Dear All,

I've playing LFS with no problems since before just Christmas. I've recently been playing S & T with nigh on no problems (All I had was the crash-to-desktop problem when there was a pile-up with patch S). But since I've installed Patch U, I can only play for about 10mins before my PC powers down. When I say 'powers down' I mean Zap! it's off. Not the nice 'Windows is shutting down' kind of power down.

I've tried heavy sessions of Doom3, Half-Life2 & FEAR to see if might be my graphics card that's cooked. But they all seem to work fine.

I want to downgrade my LFS back to T to see if it's U that's causing my grief. I've kept all the files and patches from the when I originally installed Q. The question I'm asking is; Would reinstalling from Q back to T mess up my licence?

Or, If you've got any other ideas?


Thank You!





BTW I've got an nvidia GeForce 6800GT with the latest drivers installed.

lfs is very cpu intensive. download a program called prime95 and run a few torture tests in that while keeping an eye on cpu temp.

I'd also wonder about your pwer supply....

Does the 6800GT use a separate power connector? Is your PS 'cheap'? What is it rated at?

I ran prime95 for ages (about an 30-60mins). It was passing all the test. I then got bored and stopped it. Temp peaked at 48C (Tank 43C).

I connected my graphics card to the power supply with a lead that has nothing else connect on to it. Power supply 600w.

I've installed a new copy of LFS and upgraded it to patch T. It works fine. Patch U however still powers down.

"Powers down" - totally off, or reboots? If it reboots then you've got a BSOD / STOP error of some kind, most likely.

I had an instant reboot last night with patch U - Running Athlon 64 and Geforce 4800, with plenty of power supply.

Only happened once, but I will report back if it happens again.

To stop windows doing an auto-reboot on a STOP error, you may wish to do the following;
1. Right click on My Computer and goto Properties
2. Goto the Advanced Tab
3. Under "Startup and Recovery" click Settings
4. Untick "Automatically Restart"
5. Click Ok x2

This will give you the "famous" blue screen, on it will give you some interesting facts about the reboot.

If you still want it to automagically reboot, in the same area keep it ticked, but also make sure that "write an even to the system log" is ticked. Next time this happens look in the Event logs (right click my computer > manage), under System, and look for the last error. This error should contain the same information. If you can give us a copy of this error, we maybe able to help

If there are no errors, then its likely to be a hardware related issue.

The computer turns off, it doesn't reboot. Well at least not in an instant reset kind of way. This is what happens: Racing (or crashing) on LFS. Then after about 10mins the screen goes blank. I then get an OSD message from my monitor saying it's got no single and is going to switch to 'off mode' in 5secs. The case fans and water cooling are still running at this point. The screen as it said switches off along with the case fans. If I however leave it off for 5-10mins after shutdown the computer does power up by itself

Normally I would think that I have a hardware issue. But the fact that the only game it does this with is LFS with patch U seems odd. Like I said Doom3, Half-Life2, FEAR and even patch T still work fine. Odd indeed.

Ok, so lets clarify, the monitor turns off, but the system unit appears to retain power. Ok, I'd say this is a graphics driver issue - believe it or not graphics drivers do have to understand a game, in order to display things correctly some times. Whats your card / manufacturer, and what revision drivers are you using?

If different drivers don't help, then to be honest to debug this I'd start by timing it exactly, and then checking the windows event logs against this to see if theres correlation between services going nuts, etc. Also, I'd test to see if it was specific to a track, an area of a track, a vehicle, or a combination. Finally I'd move onto LFS settings. Things like this are a bitch to fix, but its usually the only way.

Do you have the latest official drivers or the latest beta drivers for the 6800?

Did you install them recently?

Did you properly uninstall the previous ones (running nvcleaner in the process helps)?

I've noticed all sorts of weirdness going on when upgrading nvidia drivers if they're not uninstalled completely beforehand.

That's a pretty weird problem.
My first guess would be to call a priest/exorzist to get rid of the deamon that your computer is obsessed with.

It restarts itself after 5-10 minutes? (???? <- !!!)

Vain

no daemon, ive had crashes in that my monitor loses signal and sits there with a black screen for 2 or 3 mins, sound looping and it eventually shows the bsod pointing to nv4 something, if the auto reboot thing is on for him i wouldnt doubt it would take 5-10 mins for it to reboot, in my case i found it was write combining in windows to be causing the crashes, but every computer is different and its not always easy to find out what it is whether its SW or HW problem.
strange thing is only lfs crashes if i turn that option on again, every game i have tried so far,and ive tried alot of them , never had a problem with it.

Could it possibly be a heat issue? It's got hotter in the Uk recently and you could have a chinchilla sized ball of fluff living inside your PC case causing poor ventilation and high CPU/GPU Temps.

Your monitor is telling you that it lost the video signal. On the surface this would seem to be a video card issue.

Have you tried an older driver?

Is any of your hardware overclocked? Heat is not the only problem that overclocking can cause.