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juliancs · Aug 24, 2007, 09:54 AM

I'm going to post this on a few forums to get the biggest audience possible - sorry if you see it a few times!

I have a MacBook Pro 2.33 C2D, with 2GB RAM. When I play games in bootcamp, after about 5-10 minutes, the picture freezes, sound loops and computer restarts. This is 99% of games. Oddly enough, Company Of Heroes, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004 and S.T.A.L.K.E.R work perfectly for hours.

I, today, downloaded bootcamp 1.4, wiped my partition, reinstalled bootcamp + windows. No luck. I have tried the 'modded' drivers, the AMD ones, the Omega ones. I have tried underclocking the card with ATiTool.

I am totally at a loss what to do here. I play WoW in MacOSX with no probs.

I have a cooling pad + fans on the computer, and have aircon all day...if that helps at all.

Anyone have ANY idea what do to? Many, many thanks in advance.

Rumor · Aug 24, 2007, 12:24 PM

I was having the same type of problem playing Neverwinter Nights 2.

Turn off file indexing in XP.

Once I did, I quit having problems.

ghporter · Aug 24, 2007, 07:40 PM

File indexing can take a lot of horsepower-think of it as a task similar to Spotlight indexing your whole drive all the time, just not quite as thoroughly. I think it's dumb for it to be on by default anyway. Turning it off won't hurt you much when doing a serious disk search, and it will give you tons of CPU cycles to play with instead of basically wasting them.

juliancs · Aug 24, 2007, 09:10 PM

thank you so much for the replies. I can't wait to try this! How do I turn off indexing?

Rumor · Aug 24, 2007, 09:18 PM

Start -> Run ->msconfig

Click the Services tab and uncheck the Indexing Service

juliancs · Aug 24, 2007, 11:23 PM

Just tried it, and no luck. Froze again

Any other ideas? I really, really want to get this to work. I want to play IL-2!

juliancs · Aug 25, 2007, 07:21 AM

Did some more testing with a heat/fan controller - In windows, the comptuer wnt up to around 58-63C when I was playing the game, and so I blast my aircon pointing at the laptop, hit up all extra cooling fans and revved everything to full, bringing the temp down to about 55C. Still Crashed. I run WoW at around 61-8C in Mac OSX, and have zero freezing problems.

markponcelet · Aug 27, 2007, 05:54 PM

I had this same problem with half of my games (on a revision A 17" MBP). For whatever reason, the ATI video card would crash a lot on certain games. I narrowed it down to the video card based on when the crashses would occur. Star Wars: Empire at War, for example, would only crash once enough of the starmap was revealed.

I was able to get more stability by using ATITool to lower the clockspeed of my video card. Once I chose the clock and memory speeds that Apple sets in MacOS X, my freezing all but disappeared.

Details are in this post: http://forums.macnn.com/104/alternat...s-freezes-gpu/

However, ATITool is now incompatible with PunkBuster, which is used in games like Battlefield: 2142. To get around that, I just installed Apple's newest ATI Drivers. My experience is that I could get even more stability by using MobilityModder to install ATI's latest drivers instead. (Instructions for installing ATI's drivers are here.

MacosNerd · Aug 27, 2007, 09:59 PM

Originally Posted by ghporter

File indexing can take a lot of horsepower-think of it as a task similar to Spotlight indexing your whole drive all the time, just not quite as thoroughly.

I think its worse, does less indexing but yet takes more cpu. I hate it.

juliancs · Aug 27, 2007, 10:57 PM

Thanks for the replies.
Marcponcelet, as I have said, I have tried underclocking the card, with no more luck. I have now also tried all possible video drivers and video settings in the games that are freezing. no luck.

markponcelet · Aug 28, 2007, 11:00 AM

Originally Posted by juliancs

Thanks for the replies.
Marcponcelet, as I have said, I have tried underclocking the card, with no more luck. I have now also tried all possible video drivers and video settings in the games that are freezing. no luck.

My fault for not reading closely enough. Could you give us some of the names of the games that don't work? Battlefield 2142, for example, advertised turning off sound acceleration (in dxdiag.exe) to solve a problem like this. It didn't work for me, but that's because ATITool was causing the crash at the time.

Anyway, further information may trigger something in my memory.

juliancs · Aug 28, 2007, 09:15 PM

Success!! I feel a bit embarassed. Yesterday I changed the video mode in IL-2 from OpenGL to DirectX, and I played for about an hour (until I had to go to work)! I was smiling the entire hour. Now then, this leaves me with more questions - what if a game is in OpenGL? How do I tell? And do most games have the option to switch over? Should'nt a card with DirectX compatibility have functioncality with OpenGL?

I am going to install another game that was crashing today and test it, but again, I don't remember seeing the option to change the modes anywhere on most of the games, so unsure.

Nearly there!

Cold Warrior · Aug 28, 2007, 09:19 PM

I can't imagine any game for Windows that wouldn't support DirectX. The best way to find out would be to read its retail box, manual, and Google for it.

juliancs · Aug 28, 2007, 10:36 PM

Thanks for the response. From my googlings, it seems most run in DirectX, but some still run in OpenGL. It seems to be the OpenGL mode that gives me problems. From my searching it seems that most newer games dont give the option to choose anymore.......

jamil5454 · Aug 30, 2007, 11:40 AM

Originally Posted by Cold Warrior

I can't imagine any game for Windows that wouldn't support DirectX. The best way to find out would be to read its retail box, manual, and Google for it.

It depends on what graphics framework the game was developed for. Most games on Windows use DirectX, though a notable bunch are openGL. Examples: UT2004, Doom 3, Quake 4, etc. Nearly anything that has a multiplatform release is openGL.

To the OP: if your games are freezing in OpenGL and not DirectX it most likely suggests a faulty AMD OpenGL driver. The best thing to do is wait for Apple to update its BootCamp drivers.

juliancs · Aug 31, 2007, 05:47 AM

Seems the problems are still there

. IL-2 Runs fine stil, but Freedom Fighters, which runs totally in DirectX, freezes after about an hour.......any have any more ideas? You've all be great..

markponcelet · Sep 4, 2007, 06:14 PM

Originally Posted by juliancs

Seems the problems are still there

. IL-2 Runs fine stil, but Freedom Fighters, which runs totally in DirectX, freezes after about an hour.......any have any more ideas? You've all be great..

I know this isn't actually helpful, but you're reminding me that both of the games I play the most on my MBP -- Battlefield 2142 and Oblivion -- always seem to crash after extended play. It's so much less than it used to be that I guess I just tolerate it. But all through the holiday weekend, I was plagued by crashes.

At the time, I wondered if it was just because my video card was getting hot. The few blue screens of death I got definitely pointed to the graphics driver. So now I'm interested in feedback from this post, too.