[cold aspiration]

So along with installing windows, I installed all the quirks bizzaar things that happens with windows. I only installed boot camp so I can play my old games that I still have from my pc days.

Now I get the following symptoms (most during gameplay unless stated otherwise):
- random (and I do mean random) freezes, unescapable (have to force shut down)
- colors suddenly go on the blink, purple flying everywhere
- blue screen of death
- freezes during windows startup
- game freezes and crashes to the desktop with the vpu recovery error box open

What a reminder of why i went mac. The only way to fix a lot of these things is to force shut down. I wonder if holding down the power button to shut off hurts the hardware or the software?? And will it damage my mac?

But most of all, do all of you experience your same hardships that you endured when you used pc (however long that is for some of you ). ??

I think i'm going to try to re-install boot camp and see if that helps. (sigh*)

[BkueKanoodle]

I run a 1000+ Windows network, and almost never see those things. More likely, it's your "old pc" games or some other software you've installed. Don't blame windows, blame the 3rd party application developers.

I am writing this on a mac. The only problem I've had with windows on the mac mini is the ram overheating and locking the system. I've confirmed this through testing of different ram configurations and tempature sensors around the unit. If anything, that seems to be a hardware design issue to me.

[cold aspiration]

So when you say that you hardly see these things in windows, do you mean windows on a regular pc or a mac running windows?

[ghporter]

I have NEVER seen this kind of issue on a Windows computer. I've seen occasional slowdowns with an app accidentally taking over during some sort of blocked operation, but never the video issues you mention, nor problems that occur on a routine basis. That sort of thing says "Windows needs to be reinstalled." You can do that OVER the current installation, which will not lose your current setup but WILL repair the faulty files and interrelations between them.

BkueKanoodle is right about applications being poorly behaved and wreaking havoc with Windows. Since there isn't a strong validation process required for Windows apps, you can run into apps that leak memory like crazy, access memory they shouldn't, and otherwise run rampant. My C professor told us that "if you don't see the copyright on the video BIOS at least once while you're learning C, then you aren't trying." But that should only apply to student projects. Gotta tell the software houses about that someday...

[cold aspiration]

I remember thinking that xp was a lot more stable than windows ME. I just uninstalled windows and now I'm going to redo the boot camp thang. Tell you guys how it works this time around.

[TheoCryst]

There's also a pretty high chance that Apple's beta drivers are to blame. I'll second (third?) the feeling that this isn't Windows's fault. I've been a Windows user for over 10 years (only switched less than a year ago), and this is definitely not normal. Hopefully a reinstall will fix it, but if not, I'd blame the drivers and/or the game(s) that experience these problems.

[ghporter]

XP is enormously more stable than ME. Orders of magnitude more stable-compare New Jersey to the Sun...that's how much more stable it is than ME. (ME was the WORST Windows OS ever-even including version 1.0-because it combined the worst features of NT and 98 without integrating them with each other. It was very unstable and should rest in peace.)

I agree with TheoCryst that there could have easily been a problem with the beta drivers. There could also have been other factors involved, such as glitches in the formatting of the partition (rare but nasty) and interactions between third party software and the OS and/or drivers. A clean install (format the partition and start from scratch) should be much more stable. In fact, "unstable" is the very best reason to reinstall Windows.

[cold aspiration]

I did a clean install of xp and it seems to be running fine now, but I haven't tested it out too much yet. I do believe it might have been some drivers that were automatically installed from ghost recon: advanced warfighter. Or something along those lines that messed with the beta drivers that was included with boot camp

[cold aspiration]

Well after some testing, it seems like my problems aren't really solved. Most of the symptoms are gone after the clean install (reformat partition and fresh windows installation) but problems with game graphics still exist. These are problems like, colors going on the blink, blue screen of death/freeze/crash when changing resolution in the game or turnning off/on anti-aliasing. Also the intermittent vpu recovery box comes up. I am using Age of Empires III to test these problems because everyone else says that this game runs perfect on their systems. it is even on the compatibility list on dualbootguru.com .

I tried omega drivers to no avail, it just made it work for a while then gave only blue screen of death. What do you guys think the problem is? I do remember AOE III running fine for the first couple of days. CS source and DoD source run fine as well, except for the intermittent game crashes/freezes. Could it just be the windows that I am installing? (I did slipstreaming because I didn't have a windows with SP2). But if that was the case, then I would have a hard time getting windows installed right?

