Hi guys,

I've been playing QW through ezQuake for a while now. Just in the last couple weeks, I'm getting a weird crash that's preventing me playing (and that's not cool!)

Basically, I get in game and after some time it crashes. I can be in the vanilla quake opening area (difficulty selection), or go 'map dm4', or join a ktx server or just about anything.
After being in the server for a bit (anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 minutes) it crashes with looping sound, locking up my entire machine.

I can't open the task manager or alt-tab or anything. It just locks up.

I'm running ezQuake on Windows 7.


Any ideas/suggestions? I've tried reinstalling the quake paks, ezquake, qw files and so on. Nothing has helped and I'm leaning toward a bad windows update or something.
I run lots of other games (Quake Live, Team Fortress 2, Natural Selection 2, Starcraft 2...) and I have nothing like this. It's just in Quake 1.

Side topic: should I run the game in a virtual machine instead? I'm worried about mouse lag and stuff if I do that...

What is your GFX card? NVIDIA or other? Tried different driver versions? Also, try running as administrator.

Maybe trying to set cl_maxfps to a fixed value, per default ezquake runs as fast as possible which may result in heat problems.

Run with -nosound command line switch. Then you'll know if it's a sound related problem.

Video card is an ATI 6970. FPS is already capped at something fairly low, temperature of the GPU/CPU is fine.
I haven't tried different drivers.

Thanks for the suggestions!

edit: still crashed with -nosound, so I guess that narrows it down further...

Rather it brings up a million other possible causes than narrowing it down unfortunately.

I'm guessing drivers, if not that, then probably faulty RAM or something like it.
Or perhaps you installed some other software at that time that might be causing it? Some OC utility or whatever.

In my experience if QW locks up the whole machine it is usually caused by an underlying system instability (typically cpu/memory, but possibly video card too).
I'd recommend doing some stress testing of your system using something like Intel Burn Test or WPrime (google them).
Are you overclocking?

No, stock settings on an i7 960.
I guess I'll do some prime testing and maybe a memtest or whatnot.

It's just weird that I only see this with QW, and only in the last week or so. The only software change I can really identify is getting windows updates..

Looping sound is common for all types of crashes, it is not really any kind of clue. Also, sometimes the crash happens in a way that the "application is not responding" dialogue is hidden under crashed fullscreen client window, and can be only accessed by some arbitrary combination of alt-tabbing, blind-clicking, and so on. So the system may look like it's locked up, but it might be only displaying this dead client window on top of everything.

But if your system really locks up then it's probably driver/HW issue. I would really try different driver versions, there are many issues with AMD/ATI and old OpenGL games like QW.

Really? That's not my experience. I've actually found ATI/AMDs drivers to be very stable. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that his graphics is fairly new, so it is possible that the drivers are still buggy. Unfortunately with the graphics card being so new, there are probably not a lot of old version of drivers to choose from.

Anyway, I agree with JohnNy_cz, it's imperative that you figure out whether it is truly a lockup or not. No combination of CTRL+ALT+DEL or CTRL+ALT+ESC does anything? Maybe start some kind of server in the background (FTP? QW?) and connect to it and see if you lose connection during the 'lock up'.

That being said, a lock up is almost certainly a driver or hardware problem. If it is a driver problem, crappy Realtek onboard drivers is a good candidate too. If it is a hardware problem, most likely faulty memory or PSU.

Somehow I didn't account for the fact that I updated my video driver recently. I'm gonna play around with that a bit and see what I can come up with!