[matariki]

For some reason my computer keeps crashing (automatically turning off) every time I play The Witcher after 15 minutes or so of game play, otherwise the game runs fine.

So far I've tried the following;

Redownloading and reinstalling the game.
Changing the access to administrator only (and loading it as administrator).
Changing the computability to windows XP (service pack 2 and 3).
Downloading two patches for the game from The Witcher wiki (both 1.4 and 1.5) and have not been able to figure out how to install them for the steam version of the game.

My specs are the following;

OS: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

Processor: 2.70 gigahertz AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core
256 kilobyte primary memory cache
1024 kilobyte secondary memory cache
64-bit ready
Multi-core (2 total)
Not hyper-threaded

Drives: 1000.10 Gigabytes Usable Hard Drive Capacity
460.88 Gigabytes Hard Drive Free Space

Optiarc DVD RW AD-7200S SCSI CdRom Device [Optical drive]
3.5" format removeable media [Floppy drive]

ST310005 28AS SCSI Disk Device (1000.20 GB) -- drive 0, s/n 9VP7XCHA, SMART
Status: Healthy

Multimedia: ATI High Definition Audio Device
High Definition Audio Device

Display: ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series [Display adapter]
AOC 2216 [Monitor] (22.0"vis, s/n E6783JA074655, March 2008)

[Guy N'wah]

A failure that occurs regularly after the game has been running for some minutes (rather than at a specific place or on a specific event) sounds like a power or cooling problem. With a computer that's several years old, the most likely cause is accumulated dust. You can clean it by opening the case and blowing the dust out with canned air. (Do this outdoors.)

A remote possibility is an inadequate or deteriorated power supply.

[matariki]

Guy N said:

A failure that occurs regularly after the game has been running for some minutes (rather than at a specific place or on a specific event) sounds like a power or cooling problem. With a computer that's several years old, the most likely cause is accumulated dust. You can clean it by opening the case and blowing the dust out with canned air. (Do this outdoors.)

A remote possibility is an inadequate or deteriorated power supply. ›››

I cleaned out my computer recently and the game runs smoothly. Other people on the Internet have also have noted to experience this problem. Does this problem require a patch? If so, how do I apply the patch to the steam version?

[Guy N'wah]

There are problems with the Steam edition (I don't have Steam; *Tommy* knows a lot more about it), but they don't cause a hard power-off failure. That's inadequate or deteriorated hardware. The last several occurrences of this problem have been GPU cooling, GPU miswired, or inadequate power supply. What power supply are you running, and what model of 5700-series card is it?

The next thing I would do is install MSI Afterburner and monitor GPU temperature while the game is running.

[matariki]

I'm not too sure what the model of the power supply or the model of the 5700-series card is (I'm not a computer wiz) but here is what Belarc Advisor found in its scan;

Operating System - Windows 7 Home Premium (x64) (build 7600)

Processor a - 2.70 gigahertz AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core
256 kilobyte primary memory cache
1024 kilobyte secondary memory cache
64-bit ready
Multi-core (2 total)
Not hyper-threaded

Main Circuit Board b - Board: ASUSTeK Computer INC. M2N-MX SE Plus Rev x.xx
Bus Clock: 200 megahertz
BIOS: American Megatrends Inc. 0503 03/26/2008

Memory Modules c,d - 2048 Megabytes Usable Installed Memory

Slot 'DIMM0' has 1024 MB
Slot 'DIMM1' has 1024 MB

Drives - 1000.10 Gigabytes Usable Hard Drive Capacity
460.35 Gigabytes Hard Drive Free Space

Optiarc DVD RW AD-7200S SCSI CdRom Device [Optical drive]
3.5" format removeable media [Floppy drive]

ST310005 28AS SCSI Disk Device (1000.20 GB) -- drive 0, s/n 9VP7XCHA, SMART Status: Healthy

Controllers - Standard floppy disk controller
ATA Channel 0 [Controller]
ATA Channel 1 [Controller]
Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller

Bus Adapters - NVIDIA nForce Serial ATA Controller
Standard Enhanced PCI to USB Host Controller
Standard OpenHCD USB Host Controller

Local Drive Volumes - c: (NTFS on drive 0) 1000.10 GB 460.35 GB free

Display - ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series [Display adapter]
AOC 2216 [Monitor] (22.0"vis, s/n E6783JA074655, March 2008)

Multimedia - ATI High Definition Audio Device
High Definition Audio Device

Other Devices - HID-compliant device
USB Input Device
Virtual Media Keys
Wacom HID Digitizer
Wacom HID Pen
Wacom Virtual Hid Driver
HID-compliant mouse
Wacom Mouse
USB Root Hub (2x)
Generic volume shadow copy

[matariki]

Guy N said:

What power supply are you running, and what model of 5700-series card is it?

The next thing I would do is install MSI Afterburner and monitor GPU temperature while the game is running. ›››

I've installed MSI Afterburner. And I've also found out what model I have, its a ATI Radeon HD 5700. My Driver is a Catalyst 10.6.

[Guy N'wah]

Oh. Wacom devices cause all sorts of trouble. Take them off your system and substitute an ordinary mouse. If that doesn't do any good, we can continue to look for temperature, power, or driver problems.

What GPU temperature did you observe immediately before (not after) the game crashed? You can put GPU temperaturs in the on-screen display using MSI Afterburner.

There is no HD 5700; there is an HD 5750 and an HD 5770. They're good cards, good enough for highest performance. But they require auxiliary power from the CPU; you haven't told us enough that we can figure out whether your power supply can handle the card or whether it is hooked up correctly. Specifically, what is the make and model of your power supply, and is the auxiliary power connector connected to the graphics card? You would have to open the case to find out.

