Guild Wars 2

Chrome is a good browser, but it’s also a giant memory hog in my experience. I’ve seen it happily eat up more than a gigabyte of my system’s memory, which is part of the reason I switched from it to IE10 when I installed Windows 8. While high memory usage probably wouldn’t be an issue on a system with 16GB of RAM, there’s a small chance that one of your RAM sticks has an issue and the combined memory load of Chrome and GW2 is pushing things onto that and causing crashes.

You could try running Memtest86 and checking to make sure all of your RAM is good. It’s an outside possibility, but that’s the only thing I can think of. If it’s crashing a lot even when you avoid using Chrome, it’s more likely to be confirmation bias than anything.

It’s very likely that your graphics card is on the way out, and Guild Wars 2 just pushes things a bit harder than other games you’re running. My old 8800GTS did the same thing; crashed a couple of times in League of Legends with an Nvidia driver error and graphical glitches, and within three days I couldn’t even sit at the desktop for more than a few minutes before it crashed. Google up Furmark and see if that gives you the same issues. If it does, you’ll need a new video card, or a new power supply as an outside possibility.

Furmark may push your video card from dying to dead, though, so fair warning if you don’t have cash on hand to buy a replacement.

I upgraded to Win 8 yesterday, and I haven’t had any issues with lag. Actually, Windows 8 seems to have fixed a minor bug that made everything on my second monitor minimize at random. You might try disabling Windows Update and seeing how the game runs without Microsoft’s updates, though. KB27856872 caused the All Programs button in Metro to suddenly stop working, and apparently it’s been causing other strange issues on other systems.

Intel Q6600, Radeon 5770, and Logitech keyboard and mouse here, on the off chance that it’s a driver issue on your end.