Windows 7 Crashing

Whenever I am running an architect mission with lots of enemies in a small location, the game tends to crash. The strange part, is that the game rarely crashes the first time I run the mission after starting the game. It will crash pretty much 100% of the time when I try to do the same mission a 2nd time, instantly crashing when I get close enough to all the enemies.

Nothing changes between the two missions, except that I have already run the mission once before. I figured that since I was on Windows 7, it could be an issue with that, and I tried running the game in Windows XP compatibility mode, unfortunately that just made the game extremely slow and I was never able to load fully into the game.

I updated all my drivers, but that did not solve the problem either. I moved my entire game folder to run off a different hard drive, and increased my virtual memory, also to no avail. I also tried setting my in-game graphical settings to the bare minimum (As they were on full before), this also made no difference in the occurrence of crashes.

My system specs are:
AMD Athlon 64 4400+
Nvidia 8600GT
2GB RAM

Watching taskmanager and perfmon, I hovered around 70% physical memory used, and I sit around 50-70% CPU usage until just before I crash, it shoots up to 100% (To try and load all the enemies I guess)

I can't think of any reason why the game would crash like that, and was unable to find any similar experience by searching the forums and the web in general. My friend, whom runs Windows XP, is able to do the same thing, without crashing at all. The only major difference between us, is our operating system.


Does anyone have any idea what might be causing my game to crash when a large amount of enemies are entering my game's awareness area? I do not have issues with large volumes of enemies, it is just when large amounts of them are being loaded at once it seems. I have had no other issues with the game so far, and it is very strange how the crash is occurring.

Any help would be appreciated, thanks if you read through all that.

Just an update, I finally got the time to install XP on a seperate partition, clean install. Updated all drivers, (Tried before Automatic Updates), still didn't work, so I ran Automatic Updates, got completely up to date, and the game will still crash in the same place, completely predictable and repeatable.

Normally I would think it would be a game issue at this point, since everything I have done has not remedied the situation, however, as I mentioned before, my friend is able to repeat the steps that causes me to crash, and he will NOT crash. This is what confuses me, and this is what is bothering me so much.

I have ruled out Windows 7 as being the majority of the issue, and I now believe that could be an issue with my video drivers, or even possibly an incompatibility with my hardware. I do hope that it is a soft issue that I can fix without having to upgrade my system.

As always, I appreciate any feedback or ideas on how I may be able to fix this. I have spent the past few days working on this, and I am running out of ideas.

There's a map that tend to crash EVERYONE in the MA, no matter what OS you're on. It's one of the "farm'ish" outdoor maps, don't know it's name. Does that ring a bell?

As Sing says it could be one of the problem maps and maybe your friend is just lucky if you post up the Ark ID I'm sure a few of us will give it a try and see what results we get.

Failing that I would agree it sound like some kind of graphics issue mite be a idea to compleatly wipe the drivers for your GFX card and reinstall them

Just to bring it to everyones attention, I believe 'Incompatible's version of windows 7 to be either the beta or pre-release candidate limited trial time versions and as such not a supported version.

The official retail/upgrade versions are due out around October.

Please bear in mind that the official graphics drivers for windows 7 may be 'Incompatible' with these earlier testing versions.

Yes, I am using the Win7 RC, but as I stated in my second post, I believe I have ruled out the OS as the problem. Even on XP with the latest drivers it crashed at the exact same point.

My friend whom does not crash is out of town at the moment, but I asked him to let me know what version of Nvidia drivers he is currently using to see if I have any luck with those.

As for the map, I have had this issue occur on several different maps, and it is always the 2nd+ time I am running the mission (Never the first time after game start), and only when a large amount of enemies are being first seen.

It is possible that it is a memory issue, but it seemed more likely that it was video related due to the predictability of the crashing.

As Sing Suggested, post up a few arc ID's and people will gladly test the same maps for you.

Also could I sugest checking out the Omega Nvidia Drivers as these are game stable for most games, websearch it or send me a tell and i'll find a link for ya.