New pc - worse than old one?!!!

MajorR

What is it that gives you the error 'hardware is not compatible' is it a menu from within the game or a xp windows box thats popping up. Do you know if this card is AGP OR PCI-E. This card is clearly good enough to run this game without breaking sweat so its software, setup or the card is packing up. This message your getting suggests to me its a setup problem because the computer thinks your card is not good enough.

Is BIOS set correctlly

1. Is on-board graphs disable?
2. Is video AGP set to AGP 8x (if it is AGP that is)
3. Is there more than one port on the back of the pc to plug a monitor into?

Stumpy

MajorR wrote:

What is it that gives you the error 'hardware is not compatible' is it a menu from within the game or a xp windows box thats popping up. Do you know if this card is AGP OR PCI-E. This card is clearly good enough to run this game without breaking sweat so its software, setup or the card is packing up. This message your getting suggests to me its a setup problem because the computer thinks your card is not good enough.

Is BIOS set correctlly

1. Is on-board graphs disable?
2. Is video AGP set to AGP 8x (if it is AGP that is)
3. Is there more than one port on the back of the pc to plug a monitor into?

Okay - I'll answer the easy questions first - the more difficult will have to wait a bit!

As far as I can tell, there is no on-board graphics - nothing suggested there would be on-board graphics elsewhere, and it doesn't show up in the hardware devices section. The card is a PCI-E and there is only one analogue socket on the back of the computer for the monitor - saying that, there is also a digital socket, and it did come with a digital cable, but I'm currently using a switch box so that I can use the monitor/keyboard/mouse on two computers (the other is for work) and it will only take the analogue cable.

The game with the main problem, Dungeon Siege 2, comes with a "video diagostic" thing - that is run seperate from the game and that is what reports the error. The game itself doesn't come up with any error messages - just the crashes and odd glitch.

For the ATI Tool artifact test you need to run it for at least an hour. To see gpu temp with ATI Tool, click on the bottom right settings button, then in the drop down list at the top (above "Use Device:") select 'Temperature monitoring' and tick 'Measure Card Temperature' and select 'Tray Icon - gpu temperature.'

I'll try the artifact tool again later, but I tried to find the temperature option - it isn't on the drop down list (overclocking, artifact scanning, gamma control, startup, 3d detection and miscellaneous are the options - maybe I've downloaded the wrong version?).

When you've done that go to Start --> Run and type in dxdiag and OK. Go to the 'Display' tab and run the Direct Draw and Direct 3D tests. Report results.

Did this before - no problems reported on either.

Have you gone into your ATI Settings, I think the ones to look out for here are, OpenGL, Direct3D and Troubleshoot settings, and VPU Recovery (not sure about that one, I think it resets the graphic card) have you tried to tweak these.

Strangely, Couldn't find the first two - could find VPU recovery, which apparently resets it if it freaks out, or something, instead of having to reset the computer - this is switched on.

brummybloke

k i will make the simple suggestion no one else has yet made..

phone the supplier and get them to examine your pc.

i always built mine up myself so when i messed up i would have to find the answers, if you bought it ready made you have the luxury of taking it back and getting them to fix it.

Stumpy

brummybloke wrote:

k i will make the simple suggestion no one else has yet made..

phone the supplier and get them to examine your pc.

i always built mine up myself so when i messed up i would have to find the answers, if you bought it ready made you have the luxury of taking it back and getting them to fix it.

Rang them yesterday morning (which was why I wasn't around!) - Mesh have one of these 0870 helplines that seem to have a default of keeping you on hold for 15 minutes - very frustrating - but at least when I spoke to the chap and he suggested various possible fixes I could tell him "I've tried that" to everything!! Anyway, in the end he suggested first of all taking back to the factory settings and then, if that didn't work, a full reformat and reinstall.

Took me most of the day but ended up no better (apart from discovering where they kept all the drivers!). Anyway, rang back, and they're sending an engineer out - they think it may be a faulty chip on the card?

3-5 working days it will take - ho hum. Fingers crossed that fixes it.

MajorR

looks like the game is the problem look here everyone else is having the same trouble DS2 forum


seems at if the DS2 2.2 patch doesnt work nothing will

wonderfullife_2

MajorR wrote:

looks like the game is the problem look here everyone else is having the same trouble [

Hi
I'm on xp, with radeon X600 256mb and it works perfectly fine on my pc, no problems whatsover.

Stumpy

MajorR wrote:

looks like the game is the problem look here everyone else is having the same trouble DS2 forum


seems at if the DS2 2.2 patch doesnt work nothing will

I would have been convinced it was the game itself (and was for a while) apart from the fact that it struggles with others too. Fate crashed after half an hour - same type of crash where the entire machine siezes up and Sacred has strange artifacts on the menu screen (don't know if it crashes yet, as I haven't played it for more than a few minutes to find out).

I did just come across another problem with this machine though - I use Thunderbird for my e-mail programme, and it turned out that it wouldn't work on a dual processor machine without a new file download. So much for it working straight from the box.

Stumpy

I have just been having a look around a few forums, and came across this one:

https://forum.wildtangent.com/viewtopic.php?t=6064

Apparently quite a few games have problems with dual processors (I'm assuming this is something that will be fixed soon?!) but you can remove the problem simply by forcing the game to run on only one processor.

