Computer Woes

J

Johnny_Z

Joined
Jun 11, 2004
Messages
201
Since others have asked and gotten help I thought I may as well try myself.

I have an HP Pavilion laptop, not quite a year old. It runs XP Home, has 512 megs of RAM and an Nvidia 440 video card (or chipset more likely). Seems to work just fine, that is until I got Neverwinter Nights . When I installed it I started having problems with the display going on and off - when I WAS NOT playing the game. A friend suggested turning off the hibernation mode so I did that and still had problems. The display would flicker, causing the system to freeze to the point where I had to hard boot. After going into safe mode and removing the game and reinstalling the video drivers that came with the system things seemed to be alright.

Anyone have any idea (other than my being cursed) what would cause this and what I can do about it? I've run AVG virus scan, AdAware and Spybot, done a scan disk and none of that seemed to help.
 
Have you made sure the video drivers are up to date? Might just want to get a good vid card, would probably solve the problem and you would get a better picture too.
 
Have you gone the Start-All Programs-Windows Update route? May just be needing a driver or two?
Google for issues concerning the game itself and it and your brand of PC combined! Never underestimate the geeks ability to find a way to play games on systems that just dont want to!
Seeing as it cleared up once you nixed the game,it probably is the problem ,not a virus or spyware. Are ther any updates for the game you can download?
Don't just check the games home site as the fans may have a workaround already the developers dont!
Let us know how you get on and if needed I can get in touch with some real pencil necks! :)
 
Check the system requirements on the side of the box the game came in. If it says something to the effect that you need at least between 32 and 64 MB of Video RAM you need to get a video card that meets those requirements. Easy to install if you know how. A video chipset most likely does not have enough RAM to run the game properly as they are not designed to run games but rather to run standard PC graphics.
 
When the game installed, it probably showed you a checklist screen of some sort telling what it was going to install (not always). If it did this, it may have told you it was gonna install drivers, or directx, or something not directly related to the game content. If it did install drivers or directx, it may have been the issue.

Now, if any of the above *may* have happened, I'd believe it was directx. If directx became installed, you probably needed to reinstall video drivers. Many times, if you do not reinstall, the pc doesn't work quite right. So, it's a possibility, but I do not know with any surety that this happened.

I'd be less inclined to think it woulda been drivers. To have included drivers would bump up the disk size by a bit, and be very annoying for them AND you.

I'd say, start the install again, and see if it does anything like this. If it does, just uncheck whatever extra stuff it wants to install and see if the error comes back.
 
There might be a chance that your video card is fried,
hopefully, you have on-board video as well,
try switching the monitor plug into it's old port (should be the same size)
and see if it still acts funny.
Good Luck, there's nothing more frustrating that video problems!!!!
 
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