PCA Forums

I have a friends computer here and trying to solve what would seem some video/diver problems.

He cant play Medal of honor at all.. Go through the screens and as soon as you pick a difficuty level a hard freeze. (you can see your last click of doom. You get a nice hard snap shot of that pointer & screen)
Max Payne: Runs great til you exit and get a freeze in a black window.

In both cases its reset time.. Its a nasty freeze. As for other games such as Alice No problems.

Whish I could tell more bout the system but what I can tell is its a later model Dell, 1.6 G 256. GF2 mx 400. and running windows ME
I did some directx test and was clean (8.1) Seems to be current there.

I'm downloading the latesr xp detonatoer driver as I type. It's hooked up to the phone cord right now in the other room and should be done soon and i'll post back.

The thing is I have finished both the above mentioned games no prob on an AMD 600 GF2mx400 that I sold a while back.. This guy spent some serious coin and wanted a gaming machine..could ME be the problem? I would hope not.

Any hints would be great

Latest drivers no change...

Fist off make sure both games are updated to the latest version. Both (especially Max payne) had lockup issues.

Does he have Quake3 on that box? If so, I'd run that a while and see if it locks up. If it does then it's probably a hardware issue. If it doesn't then it's likely just a problem with those two games.

While I'm no big fan of ME, it's okay and should not be the problem.

Has he, by chance, installed any cards or moved them around? I can think of several reasons this can happen and most of them are related to IRQ problems, but this system shouldn't have any new out of the box.

- This computer came with this vid card I assume? If this vid card is an add-on and the box has an on-board vid card, you need to either disable it in BIOS or disable it in the Windows Device manager. DO NOT uninstall the driver for the on-board vid card otherwise Windows will assign it's resources to other devices and cause a conflict.

- I'd pull all his cards except the vid card and see if that helps. Don't use Max Payne as the test - Max is prone to locking up. Mohaa or Q3 updated to the latest version should be rock solid.

- Make sure you have the latest sound drivers installed.

- Take the cover off and make sure it's not overheating.

- If he's overclocking the vid card, don't, and see if it helps.

- If he just installed this card, make sure to remove any utilities for the old video card.

- The Geforce does NOT like to share an IRQ with other devices - make sure it's the only card using it's IRQ. If you can't change the IRQ for the conflicting card in Device Manager, then you must move the card to another slot.

- You may have background app running causing problems. I like to run a very clean system when play - I want NOTHING running in the background. Don't run anything in the background: Virus Scanners, disk utils, reminder programs, taskbar shortcuts for Real Player, AOL Instant Messenger, etc). If you have Win98 run MSCONFIG.EXE click on the Startup tab. Uncheck anything you don't need running - Windows ONLY requires System Tray, Task Monitor and Power Profile to run properly (and you can lose Power Profile if your computer doesn't use sleep mode). Uncheck everything else unless it's required by something. Run Adaware and lose any spyware apps.

Hope this helps...

Hey thanks a ton FP!!

I did the above and found no serious hardware issues.. The machine seems to run fine in any other games. Even loaded up GTA3 for a torture test and it ran suprisingly well for a GF2.. (i'll be dipped in shit and hung to dry) It hiccups a bunch but ran OK.

A breakthough on MOHAA!! After reading some FAQS I found out to get the game running' you must disable dialup.. You must go to setting/controlpanel/internet options/conections tab/ and set to never dial..and the bastage loads and runs fine! Ive reapeated the test and works. Why the hell would IT want to dial up any way in single player game? The bad part is I can't dial with it set that way and must return setting to "always dial OR connect if no connection presant thus disabling the game (MOH)

I can't find a happy meduim on the short time I've spent with this "thing" (not impressed with ME either)

As for maxpayne still freezes on exit window even after the patch. Hes not wooried about that though.. MOH must Run!!






The guy is going pickup the computer in few hours from now. If anyone has any magical words or pathches to make it NOT dail to "whatever" that would be great.

I found out to get the game running' you must disable dialup..

It does that because it uses an old version of the Q3 engine. If you remember, Q3A had the same problem until the first major update.

Sounds like he doesn't have the latest update for MOHAA installed - I'm fairly certain they fixed that. However, if he's playing the solo game he won't want to update because the saved games won't work.


If I remember I had a similar problem with Max Payne until I fiddled with the visual settings. Vaguely remember something like it'll crash if you don't set the game's color depth the same as the desktop.

Do a search on google for Max Payne Troubleshooting and I'm sure you'll find some useful info.