Computer whiz?

[Nanaki316]

I could really do with a hand as I'm experiencing trouble with my laptop. I've done so many things I'm at a complete loss of what to do now so I hoped my fellow escapists would have an idea?

I got a new laptop back in May this year, it's a Dell Studio 1558.
It's run really well for ages, runs most decent games and rarely has a problem.

Basically I've gone back to World of Warcraft, only to find I can no longer play the game.
I could when I first got the laptop, ran on high graphics and had no problems at all.
Like I said I went back since the last big patch, runs really well for about 5 minutes, then it just destroys my laptop. The fps crashes completely and the game freezes so I can't even exit it properly.
On top of that, when I finally get it to exit, the entire laptop is unuseable until I reset it.

I've been on the blizzard forums, updated all my graphics drivers, defraged, disk cleanuped, error checked, I'm very computer savvy but am totally confused what I can do now.

I've gone for help on the Dell forums and have had no help whatsoever.
On top of this, I can't email Dell because when I put in my service tag it tells me it is invalid.

Most of my other games run perfectly still, it's only WoW having this problem. Can anyone enlighten me as to what's happening?
I've researched getting to my laptop fan and cleaning it out - but I only wanted this to be a last resort as I don't want to risk cocking something up.
Does it sound like a dusty fan problem? Or something else? Any idea will do.

P.S I'll save you the time now and say "Haha that will teach you for trying to play WoW."

Productive responses? Thanks guys.

 

[tomtom94]

Could be that your graphics card's dying. Is it just WoW or is it other games as well?

 

[Hateren47]

Install something like System Info for Windows (siw.exe) that will record your max temperatures on all your sensors. Play some WoW with the monitoring app running in the background and check if something is over heating. If it is, start cleaning fans or send it in for service.

 

[Nanaki316]

Could be that your graphics card's dying. Is it just WoW or is it other games as well?

Other games are fine.

Install something like System Info for Windows (siw.exe) that will record your max temperatures on all your sensors. Play some WoW with the monitoring app running in the background and check if something is over heating. If it is, start cleaning fans or send it in for service.

Brilliant thanks I'll try that asap.

 

[tomtom94]

Could be that your graphics card's dying. Is it just WoW or is it other games as well?

Other games are fine.

Install something like System Info for Windows (siw.exe) that will record your max temperatures on all your sensors. Play some WoW with the monitoring app running in the background and check if something is over heating. If it is, start cleaning fans or send it in for service.

Brilliant thanks I'll try that asap.

If that doesn't work...tried an uninstall/reinstall? (Is that even possible with WoW?)

 

[7moreDead_v1legacy]

Did they update the gfx in WoW? check srl(canyourunit) see if it says it's up to it.

Failing that trying running the WoW repair tool - Or god help you a complete reinstall of the game - Could be corrupted files causing conflict. If all that is good then it could be the machines failing in the hardware...If you can clean out the cooling matrix and pray it isn't the cpu/gpu...I blame dell tbh.

 

[tahrey]

Try some other games and 3D apps/screensavers/etc that would load the system about as much as WoW does to see if it's just some strange incompatibility with your setup (don't scoff - FF7 HATED our Cyrix-based system pretty much because of the CPU; once a patch came along it was fine. Could be the reverse has happened and not enough people have been affected for it to be a big fix-priority).

Also some kind of generic benchmarking and burn-in app like 3Dmark, see what score it gives you and see if you can google up the results for the same/any similar systems and make sure it's a reasonably close match.
Do all the other windows things work ok? Have any wierd errors elsewhere?
(I'm going to hedge on "no", given that the problems only started after a WoW update)

Is it one of these gamer-portable hybrid laptops with switchable low-energy and high-performance graphics cards? Maybe you've flipped onto the former and it's not gone back to the latter for some reason?

The "runs fine for 5 minutes then breaks down" thing is strange. Maybe something else starts going in the background? Antivirus? Distributed computing client? Malware? Complex screensaver that you can't see because of the game? BTW rather than dusty fans, it may be an ACPI hiccup meaning the sensor readings are ignored or are corrupt, so the fan isn't spinning up as the CPU temperature rises, and so it auto-throttles in hardware, and may become unstable even so. I've had that happen halfway through a very heavy processing job that bogarted ALL clock cycles, including that used for hardware monitoring and the "cancel" option. All I could do on realising the laptop base was getting frighteningly hot was hurridly grab a fan-heater, set it to blow cold, and aim it in the vent slats which thankfully worked (then had to find some way of propping them together and come back in 15 minutes).
Shut it down, turn off properly rather than using sleep or hibernate, remove the AC and battery for a minute to make sure everything is off and clear, then restart and try again. If that doesn't work, have a fiddle in the BIOS (startup options - hit whatever key is mentioned at the very first power-up screen) and look for something like "always run fan at full speed" or similar, or options that will make it blow harder at lower temperatures. This should avoid that particular issue, though you probably only want it on for gaming sessions. Also, Notebook Hardware Control is a good download, though it's not been updated for a while. Allows you fine control over fan speed and trigger temperatures for one, though you have to be careful (and it was probably the root cause of my own ACHP cock-up). Got mine set up so the fan is turning so slow it's silent (vs HDD, environment...) when doing low-impact stuff with the CPU speedstepped at minimum, but it quickly runs up to a higher speed when working hard, and blips to 100% if it ever goes more than 2'c higher than it's normal "full blast" temperature, which would suggest something's blocking the vents or whatever.

Also, do Dell not have a telephone help line you can try? (Ignore that if you're deaf or have phone-a-phobia). Try to get the laptop's actual serial number, unless this is what you mean by "service tag", and stand your ground.

 

[Nanaki316]

Did they update the gfx in WoW? check srl(canyourunit) see if it says it's up to it.

Failing that trying running the WoW repair tool - Or god help you a complete reinstall of the game - Could be corrupted files causing conflict. If all that is good then it could be the machines failing in the hardware...If you can clean out the cooling matrix and pray it isn't the cpu/gpu...I blame dell tbh.

Actually tried it on canurunit and yeah my laptop maxes on the bar lol

The repair will be my absolute last resort I think, gonna try some of the things other users have suggested but thanks a lot too

 

[Nanaki316]

Try some other games and 3D apps/screensavers/etc that would load the system about as much as WoW does to see if it's just some strange incompatibility with your setup (don't scoff - FF7 HATED our Cyrix-based system pretty much because of the CPU; once a patch came along it was fine. Could be the reverse has happened and not enough people have been affected for it to be a big fix-priority).

Also some kind of generic benchmarking and burn-in app like 3Dmark, see what score it gives you and see if you can google up the results for the same/any similar systems and make sure it's a reasonably close match.
Do all the other windows things work ok? Have any wierd errors elsewhere?
(I'm going to hedge on "no", given that the problems only started after a WoW update)

Is it one of these gamer-portable hybrid laptops with switchable low-energy and high-performance graphics cards? Maybe you've flipped onto the former and it's not gone back to the latter for some reason?

The "runs fine for 5 minutes then breaks down" thing is strange. Maybe something else starts going in the background? Antivirus? Distributed computing client? Malware? Complex screensaver that you can't see because of the game? BTW rather than dusty fans, it may be an ACPI hiccup meaning the sensor readings are ignored or are corrupt, so the fan isn't spinning up as the CPU temperature rises, and so it auto-throttles in hardware, and may become unstable even so. I've had that happen halfway through a very heavy processing job that bogarted ALL clock cycles, including that used for hardware monitoring and the "cancel" option. All I could do on realising the laptop base was getting frighteningly hot was hurridly grab a fan-heater, set it to blow cold, and aim it in the vent slats which thankfully worked (then had to find some way of propping them together and come back in 15 minutes).
Shut it down, turn off properly rather than using sleep or hibernate, remove the AC and battery for a minute to make sure everything is off and clear, then restart and try again. If that doesn't work, have a fiddle in the BIOS (startup options - hit whatever key is mentioned at the very first power-up screen) and look for something like "always run fan at full speed" or similar, or options that will make it blow harder at lower temperatures. This should avoid that particular issue, though you probably only want it on for gaming sessions. Also, Notebook Hardware Control is a good download, though it's not been updated for a while. Allows you fine control over fan speed and trigger temperatures for one, though you have to be careful (and it was probably the root cause of my own ACHP cock-up). Got mine set up so the fan is turning so slow it's silent (vs HDD, environment...) when doing low-impact stuff with the CPU speedstepped at minimum, but it quickly runs up to a higher speed when working hard, and blips to 100% if it ever goes more than 2'c higher than it's normal "full blast" temperature, which would suggest something's blocking the vents or whatever.

Also, do Dell not have a telephone help line you can try? (Ignore that if you're deaf or have phone-a-phobia). Try to get the laptop's actual serial number, unless this is what you mean by "service tag", and stand your ground.

Thanks so much for your lengthy post, will be trying out all of those.
And yeah all my other games run just fine, the background task thing you suggested - I had checked for that and nothing starts up running behind WoW to make it kill itself like this.

It's also not one of the hybrid laptops you described

 

[digitalarcane667]

Hey, I know I'm the new guy here, but I make a living in IT/computer work, so here goes.

I have a relatively new system, desktop, ATI HD4890 with a gig of video ram, quad core cpu and 8GB of DDR2 with a nice WD Caviar Black harddrive -- this was all top of the line stuff roughly a year or more ago, and in Dalaran, it craps itself spectacularly.

They've done a lot of graphical changes in WoW, especially with shadows, lighting (light shafts), Lava and Water, these new changes will eat your graphics card for lunch, specially if you're playing on a laptop. I've managed to tune a netbook to play WoW 4.0.1, at a reasonable clip, so here are some tips from me:

Turn your shadows down to low. I don't care how much you love them, do it. shadows will cause your video card to choke. Turn down the lighting effects. the dynamic light shafts puts a lot of stress on your video card and doesn't make that big of a change imo. experiment with changing settings for water and/or lava. that's up to you.

Turn down ground clutter density and radius -- the less crap on the ground your video card has to draw, the more it can focus on spell effects and other character models.

Make sure you're turning off services in windows that you're not using. Google for black viper -- he has a list of services you can turn off on your computer safely -- doing this will reduce the amount of memory your system is using while playing WoW.

I hope this helps and apologize if anyone else already mentioned my hints.

 

[Nikolaz72]

Well Blizzard has upped the requirements for the games over the past few years with new technology and all. Might be that?

 

[Wolfram23]

Install something like System Info for Windows (siw.exe) that will record your max temperatures on all your sensors. Play some WoW with the monitoring app running in the background and check if something is over heating. If it is, start cleaning fans or send it in for service.

Brilliant thanks I'll try that asap.

HWMonitor, Real Temp, GPU-Z and MSI Afterburner are all easy 3rd party apps that give you plenty of good info like temps. I'd recommend GPU-Z for detailed GPU temp readings and Real Temp for CPU readings, but HWMonitor will show all the readings in one place if it can pick up the sensors. So, yeah, HWMonitor might be the simplest one. The other ones are more for overclockers.

 

[McScore]

I could when I first got the laptop (...) had no problems at all. (...) the game freezes (...) when I finally get it to exit, the entire laptop is unuseable until I reset it.

This sounds like "It runs pretty well but then it suddenly crashes". I suspect an overheating issue, too. But due to the age of the laptop it could be the first symptom of a slowly dying harddrive (maybe parts of WoW are now saved on damaged sectors on the disk causing the entire system to hang trying to access the data). As it doesn't cost anything I recommend downloading and burning the http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ . Boot from it and run the appropriate harddrive diagnostics tool (there is one of every major company on the UBCD). Be sure to also check the drive's S.M.A.R.T. status (using Parted Magic from the UBCD or any other program).

 

[Hateren47]

HWMonitor, Real Temp, GPU-Z and MSI Afterburner are all easy 3rd party apps that give you plenty of good info like temps. I'd recommend GPU-Z for detailed GPU temp readings and Real Temp for CPU readings, but HWMonitor will show all the readings in one place if it can pick up the sensors. So, yeah, HWMonitor might be the simplest one. The other ones are more for overclockers.

System Info for Windows reads all you sensors all on the same page as Current, Highest(the important one here) and Lowest that's why I recommended it instead of getting 2 or 3 apps to do the same thing.

 

[Nanaki316]

Thanks again for more points about the graphics, I ran the game with everything disabled and on it's lowest to see if it made a difference but it didn't

I suppose I'm at a loss deciding whether it's actually WoW or if it is something to do with my laptop.

Downloaded SystemInfo this morning and about to use it and run WoW, will report back shortly!

 

[olendvcook]

do you have any wow addons installed?

 

[Naheal]

What's your video card looking like?

How many programs are you running?

Are you running any addons? If so, what kind of addons are you running?

Where are you running around? Wintergrasp has always given me issues (unless that was fixed in a fairly recently).

 

[Nanaki316]

do you have any wow addons installed?

None at all, I used to be heavily dependant on them but since the patch everyone I know has had to get rid of them, even if they've been updated they were causing fps crashes.

 

[Nanaki316]

What's your video card looking like?

How many programs are you running?

Are you running any addons? If so, what kind of addons are you running?

Where are you running around? Wintergrasp has always given me issues (unless that was fixed in a fairly recently).

I run minimal programs, in fact before I start WoW I turned background stuff off to see if that helped.

Not running any addons anymore, as above.

I've tried running around in various places from cities to quiet old world places to see if it's made a difference, but nope

HWMonitor, Real Temp, GPU-Z and MSI Afterburner are all easy 3rd party apps that give you plenty of good info like temps. I'd recommend GPU-Z for detailed GPU temp readings and Real Temp for CPU readings, but HWMonitor will show all the readings in one place if it can pick up the sensors. So, yeah, HWMonitor might be the simplest one. The other ones are more for overclockers.

System Info for Windows reads all you sensors all on the same page as Current, Highest(the important one here) and Lowest that's why I recommended it instead of getting 2 or 3 apps to do the same thing.

When I downloaded SystemInfo it added in this thing called RegistryReviver? Is that essential to this? Because it scanned my laptop and found over a thousand errors :\ just things like missing files. The full download is like £25 though but could this be a problem?