Ah, just getting frustrated, used boot camp assistant to restore single partition again right now so I can feel better about my MBP. Need help.

[BkueKanoodle]

Video drivers. Even in a well supported Windows environment, which bootcamp is not (what with drivers being beta and all) Driver issues are a recurring headache for gamers. Drivers that might work great for some games, cause other games to crash. Updated drivers that fix game crashes in the latter can hose performance in the former. Drivers that work great on one system get conflicts on another. These kind of headaches is why I stick to consoles for gaming.

Video card driver developers or the game programmers in this case is who I would vent at.

[ghporter]

Some games are only really workable with a very well specified set of hardware. Others take advantage of built-in functionality and work fine. The bleeding edge games are the ones that are most likely to give you trouble, and usually because they go outside the "well behaved" program parameters, almost always to tinker directly with (you guessed it!) the video hardware. Let's have a look at what your particular game needs and wants in terms of hardware:

Minimum Requirements:

Processor: Intel P4 or AMD, 2 GHz
Operating System: Windows 2000/XP (only!)
Memory: 512 MB RAM
Disk Space: 4.5 GB
Graphics Card: 128 MB DX9.0c compatible card (GeForce 6200 / Radeon 9600 or higher) *See supported list below
Sound Card: DirectX 9.0c compatible
CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive : X2 Read Speed
DirectX Version: 9.0c
Network: High-speed modem with 64 Kbits of data transfer upload rate for a client, 512Kbits of data transfer upload rate for a server on a full game.

Recommended Requirements:

Processor: Intel P4 or AMD 2.8 GHz
Operating System: Windows 2000/XP (only!)
Memory: 1024 MB RAM
Disk Space: 4.5 GB
Graphics Card: 256 MB DX9.0c compatible card *See supported list below
Sound Card: DirectX 9.0c compatible
CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive : X2 Read Speed
DirectX Version: 9.0c
Network: High-Speed Modem with 128 Kbits of data transfer upload rate for a client, 512Kbits of data transfer upload rate for a server on a full game.

Graphics Cards Supported:
ATI Radeon 9600
ATI Radeon 9700
ATI Radeon 9800
ATI Radeon X300
ATI Radeon X600
ATI Radeon X800
ATI Radeon X1600
ATI Radeon X1800
ATI Radeon X1900

nVidia GeForce 6200
nVidia GeForce 6600
nVidia GeForce 6800
nVidia GeForce 7800

Laptop version of these chipsets may work but are not supported.
These chipsets are the only ones that will run this game. Additional chipsets may be supported after release.

All emphasis added.

This is not a simple "anyone can play this on any moderately capable Windows machine" game. It's pretty demanding-and it hasn't been out for the PC platform for too very long. That means two things: it's going to take a lot of horsepower-both processor and video- to run, AND it's not necessarily the most stable piece of software around.

Remind me which Intel Mac you have, and note the last part of the quoted minimum and recommended requirements-the part about laptop chipsets not being supported-even if you have a MacBook Pro. That may be the issue right there because Ubi's software expects a full retail desktop version of the specified video cards. And I forget if the iMac's video is a laptop chipset or desktop chipset, but it's not a "full retail desktop version."

Reminder: video hardware on Intel Macs and whether they should work with GR-AWF:
iMac.................ATI Radeon X1600 (maybe)
MacBook...........Intel GMA 950 (NO)
MacBook Pro.....ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 (probably not)
Mac Mini............Intel GMA 950 (NO)

[cold aspiration]

Yes I did read those requirements before and the 17" MPB meets them and the only part that concerned me was the fact that laptop chipsets were not supported. However, I found from the apple discussion board that many were playing AOEIII on the MBP just fine, which prompted me to get the game. From what I've been reading on multiple forums, the iMacs seem to have the least trouble with gaming, and that is probably the reason.

bknuekanoodle, Yes you are definately correct about stability of console games vs pc games. Another thing is that with console games in multiplayer and such, you know everyone is getting the same performance. The problem comes when you want to play a game that is exclusive to one system, then you need to buy another system if you want to play the game. Not to mention, first person shooters and realtime strategy games are infinitely easier to control on a computer.