Solved random crashes... Maybe

[Sacredsock]

First off, my computer is a Athlon XP1.7 with Geforce 2MX graphics and Live Value Sound. I have 320MB of Pc133 ram and enough harddrive to not have to worry about it. I have both win98 2nd edition and winXP professional.

As soon as i bought JK2 i installed it, after a few minutes it crashed. Froze solid and needed a cold reboot. I've had it crash on loading and saving. On frantic fire fights and at peaceful interludes. It's even froze on the main menu after about thirty seconds.

It did this for ages, after the patch i got the sound loop crash. Not a total success really.

Having tried different resolutions, different options, turning off the sound, the extensions and anything else i was getting desperate.

 

After consulting with my dear friend mister Jack Daniels (straight, no ice ) i tried slowing my computer down.

In the bios (my mobo is a ECS K7S5A) i have the option to change the speed of the bus for the ram and the chip. either both at 133 or 100 or a mixture.

Like most people i obviously had my pc set for best performance, thats why i paid for a 1.7XP not a 1.1XP chip.

But after turning the speed down to 100MHz for both i have now got a 1.1XP athlon and 100 speed ram.

Most importantly i have left JK2 switched on for more than 30 hours without any crashes or problems.

 

I don't know the reason for this, maybe good fortune, maybe it's unique to my setup. Maybe my 133 speed ram isn't quite up to spec.

My theory is that because of the tricks AMD pull off to make my chip perform make it unreliable. A quick recap on athlon XP processors: AMD work magic on an Athlon chip operating at 1.46GHz and it outperforns an Intel P4 operating at 1.7GHz. Therefore i get a Athlon 1.7XP.

But by running the chip at a speed within it's real world capability ie 1.1GHz, when JK2 says 'do something complicated' the chip says 'ok'.

 

Any way round i can now play the game that i bought and i can fully enjoy it, without the need for constant save in case it crashes for no reason.

 

 

I hope that my tale can help even one other person, for that it was worth while trying.

Sacredsock:)