My friend's laptop -- HALP!

I am trouble shooting my friend's laptop, which I have brought home with me. When I launch City - either from the launcher or through a direct shortcut - it gives the following error:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

My laptop has a HD 4670 and am using the 10.7 Catalyst driver. CoH keeps telling me I'm using an old driver, but I ain't 'fixing' what ain't broken.

It says this error (first quote) regardless of which driver I'm using, including the generic windows automatic plug-and-pray driver. This error is the reason that we started messing with new drivers, windows restore, etc., etc.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

Wondering if the laptop is one of those multi-GPU setups. Where it games (or is supposed to) on the Radeon, but does most of the desktop stuff on a low-power Intel chipset.

If so, there have been issues with systems like these, not doing proper switching, in the past.

The other possibility is a corrupted Windows setup. Honestly, the only way to know for sure is to nuke Windows from Orbit and reinstall (not restore).

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

I remember seeing reports one one of the Asus laptops that went haywire when installing any driver other than the latest driver on the Asus website.

Unfortunately, I don't remember what laptop model it was or what the driver revision on it was.

I know it was causing issues for people trying to play CoH. I think the driver was from 2009 and wasn't compatible with all of the I17 graphics updates.

Maybe that will trigger someone else's memory and they might remember which model it was or be able to find one of the posts. I'm at work in the middle of reimaging a computer so my SearchFu time is limited.

Found one of the posts, and it was for the same model.

Actually, it's two posts but one was quoting the other. One mentioned having to update the BIOS to be able to install the drivers. The other gave the steps that that person used to sucessfully fix their problem. Could be a combination of things with that model.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chuckers Quote: Originally Posted by AymieAmastacia I am having the exact same issue. I am also on an ASUS laptop, the G73Jh. The only way to update the video drivers for the laptop is to update the BIOS. The game was working fine with the current video driver set up until today's patch. And now, even after re-installing the game, I'm unable to start the game. I posted a problem with the same laptop/model a few weeks back. My problem dealt with a missing file: atioglxx.dll. Tex gave me the answer and I posted what I did in the thread. I needed to download a driver wipe program. You may not have the same problem, but doing this probably couldn't hurt. Here's my solution: I d/l-ed the latest AMD driver. (which was 11.10 preview) I d/l-ed Phyxion's driver sweeper program. Uninstalled the driver (and removed files) using the control panel's devices tab/icon. Rebooted in safe mode. Windows re-installed the driver. I uninstalled the driver again (and removed files) from the control panel just to be safe. Ran the sweeper program. Rebooted. Windows re-installed the device. However, I ran the AMD install. Rebooted the system as directed. Checked the device and driver details. The driver date was 10/6/11. atioglxx.dll was located in the windows/sysWOW64 directory. Started CoX with no error!

Some posts that I think were before Freedom launched mentioned an Asus model that wouldn't work with any driver other than the Asus drivers, but I'm failing on finding those posts. Forum purge may have gotten them?

EDIT: Found the older post I remembered. Sure enough, same laptop model.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Paragon_Kid The following error is occuring on launch of COH. The updated runs, a loading bar appears and then after a few seconds it errors out to the following: "City of Heroes has encountered a problem and needs to close. The crash occured in aticfx32.dll." I am sure this is an issue with the version of the driver used. If I update to a more recent driver from ATI COH launches perfectly fine. Unfortunately this particular driver package is the latest from ASUS (I am running COH on a Asus G73HJ-A1 Laptop) and any more recent drivers from ATI make the laptop unstable in general which is a known issue which hopefully ASUS will fix at some point so I am unable to update my drivers without impacting everything else I do on my LT. So far COH is the only application which has issues with the ASUS drivers and I am wondering if there are any fixes for this. ---snipped CoH Helper----------

Further posts in the thread elaborate on the poster having issues with the official ATI drivers (apparently a known problem on that laptop model) and that only the Asus drivers work right, but they wouldn't let them launch CoH using those drivers.

Hopefully this will help you find some type of resolution for your friend.

Good find TJ!

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.