Crashing on Startup Take Two
akatonbo:
I can try that when I get home again, but do you have any idea why it would start doing that both out of the blue and inconsistently?
jrd:
Could be something as simple as overheating. Last summer my system started consistently crashing after months of smooth running, the culprit turned out to be the temperature. Moving my PC one centimetre away from the wall allowed the fan to work better, and my crashes were gone.
In 2004 one of the Windows updates also caused a crash for me, it somehow updated a part of DirectX and I had to update my vidcard driver to cope.
I've also had cases where out of the blue my vidcard driver wasn't recognised any longer. I had to downgrade it and upgrade back to fix it. In this case I got the infamous 'page fault in a nonpaged area' BSODs.
Hegelian:
Body Shop is notoriously buggy. I haven't had the problem you describe myself (although I have had it crash when closing), but my partner has been getting it recently. She also went through a brief period where the game would start to load and then just unload itself without completing (I watched this happen using Task Manager). In fairness, her WinXP installation is not healthy, and we will be doing a reformat/clean install in the near future.
In the end, it turned out to be something in one of her custom neighborhoods that was causing the game to fail. I don't know that she's tried Body Shop since she made that discovery.
Some problems are just the result of poorly-programmed applications, and this may be the case with Body Shop. I would be hesitant to attribute it to a hardware problem if this is the only app you're having a problem with. However, if you start to get crashes and/or system lockups with other apps, then you might be facing a failing component, like a RAM module or the motherboard itself. Of course, such things are impossible to diagnose without access to the machine. :)
BTW, although popular, McAfee products are crap. The anti-virus app is unecessarily intrusive and can really interfere with whatever it is you are doing at the time. FWIW, I recommend AVG Free from Grisoft for an AV program; it's free and updates itself daily. In comparison tests, it does better than McAfee, on a par with Norton AV (but without the subscription).
http://free.grisoft.com/doc/2/lng/us/tpl/v5
akatonbo:
Well, it wasn't just Body Shop -- this time around it was also the game, and last time around I didn't try the game until Body Shop was behaving again. If it happens again I'll certainly test both as much as possible and post the error log from the game.
And yeah, I only have the McAfee stuff because it came with the machine (including a few months' free subscription, long since expired), and I know I should ditch it and replace it with something that doesn't suck or require a ridiculous monthly charge. My internet habits are a little less safe than they were during that 2 year stretch where I had no AV software at all and then later scanned the machine and came up 100% clean. (Not much, but a little.) I'll check out AVG. I already close most parts of the McAfee stuff all the time anyway since the subscription is long-dead.
Meh. I suppose I'll leave it mostly alone until I have problem again, if I do, so that I have some chance of figuring out what actually fixes it. (Pretty sure it's not temperature -- my room is cooler in the summer than the winter -- but I should probably open the case and blow the dust out regardless.)
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