Catalyst 10.6 is more than two years old. AMD still has current support for the 5000 series on Windows XP; the current (and most suitable) driver is 12.8.

[matariki]

Guy N said:

Oh. Wacom devices cause all sorts of trouble. Take them off your system and substitute an ordinary mouse. ›››

Err... I can't do that. I use my wacom tablet for digital art. I'll see if there is a way to temporarily disable it while I'm playing the game.

[*Tommy*]

The Steam version should already have the latest patch installed. Have you verified the game cache through Steam? But the computer powering off suggests that it`s a possible driver conflict, failing or overheating of the video card, an inadequate or aging power supply, and possible memory module failing.

You can check your memory by using Memtest But it would be very helpful if you can post your card temperatures while playing the game.

[matariki]

Iv'e been having trouble with verifying the game through steam. It keeps saying that I have an invalid CD key.

At the moment I've been playing the game with compatibility mode on windows XP service pack 2, as admin, on lower graphics and at a lower screen resolution. So far its worked without the computer shutting down. My card temp was around 50oc playing the game like this.

[matariki]

Great, now I think I've broke the game. I can't even load it. It gives me a black screen then quits again to the desktop.

[dragonbird]

Have you run memtest yet? (Tommy's recommendation from earlier). You seem to be getting an awful lot of strange errors, and it's best to rule this out before investigating other causes.

The "Invalid CD-Key" error implies a corrupt registry. Unless you've been changing registry settings manually, this could be due to memory issues. Earlier on, when the two reports gave different results, it also pointed to memory. If you don't check this first and there IS a problem, you may just make things worse. (The last time I ignored RAM problems, I ended up having to reinstall Windows).

[matariki]

How do I use memtest?

Also I've tried uninstalling the game, and reinstalling it. But the game doesn't fully uninstall (files are still being kept - although steam says that it will delete everything The Witcher Enhanced Edition)

[Guy N'wah]

Memtest comes on a bootable disk; the best way to get it is to get System Rescue CD (download the image and burn it to a CD) and boot that. Memtest is somewhere among the menu options.

http://www.sysresccd...scueCd_Homepage

[matariki]

Guy N said:

Memtest comes on a bootable disk; the best way to get it is to get System Rescue CD (download the image and burn it to a CD) and boot that. Memtest is somewhere among the menu options.

http://www.sysresccd...scueCd_Homepage ›››

Hmm... even with that, I'm still confused about how to use it, yet alone what I'm supposed to do with it or what I'm looking for. I'm going through the manual now.

[matariki]

matariki said:

Hmm... even with that, I'm still confused about how to use it, yet alone what I'm supposed to do with it or what I'm looking for. I'm going through the manual now. ›››

Now I'm really stuck, I don't get the manual at all... I'm sorry guys but I'm a complete newb at this.

First the manual is asking me to burn the image file onto a CD disk, but it advises that before I do so, that I check that there are no errors with the md5sum file. How do I do this?

[Guy N'wah]

matariki said:

Now I'm really stuck, I don't get the manual at all... I'm sorry guys but I'm a complete newb at this.

First the manual is asking me to burn the image file onto a CD disk, but it advises that before I do so, that I check that there are no errors with the md5sum file. How do I do this? ›››

Memtest has to be run standalone, because it can't test memory being used by other programs. So the System Rescue CD has a way to boot your computer into Memtest. If you're not used to doing this, it can be intimidating. Here's an abbreviated guide.

If you're a trusting soul and never got a bad download and never clicked the wrong button and downloaded malware instead, you can skip the MD5 check. The rest of us do the MD5 check whenever the publisher is thoughtful enough to post checksums.

You need an MD5 checksum program. These are built-ins in the Linux world, which is where www.sysresccd.org lives, but harder to find on Windows. This is a good one: http://raylin.wordpr...ecksum-utility/

Compare the MD5 checksum that the program produces to the one on this page: http://www.sysresccd.org/Download They should be equal.

Then burn the CD. The file you downloaded is an ISO image, so you need a program that can burn ISO images. I prefer ImgBurn: http://www.imgburn.com/

Reboot your computer from the CD. You'll get a lot of text that is gibberish to anyone who doesn't speak Linux, but don't worry about it. Eventually you'll get a screen that begins with

"SYSTEM-RESCUE-CD 3.1.2" (or whatever your version is)

and has the line

"A) Run system tools from floppy disk image..."

about halfway down the page. Use your arrow and ENTER keys to select that line. You'll end up on another menu that has

"MEMTEST: Memory test using Memtest86+"

That's the line you want. Select that line, and memtest will start up and run.

If you have any bad RAM, memtest will usually find it quickly and report a boatload of errors. If your RAM is all good, it will run a bunch of tests (for 8 minutes or so); if it completes one full pass with no errors, your RAM is good.

Then reset your computer, remove the CD before it boots the CD again, and boot back into Windows.

[matariki]

Thanks Guy N'wah

[matariki]

I used memtest86+ and it didn't detect any errors with the memory. So I wonder what else the problem could be...

[Guy N'wah]

That's good. It gets rid of one possible source of hard-to-find errors.

Sometimes I see errors related to a CD after I've been running another game that requires a key CD. Some of these games don't clear out the hooks that check for their CD correctly. Then the next program to use DirectX gets caught.

I'm still suspicious of that Wacom tablet. If you can reinstall it, I would uninstall it (and its driver) temporarily. Wacom drivers conflict openly with a number of games.

Unfortunately, Microsoft saw fit to drop the immensely useful Hardware Profile feature that Windows XP had. This allowed you to create profiles that didn't use conflicting hardware, without actually uninstalling the hardware or drivers.