Flustered and unhappy... (Video Card Issues, aka BSOD Round 3)

[Tenshii~Akari]

Just as the title of the thread says, it's my exact current mood... only I feel 10X more terrible.  :sad4:  Just when I finally believed I had fixed the problems I had when I first got my laptop in September '06, I'm once again back at square one with system crashes and the true "blue screen of death" errors involving the "PAGE FAULT IN NON-PAGED AREA" and ati3duag.dll every time I move the game's camera around.  :x

Here's my graphics card specs:

ATI  Mobility Radeon X1300  (128MB, Internal DAC @ 400MHz)

The type of computer crap I'm running the game on:

Model:  Dell Inspiron I6400/E1505
Processor:  Genuine Intel® CPU  (T2050 @ 1.60GHz/Core Duo)
Memory:  2GB RAM
OS:  Microsoft XP Home Edition (5.1, Build 2600, V.2002, Service Pack 2)
BIOS:  Phoenix ROM BIOS Plus V.1.10 A12

And here's all the things I have done in trying to stop this from happening again:

   ::smilieiforgetwhi::  Uninstall all the old drivers and installed newer drivers in Safe Mode

::smilieiforgetwhi::  Updated my DirectX 9.0c to the latest version

::smilieiforgetwhi::  Rolled back to older drivers, only to have ALL of my computer graphics either to crap up or disappear on me, including Desktop icons, windows' title bars, etc. Then I re-removed and re-installed the newer drivers again...

::smilieiforgetwhi::  Turned down my in-game graphics as low as possible (but it still happened to crash)

::smilieiforgetwhi::  Installed two "critical" updates from Microsoft that "supposedly" fixed the issue (mentioned on this site), but failed to do so in my case
 
::smilieiforgetwhi::  Tested my memory sticks once again, only to find that they're still good.

::smilieiforgetwhi::  Kicked, screamed, cursed, cried, and threw my laptop around like a 4-year-old with an attitude problem (...well... a potty-mouthed one at that.  :?)  


Obviously, all of the above failed miserably, and I feel like it's not even worth trying to play the game anymore, as much as I've loved taking screenshots and making clothes recently... :icon9:

If at all possible (saying that if this problem still remains unsolvable even after the amount of years it's been reported to happen on other people's PCs) can someone give me good suggestions of any NON-ATI/AMD video cards that are inexpensive and affordable... not to mention compatible with Sims 2 and/or my laptop?  I've been Googling as much as possible, but I'd also like to hear some good references from any of our resident computer experts and non-experts here on InSim.    I hear nVidia is still okay, but I'd really like to know for sure which video card would suit as a possible replacement to the one I currently have.  (Or for future reference if and when I go PC shopping sometime.)

Thanks in advance, and sorry for the big issue.  I've just had it with my video card acting up every time I try to do something in-game.  :?

[BlooM]

maybe you need to update your bios drivers?
Have you ever been here?
http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/driverslist.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=gen&ServiceTag=&SystemID=INSPIRONI6400/E1505&os=WW1&osl=en&catid=&impid=

I think you best ask them wat to do!
and/or wat to install

[jaccirocker]

Tenshii, I'm so sorry that you're going through all of that. I feel you.
I had the BSOD on my desktop that I bought exclusively for the game, it went on for months and I didn't play my game or anything else sims related. It was an nVidia issuse. I finally made a work around, almost no CC, if it wasn't bodyshop related. I had 7.5 GBs in the Saved sim folder and no downloads except for a hand full of hacks and some must have CC and recolors. It ran fine with no problems, once I found the right driver, which happened to be beta. I would still test the others when they came out but it was always back to that one. I don't anything about Ati cards but I thought that they didn't have the BSOd issuse. This goes to show.
I'd do what BLooM said and call Dell's tech support, they're very good and will usually help you.

Also did you google the exact error? That's how I found my driver. Also are you using Driver Cleaner pro? It gets rid of any bits still hanging around and they could cause conflicts, afterwards run a registry cleaner. I hope some of this helps, I found these hints in various places and have helped me when I wanted to chuck several hundred dollars worth of pc out the window.

[Tenshii~Akari]

maybe you need to update your bios drivers?
Have you ever been here?
http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/driverslist.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=gen&ServiceTag=&SystemID=INSPIRONI6400/E1505&os=WW1&osl=en&catid=&impid=

I think you best ask them wat to do!
and/or wat to install

Tried that... and for some reason, it won't let me flash to it.  I get some sort of strange error box instead of the instructions the directions on the site says should pop up.  :scratch:  Either way, I'm also iffy on downloading it... last time I did a BIOS update on my own, it didn't work so well.  I ended up letting my computer-whiz cousin check it out and fix what I did wrong.  Now that he's way out of the country, I'm pretty wary of doing too much with that type of system upgrade, unless I'm really confident about it.  :lol:

And jaccirocker, that's exactly what I've done since day one.    I've been trying to research every instance with ati3duag.dll errors, and most of what I found were dead-ends.  But I DID happen to remember this one site from last time I found that has a seemingly reliable version of certain driver updates.  They have one of the newer ATI Catalyst updates since the last time I've downloaded from there, so I'm going to try it out and see what happens.  :pray:

(Heck, if it doesn't work after all of this, I might as well start making down-payments on my wish-list laptop.  :lol:)

I've also tried to see if there were any ".dll fixes" that weren't "scan your PC for free" gibs.  I find myself un-installing more of those than actually fixing any possible errors.  :?  Thanks for the hints, though.  :group hu:

[Pierre]

have you tryed reformating your c drive and then reinstalling everything i did that once on my old pc before i decieded to order a new one right now i am on another pc until i recived my new pc. hope you get your problem fix.

Ps: before reformating to not forget to backup your game files that you want to keep.

Good Luck

[BeosBoxBoy]

Tenshii - I am going to recommend that you disable the page-file (see "How to manually change the size of the virtual memory paging file" in this MS article for how) - do a chkdsk /F /R of all hard drives - defragment the bejesus out of the hard drives, then restore the pagefile to about 1,5 GB.

It is possible that the bad RAM is in your video memory -- it wears out eventually due to heating and cooling making microscopic fractures occur -- but more likely it is a bad sector on the hard drive in the page file.

[Tenshii~Akari]

Well, so far, I've completely disabled the paging files to see what might happen, and there hasn't been a crash yet... (hope I'm not jynxing it, because I'm about to go back in and see what happens when I move the neighborhood camera.)  And I defragged my hard drive yesterday morning.  Guess I'll do it a few more times in a bit and reset the paging files to see what happens.  :angel:

BTW, is the chkdsk /F /R a command prompt (when you go to Run and type "cmd" to open the DOS window)?  And if it is, do I type it in verbatim to how you put it?  Just want to be completely sure.  

[AjiDivine]

I had the BSOD due to NVidia graphic card, but found a great tool that helped a lot. It is called RivaTuner. You can try it and it may help. I installed it and on the main page under driver settings click customize, then click the direct draw icon, then chose the shaders tab and under pixel and vertex shader settings chose force 2.0. I haven't had a BSOD since I started using it. Now my other problems are definetly game content and I think I am almost done with those.

[BeosBoxBoy]

Tenshii it's a command prompt command, yes. assuming you have the paging file on drive C: then the full command string would be

chkdsk C: /F /R

windows will come back with a statement saying it can't do it now, and ask if you want to schedule this for the next reboot, say yes (Y) and return, then close the command window and reboot.

ONLY AFTER the chkdsk has completed, it will be a long one, restore the page file.

[Tenshii~Akari]

Okay, thanks!  :angel: