 months ago and there shouldn't be any issues with the hardware that I am aware of. I don't currently have all of the specs on me at this moment but I will say what I know he has in there which I know the graphics card is an Nvidia 8600 GTS, Window 7 Home edition and I'll have to list more later.

Well, he brought it over to me and I booted her up in Safe Mode and uninstalled the Video Card Drivers and rebooted it, it automatically installed the drivers again in normal mode and made me reboot. Still took absolutely forever to boot up, 5-10 minutes I'd say. This fixed most of the graphics freaking out on the desktop but the computer is still hellishly slow.

Any ideas on how we can get him back up to speed because as it is now, it's ridiculous and I sort of need him up to speed so he can heal me in raids this week =P

 

[richc46]

From your description, I think that a clean boot test would be in order. Read this, if you agree, just proceed. Any questions or problems you can just post. We will be here for you.

How to troubleshoot a problem by performing a clean boot in Windows Vista or in Windows 7

 

[Rychen]

Hadn't thought of trying a clean boot! I'll give it a go after I get out of work tonight and he brings the machine over. I'll be back later tonight to post back on whether or not I've used the process of Elimination to figure out what is causing this. ^_^

 

[Rychen]

Alrighty, after getting the machine back and hooked up and struggling through the tedious process of waiting for it to load up I have successfully turned off everything but all of Microsoft's stuff which I hid as instructed to. Unfortunately, this didn't resolve anything at all =(

It is still taking forever to do anything but what's strange is, in the Task Manager it is hardly using any memory or RAM...


Any other ideas that we can try o any information from the computer you want me to get so you can assist further?

 

[Rychen]

Ok, so After playing around with everthing and letting everything load, it seems to process everything perfectly but it doesn't do it fast at all. Like it has a 3-5second delay before it actually does anything and it will lock up everything when it happens. Visually though, there is nothing wrong with that now. Like the little glow effects on the icons on the task bar that show where your hovering over the icon at don't lag at all, it's only when you give it an action to complete that it freaks out and locks up.


Hope this provides more insight on the issue.

 

[Rychen]

Long night with this machine this has been.

I've ended up taking my Geforce 9800 GTX+ out of my machine and placing it into his, installed all the proper drivers, updated everything driver wise that I can think of and for some reason, I'm still getting a lock up second or two when doing stuff.

I mean, it's definitely a noticable freeze in the system when doing stuff. Whether it be going to the next screen in IE or closing IE out to opening wow... lags out for a few seconds then continues functions.

Another thing that is still strange is that when I reboot the machine, it stills takes an abnormal amount of time to actually open windows. Something around 2-3 minutes. Once it gets to the screen that says please wait with the wnidows 7 background and then flashes the screen black and comes back with the same background and says welcome and then once that screen is complete it will show the desktop with rather quick speeds and doesn't falter too much from there other than the lag outs. I'd say that those loading and welcome screens stay up for about 1 a minute to a minute and a half each before the desktop shows.

 

[acurasd]

I think that WOW is over rated... If you dont mind, i suggest quake 3 *lol*

 

[ickymay]

it sounds like the crash may have damaged \corrupted some critical files, have you tried an sfc /scannow ?

are all of the chipset drivers intact in device manager ?

 

[Rychen]

All of the Chipset drivers appear to be intact in the DM from what I can see.

I haven't tried a /scannow as I am not really sure as to what that is. Would you mind informing me a bit more about this?

 

[Rychen]

I think that WOW is over rated... If you dont mind, i suggest quake 3 *lol*

Hehe I don't mind at all bud but it doesn't change the fact that it's the entire computer that is doing with and not just wow ^_^ If it was wow, I would be talking with their Tech support team =P

But it's not so I'm here trying to figure out what's wrong with this thing so my healer can get back in the raid lol

 

[Rychen]

Uhhh so I looked up what an SFC was and I tried to run it from the search bar but it opened then closed and that was all...?

 

[richc46]

Uhhh so I looked up what an SFC was and I tried to run it from the search bar but it opened then closed and that was all...?

Go to search type cmd

Right click on the cmd run as adminitrtor

Then type sfc /scannow in the cmd prompt

All of this from an administrators account.

 

[Rychen]

Finished with the sfc and it says that windows did not find any integrity violations. What next? Still got this lag =( In-game it's unplayable. Like it's fine walking around even with big groups of people, it's only when I go to do stuff like mount up or fight something or make an action outside of wow like on the desktop.

 

[Rychen]

When trying to do a system restore to an earlier point in time I get an error telling me that it can't perform a system restore and gives me error code 0x80071a91


=(

 

[ickymay]

what antivirus is and have been installed on this machine ?

 

[Rychen]

Just Norton from what I can see. I've ended up just reformatting the machine because I couldn't figure it out even after reading all over these forums. It seems that reformatting resolved the issue though and he is on his way to go geta new Video card as soon as the store opens =P

 

[ickymay]

Just Norton from what I can see. I've ended up just reformatting the machine because I couldn't figure it out even after reading all over these forums. It seems that reformatting resolved the issue though and he is on his way to go geta new Video card as soon as the store opens =P

glad to hear you have it solved

considering how fast you can install windows 7 it's not such a bad option in many cases