Frequent crashes with Windows 7

[Agis Silverfish]

Hi.

My game is crashing quite often. I have Windows 7. I don't have a top computer, but I don't use that many eye-candy OXPs either. Only Deepspace and System Redux. Any ideas?

[another_commander]

- Oolite version?
- Any stderr.txt file remaining in the oolite.app folder after a crash?
- Latest.log following a crash?
- System specs?
- Any third party apps running in the background, like antiviurs, or particularly memory hungry programs?

Once we have this information, we might be able to pinpoint what's wrong.

[Agis Silverfish]

- Oolite version?

The latest.

- Any stderr.txt file remaining in the oolite.app folder after a crash?
- Latest.log following a crash?

Can't tell. I deleted the whole thing to install it again later.

- System specs?

Acer Aspire 5315
Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate
RAM 1 GB
Remaining memory 404 MB
Intel Celeron CPU 530 @ 1.73 GHz, 1729 Mhz

2.7 in the Windows test.

- Any third party apps running in the background, like antiviurs, or particularly memory hungry programs?

Google Chrome, Word... No big downloads or antivirus.

Once we have this information, we might be able to pinpoint what's wrong.

Thank you! I just wanted to know if anybody else had had the same problem. It's a 2007 laptop after all, maybe it's time to break the piggy bank.

[another_commander]

The stderr.txt and Latest.log information after a crash will be needed if we are to do something about it. If you install the game again and it continues to crash, please provide these two files. Also, we are missing video card information, which is certainly helpful to have.

[Thargoid]

I'd wonder if you're running out of memory, trying to fit Win7 Ultimate into 1GB of RAM (let alone actually running anything on it). You're running on the very minimal hardware there presuming it's the 32-bit version (you're on half-minimum if it's the 64-bit). See here for fuller details.

I can report running the game (trunk and stable versions) quite happily under Win7 Home 64-bit on an Acer Aspire One 722, although that's with 4GB of RAM. That upgrade cost about £35 and took all of 5 minutes to install - you may want to consider something similar or at the very least perhaps experiment with ReadyBoost and see if that helps.

[Cody]

The Acer Aspire 5315 specs list the GPU as the Intel GMA X3100.

[Capt. Murphy]

The Acer Aspire 5315 specs list the GPU as the Intel GMA X3100.

Which will also be trying to use what limited system memory there is left for video so I think Thargoid's diagnosis is spot on.

Minimising OXPs that add additional ships to the game will help. There are one or two (Liners for example) that have ships that take a lot of video memory. If you have that installed taking it out would be a good idea. Post your latest log and we can give you an idea of what might be a good idea to remove.

[Agis Silverfish]

The stderr.txt and Latest.log information after a crash will be needed if we are to do something about it. If you install the game again and it continues to crash, please provide these two files. Also, we are missing video card information, which is certainly helpful to have.

OK, I will play a vainilla game and see what happens. By the way, I had the game installed in a Documents folder. I don't know if it makes any difference.

I'm not sure about the video card.

Mobile Intel 965 Express
Adapter: Mobile Intel GMA X3100
Available Graphics Memory: 251 MB

Is that it?

P.S. So the memory seems to be the problem. I will update the computer as soon as I can! Thank you so much!

[Tricky]

Definately use ReadyBoost with a dedicated USB memory stick.

[Thargoid]

You can double-up to 2GB for £25 (for example here) - that's the max for your system. I'd do that and also consider ready-boost, especially if your machine has a built-in SD card slot where a nice juicy card can live permanently and be given over entirely to readyboost (you can get SD's cheap as chips from Tesco et al, or your local equivalent supermarket if non-UK).

In answer to your other question - yes the Intel 965 is your "graphics card" (it's actually a graphics chip built onto the motherboard, but it serves the same function as the card but is non-replaceable/upgradeable).

[Capt. Murphy]

One other thing that can breathe a bit of extra life into an ageing machine is a thorough disc maintenance session. Your PC is probably making a lot of use of the swap file (both in general and playing Oolite), so a lot of disc thrashing. Anything to speed up hard disc read/writes will help general PC responsiveness, and just may make Oolite a little more stable. My old XP machine (which has hardware stats not dissimilar to yours, other than a 256MB discrete GPU) benefits hugely from this.

You may well already do this kind of thing but if not this increased responsiveness of the XP machine significantly.

First thing is to maximise free space on the hard disk - CCleaner is my favourite 'cleaner' app. Also go through your installed programs and un-install anything you don't use.

2nd is a ChkDsk. If the hard disk has got indexing errors read/write speeds can drop significantly.

3rd Look at your swap file settings. A Windows managed swap file can change size quite frequently and get very fragmented (although I think Win 7 is better than this than XP). Try setting a fixed size swap file 2-3 times the size of the installed RAM.

4th Defragment. Again Win 7s defragmenter is supposed to be better than previous Windows versions, but it could be worth using a third party app that can also optimise file placement as well as defragment. I used MyDefrag on the XP machine (not felt the need to use it on my Win 7 machine)- which with some tweaking of it's scripts can be used to place (a fixed size) swap file at the beginning (fastest area) of the hard disk, followed by files used at Boot time, followed by Oolite files etc. Having commonly used files all bunched together in the fastest part of the disc does wonders on older machines.

[Agis Silverfish]

Thanks a lot, I have just put CCleaner to it.