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The last 2 weeks have been a nightmare for me. I've never, ever had a problem with BF2 since it first released, but since around the 30th of Halloween it has been crashing more often than not after a few second of joining a game.
I've made absolutely no changes to my PC on or before this day, or even to the in-game settings. Every single other game I have on my PC runs without crashing (COD2, Quake 4, WoW, IL2, LOMAC, etc, etc). BF2 is the ONLY game that crashes - and it only crashes during MULTIPLAYER. Play singleplayer and it works great for hours at a time. Try joining a variety of local servers, all based at different ISPs, and most times it crashes - it's a hard lock, sounds start looping and I can't even alt+tab or ctrl+alt+delete out of the game. I am forced to physically reboot my machine.
It's driving me nuts, as the game worked perfectly for months beforehand, yet now is totally flaky even though I've made no changes to my machine.
Things I've tried doing to fix it:
- increase RAM voltage
- return video card to stock frequency
- manually update punkbuster via Pweb
- Tried different, latest drivers for video card and sound card
- delete the BF2 profiles from My Documents (this appeared to work, for a couple of hours at least)
- disabling ZoneAlarm (which had never been a problem in the past).
As I said, every single other game works perfectly for hours at a time, so I'm not convinced it's a problem. I'm a relatively computer savvy user, and have been a full-time IT journalist for over 5 years - PC gaming is my bread and butter, so please don't assume it's a user error.
I realise that not everybody is having this problem, as there seem to be plenty of people on the servers, so I'll post my hardware specs in case they might help - and yes, all drivers and BIOS revisions are totally up to date:
Athlon 64 3800+
2GB DDR400 matched 1GB sticks (slightly increased voltage to increase stability)
Albatron K8SLI nForce 4 SLI mobo
Leadtek GeForce 7800GTX
Creative ExtremeMusic X-Fi
500W PSU
2 x WD740 Raptor HDs in RAID 0 config
WinXP Pro w/SP2
All components at stock settings other than RAM voltage
So, who else is having this bizarre problem? Anybody else think it might have something to do with PunkBuster? Until this prob is solved, I'm forced to shelve my favourite title and play COD2 online, which I can play for 6 hours without a single crash...
I've made absolutely no changes to my PC on or before this day, or even to the in-game settings. Every single other game I have on my PC runs without crashing (COD2, Quake 4, WoW, IL2, LOMAC, etc, etc). BF2 is the ONLY game that crashes - and it only crashes during MULTIPLAYER. Play singleplayer and it works great for hours at a time. Try joining a variety of local servers, all based at different ISPs, and most times it crashes - it's a hard lock, sounds start looping and I can't even alt+tab or ctrl+alt+delete out of the game. I am forced to physically reboot my machine.
It's driving me nuts, as the game worked perfectly for months beforehand, yet now is totally flaky even though I've made no changes to my machine.
Things I've tried doing to fix it:
- increase RAM voltage
- return video card to stock frequency
- manually update punkbuster via Pweb
- Tried different, latest drivers for video card and sound card
- delete the BF2 profiles from My Documents (this appeared to work, for a couple of hours at least)
- disabling ZoneAlarm (which had never been a problem in the past).
As I said, every single other game works perfectly for hours at a time, so I'm not convinced it's a problem. I'm a relatively computer savvy user, and have been a full-time IT journalist for over 5 years - PC gaming is my bread and butter, so please don't assume it's a user error.
I realise that not everybody is having this problem, as there seem to be plenty of people on the servers, so I'll post my hardware specs in case they might help - and yes, all drivers and BIOS revisions are totally up to date:
Athlon 64 3800+
2GB DDR400 matched 1GB sticks (slightly increased voltage to increase stability)
Albatron K8SLI nForce 4 SLI mobo
Leadtek GeForce 7800GTX
Creative ExtremeMusic X-Fi
500W PSU
2 x WD740 Raptor HDs in RAID 0 config
WinXP Pro w/SP2
All components at stock settings other than RAM voltage
So, who else is having this bizarre problem? Anybody else think it might have something to do with PunkBuster? Until this prob is solved, I'm forced to shelve my favourite title and play COD2 online, which I can play for 6 hours without a single crash...
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