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Friday, June 29, 2007

Oblivion Sucking My Hard Drive Away

It seems like every time I play Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, it gets less stable. It has gotten to the point where I don't play full screen anymore in the hopes of recovering from a crash. Sometimes, though, it just takes the whole Windows box with it.

And people wonder why I like console games.

Did this happen to anyone else? I didn't see any mass reports of unreliability. I'm afraid this is tipping my hard drive (which I did defrag after the install) into Oblivion itself. I suppose I could re-install, but I'm like level 20 right now.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Computer issue. If it was game related usually (but not all the time) you'd just get dumped back to the desktop.

I've played Oblivion for 122+ hours and the amount of crashes I've gotten is pretty rare. The 111+ hrs was on my old Athlon XP 2800+ with ATI X800 video card. The 11+ was on my C2D with Geforce 8800GTS.

Mostly played on 2003 32bit.


You should do the usual.

Memtest86+ over night.
Processor burn-in overnight.
Loop the Doom 3 demo or 3dmark demo overnight.
Run a temp monitor during these sessions as well and have it log to a .csv/.txt file.

Don't forget to blow out your computer of all the dust it has collected.

Downgrade/upgrade your drivers as appropriate.

Remove unnecessary peripheral/cards to pinpoint the issue.

Josh said...

I think I've figured it out. The HD is fairly old and I think it just wasn't handling large textures very well. A lower res/texture set seems to have stabilized it quite a bit.