System Hanging/Locking During Gameplay

(raztafar1an) #1

It appears as though that my computer locks up while playing ET online and offline about every 5 to 10 mins for 3-7 secs at a time. Their are few occasions where it won’t do it, but it seems that on average it does it 90% of the time when I play.

Here are my system specs:

Pentium 4 2.66 Ghz
Radeon 9700
768 MB of DDR Ram
SB Live!

Any one with similar problems, and solutions please reply.

(Englander) #2

Have you any other programs running at the same time as you play ET that could be causing interference with the game,Your specs are very good and alot better than mine apart from we have the same RAM and I dont suffer from it at all.

(Kendle) #3

A few things I’d try:-

  1. Update Punkbuster manually. Get the PB web update tool from this link (save it to the “pb” folder and run it from there).

  2. If you’re using Win XP make sure the indexing service is disabled. Start -> Settings -> Administrative Tools -> Services. Don’t just stop it, but change it’s properties so that it’s “disabled” and then re-boot PC.

  3. Check your PC for virus’. There are some going around at the moment that run in the background eating up resources and bandwidth. Try this link for a good all purpose tool for finding the latest, nastiest virus’.

(raztafar1an) #4

I’ve read a few other posts on this forum that seem to deal with the same problem. Here’s a list of things I did so far so you know where I’m at, all of which left me with no solution.

  • Updated Video Card Drivers to latest
  • Updated Sound Card Drivers to latest
  • Updated Moniter Drivers to latest
  • Underclocked my Video Card
  • Defaulted My Registry to WinXP HOME Default.
  • Disabled all non-essential tasks in Task Manager
  • Disabled all services non-essential in Services Tab
  • Ran a Dianogistic Test on DirectX
  • Updated System BIOS to latest
  • Scanned for Virus/Worms on 3 different occasions using McAfee
  • Disabled McAfee during play
  • Uninstalled McAfee
  • Set RADEON settings to default
  • Set SB Live! settings to Default
  • Set ET settings to default
  • Lowered Game Graphics, even tho I shouldn’t have to with the system I have
  • Contacted Activision Tech Support, only with them to give me common knowledge fixes.
  • Updated PB

It appears while this problem isn’t widespread it must be somewhat common, because Activision has already anwsered it before me on numerous occasions, it’s been posted in this forum a few times, and it seems like it’s still not solved.

While ET may be a free game, and one would think that support would be limited, it’s still in Activision’s best interest to provide quality tech support for some of the known problem, this is known and it’s not fixed yet.

Moving on, I can’t conclude that the problem is ET, and not my system, but while running ET windowed and have task manager opened I took this screenshot. I was able to do move my mouse outside of ET and do other stuff etc.

It’d be great to find a solution to this, because it really detracts from the game.

Anyone that has the same problem, post CPU specs and maybe it can be found in compatibility issues with ET. Also I’m not sure it’s related to PB, because the problem exists offline as well.