Guild Wars 2

Not sure what the issue is. Played in the betas fine. Been playing fine since release (with an occasional crash) until a couple days ago (most settings on medium). Now after logging in a character I can maybe play 5 minutes before the game freezes and I’m forced to hard reset. I’ve tried turning all the ingame settings to low (best performance). Still had another crash so I’m writing this.

Wasn’t sure if it was the game or some other computer issue. But in the past few days I’ve had to do a clean wipe of my system to factory settings because I couldn’t get windows to start up (might have messed up a driver update in an attempt to fix this issue). Start Up Repair wasn’t fixing anything.

Anyway, after this I was hoping the Guild Wars 2 crashing would have solved itself but it hasn’t. Reinstalled all the windows 7 updates, updated my graphics card driver. All ingame settings for “Best Performance.”

Is it recommended to update other drivers as well?
If I visit the Dell site and enter my service tag it has certain drivers available to download for “Dell Application,” “Dell-BIOS,” and some others. Other than updating my graphics drivers, I’m not familiar with updating these other drivers, and don’t want to unless I have to in fear of messing my computer up again.

Will keep trying and update with any revelations.

Ok, the very first thing we need to do, is make sure you have all the drivers for your machine installed. Go to device manager and check to see that you have no yellow exclamation marks – Start -> Run -> Type devmgmt.msc and open.

Go to the Dell support website (http://support.dell.com) and enter your Service Tag, or choose your model. Download and install drivers in this order – Bios (Only update if there is a newer version on running), Chipset, Audio, Ethernet, Wireless, Graphics. I say do it in this order, because we have seen issues in my shop with some Dell’s if we don’t do it in this order.

Be sure to do a reboot after each driver installation – especially Bios (should automatically anyways), Chipset and Audio. Let me know if this makes a difference.

HCProfessionals.3601:

Ok, the very first thing we need to do, is make sure you have all the drivers for your machine installed. Go to device manager and check to see that you have no yellow exclamation marks – Start -> Run -> Type devmgmt.msc and open.

Go to the Dell support website (http://support.dell.com) and enter your Service Tag, or choose your model. Download and install drivers in this order – Bios (Only update if there is a newer version on running), Chipset, Audio, Ethernet, Wireless, Graphics. I say do it in this order, because we have seen issues in my shop with some Dell’s if we don’t do it in this order.

Be sure to do a reboot after each driver installation – especially Bios (should automatically anyways), Chipset and Audio. Let me know if this makes a difference.

Ok, did the first part. No yellow exclamations.

Went to the Dell site, entered my service tag. Now the thing I can’t figure out is what version of things I’m running.

It shows that this;
Dell-BIOS
Recommended
12/27/2009
A03
Previous Versions
Applies to:
Studio XPS 8000 BIOS

Is available, but how do I find out what version I’m running now?

Edit: Went ahead with the BIOS update, when installing it tells you what version you are currently running compared to what you’re installing. Anyway, continuing with the rest of them.

2nd Edit: So updated BIOS, Chipset, and Audio through the Dell site. Been playing about 1 1/2 hours on all low settings without any problems yet. fingers crossed

Will gradually turn up some settings eventually. Just glad I’m able to play again.

Thank You !

Well having a new issue. Not sure if I should post here or start a new thread.

After doing the above, things were fine for a day or two.

Not sure what it was but now I can maybe play 5 minutes and it will BSOD or the computer will just shut down and restart itself.

I’ve noticed that after such a crash my windows start up info (I have it so it shows what drivers it’s loading on start up etc) shows me as only have half my RAM.

When I check Resource Monitor it will show half my RAM being hardware reserved. After another restart it will go back to normal.

The only thing that changed from when it was working to not was a few windows updates. After the issue appeared, I rolled back (not sure the term at the moment) to before the updates were applied. But the issue didn’t go away.

Guess this is like my own personal diary of discovery.

For anyone interested – ran Memtest86+ last night and it found some issues.

Just now got a chance to mess around with my RAM. Removed 3 of 4 sticks and tried to turn on the computer.

Wouldn’t turn on and got a couple beeps repeating. At least on my system that means no RAM detected. So I switched out the stick I had in there into the same slot and got the same thing happening. So I then retried that first stick of RAM in a different slot and it started up with no problems.

That 1 stick was 2gigs of RAM so I went ahead to test GW2 and played fine on Auto-Detected settings (some High, some Medium).

Anywho seems that first slot is messed up (hopefully no others are). I don’t have the ability to clean it at the moment so I’m just going to use the 2 remaining slots and test with 6gigs.

And hopefully that is the extent of my problems.