DA:O Game crashing after 15 minutes

Dragon Age: Origins

DarNoor

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November 11, 2006
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713
Has anyone experienced this? My game is crashing, and restarting my computer after 10-15 minutes of gameplay. I went to the forums, and i don't see any solution for this. There are people who are experiencing the same issue. Has anyone here had that problem? I am running it on XP. I don't know if it's my graphics card (Nvidia 7900) or not. I hope i can fix it, because it looks like a great game.
 
Joined
Nov 11, 2006
Messages
713
Hmmm, 15 minutes.... There are possibilities.

1) Overheating. Dust has probably started clogging your fans up a bit and now something in your machine is getting too hot and causing the computer to freak out. There are other ways this can happen but dust is far and away the most common cause. Try cleaning off your fans. (And beware static electricity shocks. One zap to your motherboard and your computer is finished. Make SURE you have grounded yourself before going in there.)

2) Bad memory. Something in the higher banks of your RAM isn't quite right and 1's are changing to 0's all by themselves - blowing the computer's mind. This one isn't too likely unless this is a new computer or you just expanded the computer's memory.

3) Bad/corrupt drivers. You need to see the blue screen of death to diagnose this one. If the blue screen is always complaining about one of NVIDIA's driver files then it's probably a bad video driver. Audio drivers can crash you, too. To see the blue screen on XP you need to poke around... errr... well, I haven't got XP now but you right click on My Computer, select properties, then start hunting around. There will be an option to automatically restart on a crash. Clear that option and you'll get the good old blue screen.

4) You have cussed at your computer too much. You must appease the computer gods by sacrificing a goat (or at least a picture of a goat) and two fudge covered oreo cookies. ;)
 
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DA was very stable for me, I only had 3-4 crashes over the course of the entire game. I'm also using XP and an nVidia card (8800 GTS 512).

Perhaps try reinstalling after a complete uninstall.
 
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Thanks for the suggestions. I will try cleaning the inside. I haven't done that in quite a while.
 
Joined
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Darnoor

I'm also experiencing a lot of crashes with DA - although looking at the DA forums, it seems that the game dislikes ATI cards in general.

However if the clean out doesn't work for you, I found that running in windowed mode seemed to help.

I still get occasional crashes though and it seems to be related to fmod_event.dll which is a sound driver. There were two high def sound drivers listed in my device manager. Turning off one of them seemed to help matter as well.

Apart from that - save after every battle.
 
Joined
Aug 7, 2009
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I think the problem is the Nvidia 7900. I had similar problems with the 7900GS card and immediately upgraded to a Nvidia 8800.

2 Major causes of Constant crashes while gaming is an Underpowered Video Card and/or an Underpowered Power Supply.

Shaf
 
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