Something that's never happened before...

[moed]

Last night I was playing BC on an older PC of mine that I'm giving to my son as his primary computer. I've had this system for a few years and it's always been awesome with no problems. I've very recently upgraded the processor and RAM to give it the max amount of horsepower and have used it 3 times to play BC on it before last night and it was great. Last night was the 4th time I fired it up to check it out/play some BC and basically finalize it before I pass it on to my son.

As I was playing, it suddenly completely froze where the only thing I could do was a force shutdown with the power button and then when it came back up there were no errors generated whatsoever and was as if nothing had ever happened. I ran extensive benchmark tests and checked the temperatures of the CPU, Video Card, Motherboard and all other components in the system and all temps were totally fine. I recreated the same conditions of exactly when the system crashed as I was playing a couple of QB battles. The first QB battle I played went perfectly, but the second crashed again and froze the system in the same way. I did a restart and once again, everything was normal as if nothing had happened. I ran some more tests and distinctly noticed that the system only froze when I played BC.

When my system ran perfectly before I did the upgrades, I only had 2GB or RAM. After the upgrades, I put in a total of 4GB of RAM and that's the max amount that the system can take. I remember reading some past thread that talked about a "memory leak" that BC has and a link to a 4GB patch that supposedly fixes some issues with BC's memory leak. I managed to download that 4GB patch but have been too busy with real life to run it and see if it fixes the problem... hopefully it will.

I'm curious if anyone else has ever encountered this type of problem before and if anyone has used that 4GB patch - and if they have had success with it. Bear in mind that I have been playing/modifying BC for a long time and have encountered and fixed many problems so I'm not a newbie by no means. Also, I have many years of IT experience and was a previous IT manager so as far at the technical side of things go, I definitely "know what I'm doing". I have this underlying fear that the 4GB patch will do nothing and it's most likely some kind of hardware problem... if that's the case then tracking down what it could be is a real trial-and-error pain in the a$$ so that's why I started this thread to start getting some feedback on possible past similar situations.

Here are the upgraded system specs:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400+
4GB RAM
Nvidia GTX460 Video Card
Win XP SP3

Thanks in advance!     

[KrrKs]

I've never had BC completely freeze my system (without the reason being my own faulty mod  :roll),
and you could recreate that? -What was happening at that time?

About that 4GB-patch, AFAIK it fixes some of those stack overflows which cause CTDs after a time, so I don't think it will help you much.

[AllotoniFan]

No. Never had BC freezing my PC. The only time my PC did freeze was when i was playing Skyrim, but that was the GPU driver that had a "hiccup". Maybe your problem is fairly similar?

[moed]

I think I might know what the problem is. I haven't had the opportunity to test out my theory as I'm busy with real life right now but will try to get to it this next weekend.

Thanks for the responses so far!