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Star Wars Galaxies + HP DV6000 = Asplodey!


The 2-Belo

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I've been lurking for quite a while hoping that someone would post a similar problem, but I'm at my Wit's End.

I am attempting to run Star Wars Galaxies on my HP Pavilion DV6100/CT, with an nVidia GeForce Go 7400, under Windows XP Pro SP2. Up to now, no matter what driver I've tried, it has been the same sequence of events:

1) I start the game. Absolutely no problem.

2) I log in, choose a toon, and launch the client. All objects, textures, etc. load with no problems.

3) My toon appears in game, alive and well. Everything looks quite good, in fact, since I usually have the graphics settings to "middle of the road" or lower, since I am one whom is not averse to sacrificing eye candy for the sake of frame rate.

4) I began to run toward another cell in the game, or I attempt to enter a building, or sometimes I just do nothing more than turn arou#${`+%&{#`$

5) I crash to desktop, or worse; often the laptop will refuse to respond, forcing me to power-cycle it.

I could play this game for hours, if all I had to do was stand there. But the minute I run toward anything of any significance, the game dies horribly, every single time. I have turned everything off in the nVidia control panel; I have turned the resolution down; I have turned off the pixel shader, high-res textures, world preloading, even the lights and the stereo in my workroom; and nothing ever changes.

Sony Online Entertainment have no official position on the matter, because they provide no support for SWG on laptops. I have Googled this issue from one end of the net to the other, and judging by the results, I am the only human on Earth attempting to run SWG on a HP laptop and having it crash 284,517 times in a row.

Curiously, a four-year-old Fujitsu laptop with an ATI Radeon 340M IGP shared-memory Tic-Tac of a GPU can run this game for hours and hours -- albeit with 10fps frame rates -- with precisely zero crashes.

I want to say that I have a RAM problem, or a GPU problem, or a motherboard problem, or a problem between the keyboard and the chair. But I don't. Hours of RAM testing produces no errors. Every other game I've run on this laptop so far -- Need for Speed: Carbon, Flight Simulators 2004 and FSX, 3D SexVilla 2: Everlust, EVERYTHING -- has run with no hitches, no glitches, no crashes. It's just SWG.

I notice curious things, such as turning off multipass rendering or Vsync causing a crash before the game even loads all the way. But nothing I've tried has resulted in an improvement.

Has no one else ever seen similar behavior? And if all else fails, which should I hurl through the window in disgust: The laptop, the SWG installer CD, or myself?

Edited by The 2-Belo
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Update: I've given up. I mean, I've tried just about every driver there is since 90.x, and nothing has worked.

I guess a more to-the-point question would be: does this sort of thing happen with any other games? I'm not the most experienced of gamers, but I've never seen a piece of ... uh, software that simply refused to run properly on one specific computer.

:)

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  • 2 weeks later...
Guest SWG Player

Can you give me the specs for your laptop? You might want to look at your computers internal tempretures when you play the game. It really can be a number of things.

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Can you give me the specs for your laptop? You might want to look at your computers internal tempretures when you play the game. It really can be a number of things.

I'm quite sure it's not the GPU temperatures; they hover around 65C throughout the brief ordeal. And I can play other games that are quite more graphically intensive (such as Need for Speed: Carbon) without any problems.

I've come to the conclusion that SWG simply does not like this particular machine, and neither SOE nor Hewlett-Packard will likely help me because neither has officially approved the other's products.

I paid US$1500 for this thing new, and can't play the game I most want to play. Go figure. If this happened with cars -- "I'm sorry sir, the Chevrolet Substation is a fine vehicle, but we don't support its use in St. Louis, Missouri or Novrosibirsk" -- there would be riots.

--

Reikanido

Edited by The 2-Belo
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  • 2 weeks later...

I'm in the same boat with the exact same issue - my laptop is a Thinkpad T61P 4GB Mem, 2.4ghz, 200GB 7200, nVidia Quadro FX 570M with the lastest drivers. TAT says my temps stay around 65-70 under load. My other games like the ones you mention run without issues as well.

There must be somehting with the nVidia drivers, perhaps the fact, at least with mine, that the card is not meant for gaming.

Edited by guido1205us
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  • 4 weeks later...
Has no one else ever seen similar behavior? And if all else fails, which should I hurl through the window in disgust: The laptop, the SWG installer CD, or myself?

Update: Problem SOLVED!

I add this here in the hopes that it might help some other HP laptop user in the future.

The solution to this problem lay in the laptop's Intel chipset drivers, which apparently had not been installed properly or had gone wonky for some reason in the interim.

I happened across this sort of by accident, when I installed the freeware MMO racing game Project Torque, and it crashed horribly multiple times with symptoms very similar to the ones I experienced with SWG.

In a fit of desperation, I wiped the entire drive and installed Windows XP from scratch, taking care to install drivers off the impenetrable Black Forest of the HP support site once I found the proper ones.

This time around, I noticed that in dxdiag, AGP texture acceleration -- which had been grayed out before -- was suddenly available and running again. This turned out to be the key. (In my unbounded n00bness regarding GPUs, had assumed this was just unavailable for this PC at all, and didn't give it a second thought.)

A quick reinstall of both SWG and Project Torque clinched it -- both ran flawlessly. I have been messing with both for the last two days, graphics turned all the way up to 11, wild mouse movements in large cities with high activity, daring them to die. Crashes? ZERO. Rock solid.

So. Lessons learned?

1) If all else fails? Reinstall the OS. Life with Windows dictates that this will become necessary sooner or later.

2) If you try every graphics driver you can think of and it still doesn't work, it might be the hardware, but it also might be the chipset drivers that are running underneath. Reinstalling them alone might not work; if it doesn't, then see #1.

3) RTFM, n00B.

--

Reikanido

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  • 2 weeks later...

UPDATE!

Never mind.

:)

I give up.

--

Reikanido

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  • 1 month later...
Guest Porkdurmom

Playing EvE online With the same graphics card and crap and ill have the same problem. If im just sitting in a station everything is dandy but when i leave it crashes.

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