Still doesn't seem to solve the initial problem with DS2, but I will be giving it a go later when I run the game itself for a while. At this rate, I may have solved the problem before an engineer even bothers to ring!!

Stumpy

Just to give everyone a head up on the saga so far - the engineer came last week and replaced the graphics card. When he opened it up, he found one of the loose power cables (the type that plugs into cd-drives, etc) hooked up on some solder or something on the back of the graphics card - he mentioned that this could have caused a short of some kind. We also noticed a difference in noise level when the new card was put in, indicating the possibility of a fan problem.

However, after he had gone, discovered things had gotten worse - the games now crashed in a much shorter space of time - Dungeon Siege was down to around 5 minutes for example. I was also getting "low memory" messages from frontpage and Zuma (a game one step up from patience!)

Plus I had discovered that I had an icon in my system tray allowing me to "remove hardware safely" - for my hard drive!

As an aside, just to put the icing on the cake, my printer seemed to have given up - it looked like the printhead had gone, missing out stripes on all printouts - the engineer who changed the graphics card confirmed this.

Anyway, rang Mesh up again and after the obligitory 15 minutes on hold, got to speak to the most obnoxious little runt who, after a 10 minutes conversation where he obviously hadn't read the notes on his computer, simply said that it was a "cutting edge" technology, no-one had written software for it yet, so I shouldn't expect it to work until the software came out for it. Stupid little sod. Have to say, I was a tadge annoyed at this, but after further arguing back and forth, I was left simply with the promise that a supervisor would get a message to call me.

Have to say, I was steaming and not a little upset about this - according to this bloke, I could not play ANY games and expect them to work correctly, or any office software, etc.

I started browsing on the internet - primarily I wanted to find somewhere/someone who could categorically state that they were running the same software on the same chip with no problems. And the computer crashed. Completely - seized up. All I was doing was browsing, with the e-mail programme running in the background - same crash.

Armed with this, I rang them back up, got to speak to another guy - who said that a "patch" has just come out for AMD dual core processors, plus there were problems with new Maxtor drives bought after December 2005 - so he sent me those.

Installed them - heres the info from Mesh, if anyone needs them:

1) Dual Core AMD Processor driver Below is a drivers update for the dual core processor. What's it good for.

http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/utilities/amdcpu.exe

a) Will help with some game crashing issue.

b) Should sort out the out of sync audio / video when using the external TV tuners.


1) Maxtor / NF4 Fix Boot issue. (hard drive not found as well as other issue) Only for drives bought in December onwards.

It seems that some Maxtor hard drives are having an issue where the drive is not detected on reboot when using a motherboard with an Nforce4 Chipset.

There is now a supported fix (This is not the one on the Maxtor website) Please download the following file depending on the drive you have.



The following fix is in an ISO format and will need to be burnt to a CD using the guide below if you are using the supplied Cyberlink Power Starter Software supplied.



Please note that the following fixes will only work on the drives they are intended for and should not run at all on any other drive.





For drives under 400GB That start with the code 6V please use the following download

www.meshcomputers.com/downloads/d10.zip



For drive of 400GB and over (All)

www.meshcomputers.com/downloads/d11.zip





Once you have you download the zip file you need, you will first need to extract the ISO file from the zip file. (The following is using windows unzip feature)



1) Double-click the zipped file.

2) In the window that opens, click Extract all files. (This will be on the left hand side).

3) The Extraction Wizard opens. Click Next

4) In the Select a Destination panel, select the location where you want the folder to be placed, for example, the Desktop. Click Next.

5) In the Extraction Complete panel, select Show extracted files. Check Finish. The unzipped files appear in a new window.

The AMD patch did seem to make a marked difference to those games who were suffering from problems with dual core jitters, but it didn't solve the crash - DS2 crashed now within 2 minutes.

The harddrive patch (applied via a boot disk) didn't seem to make much difference either - although increased playing time up from 2 minutes to around 45 minutes.

So .... back to Mesh again. Managed to get hold of the same "helpful" guy - and am now waiting for something to come in todays post so that I can send the thing back. He said they would have to keep it for about a week - but I told him I didn't care (within reason) how long they had it, as long as it worked when I got it back.

So this morning, after transferring all setting back to my old computer again, I've packed it all up (and what is up with packing material and boxes - they always seem to fight back!) and am now working on my (working) hamster driven pc again.

Oh - and strangely, the printer now works fine. So no knackered printhead - obviously something in the other computer had mucked it up. And it can't have been drivers, as such, as they were originally the same drivers I used on this computer, until I had problems, then I upgraded to most recent.

Happy days. :rolleyes:

T4i

MESH......and thats why I wont recommend them. They dont even test the machines before sending them out.

If I spent £500+ on a p.c and it turned up at home unable to do basic p.c stuff I'd be gutted!

I like the bit about the loose power cable stuck to some solder on the GPU...........Well done MESH! Good eye for detail it seems.....

I know one bloke who worked for MESH, he told me about there testing policy that was in place (not sure if its changed) anyhow, before sending any of the machines out they were supposed to do a good torture test for temps, voltages, stability etc (4-8hrs i think) the guy i know worked in the test/QA department and he knows for a fact this kind of testing does NOT get carried out. Same goes for Tiny. :mad: