Byrons_Ghost
First Post
Ok- I got a new computer a few months back, but it's been having a lot of trouble running games, and it's gotten pretty much unplayable recently (though other programs still work fine). I'm thinking about trying a clean Windows install before I start buying new hardware in the hope that it will get fixed.
However, all I have from my company is a restore disc, and not an actual XP disc. This is for XP home edition. My question is, should I format my hard drive before restoring, or do restore discs typically need a pre-existing version of windows to roll things back?
Also, if anyone has any tips on troubleshooting game crashes, they'd be appreciated. I've got all the latest DirectX and drivers for my machine, but the games I've tried (Pirates, Oblivion, Silent Hill 2, FEAR) still lock up frequently. That's a wide array of games, and even though Oblivion is pretty demanding, I have the recommended specs so it should run at least decently.
Normally I can get an hour or two from Oblivion which, ironically, is better than Pirates or Silent Hill. FEAR is pretty random when it crashes. I generally get a blue screen telling me that it's caused by the nv4 video driver, so there might be a problem with the video card. However, Pirates has given errors that it could not initialize DirectX, so maybe that's causing problems as well.
Anyhow, my specs are:
AMDx2 3800
450 watt PSU
1 gb Kingston hyperDDR
NVidia GeForece 6800xt
If anyone needs any more information, just ask! Thanks!
However, all I have from my company is a restore disc, and not an actual XP disc. This is for XP home edition. My question is, should I format my hard drive before restoring, or do restore discs typically need a pre-existing version of windows to roll things back?
Also, if anyone has any tips on troubleshooting game crashes, they'd be appreciated. I've got all the latest DirectX and drivers for my machine, but the games I've tried (Pirates, Oblivion, Silent Hill 2, FEAR) still lock up frequently. That's a wide array of games, and even though Oblivion is pretty demanding, I have the recommended specs so it should run at least decently.
Normally I can get an hour or two from Oblivion which, ironically, is better than Pirates or Silent Hill. FEAR is pretty random when it crashes. I generally get a blue screen telling me that it's caused by the nv4 video driver, so there might be a problem with the video card. However, Pirates has given errors that it could not initialize DirectX, so maybe that's causing problems as well.
Anyhow, my specs are:
AMDx2 3800
450 watt PSU
1 gb Kingston hyperDDR
NVidia GeForece 6800xt
If anyone needs any more information, just ask! Thanks!