I have a big problem with LFS. There is another similar thread on it but I am running out of ideas now and really need to get it sorted so I thought it would be worth a thread of its own.

After a varying amount of time, LFS screen freezes for about 5 seconds during which time the sound loops. The game then continues. Usually by the time it comes back round I’m stuck in a barrier. Happens online and offline. When online, if I view the replay my car disappears while the freeze happens, then I reappear in the barrier. I assume that means that when the freeze happens communication with the master server is lost temporarily. When offline and I view the replay, the car doesn’t disappear but continues in a straight line.

Also, much less regularly my graphics go crazy. Textures and polygons go mad and it’s a struggle to hit escape and click the end game button.

Even less occasionally I get very occasional black thin polygons appearing on the screen during the game, probably only for one frame. I have only noticed this a few times.

I was suspicious of the graphics card, so I borrowed an NVIDIA 6600 and installed the latest NVIDIA drivers for the 6xxx series. It still freezes, but the behaviour is different. The screen freezes for 5-10 seconds, then the screen goes blank, then LFS crashes and returns me to windows with the standard error capture message (with Send/Don’t send boxes).

I havn’t had any other graphics problems. At the moment I only play LFS but previously I have played several other racing games with no problems.

I have recently started testing using single player and 10 AIs only. The symptoms are different – the screen freezes and the game stops. I need to do some more testing on this, will update this post when I have more info.

I can’t remember when this problem started, maybe 6 months to a year ago. I only started to try and solve it when I entered a league a few weeks ago (the GFC) so it’s really important that I get it solved now.

My PC
AMD Sempron 2800+ (never overclocked)
Motherboard: EPoX EP-8HMMi-A, K8M800
Mainboard: Chipset/northbridge: VIA K8M400 (VT8380)
Southbridge: VIA VT8237
BIOS: Phoenix Version 6.00 PG 10/11/2005
Memory: 512MB DDR 200MHz PC3200 Corsair VS512MB400
Graphics: Gigabyte NVIDIA FX5900XT (never overclocked)
Microsoft Wireless USB
Netgear WG111T Wireless USB Adapter
Microsoft Wireless Optical Desktop 1000 Keyboard and Mouse

Software
Windows XP Pro SP2
DirectX 9.0c June 2007
VIA Hyperion INF Driver 2.90A 17-05-2007
VIA Hyperion AGP Driver 4.60A 17-05-2007
Realtek Audio AC'97 Driver v2.11.15.0
AVG 7.5
Logitech Gaming Software (Wingman Profiler)
Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0
Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0
Netgear WG111T Program
NVIDIA Drivers - Forceware Version 93.71
MSXLM 6.0 Patrser
VIA Rhine-Family Fast Ethernet Adapter
RealTek AC'97 Audio
Windows Installer 3.1

What I’ve tried (all without success L)
Removed all PCI cards
Close all programs not required to run LFS (inc. virus checker)
Reinstalled LFS.
Format (not quick format) a different hard drive, reinstall XP and LFS and required programs.
Turned Direct X sound acceleration to BASIC
Updated to latest directx 9.0c (June 2007)
Enable write combing on GFX card - unticked
Haze effect OFF
Ran Prime95 stress test for 11 tests (approx 1hr)
Check CPU temperature – runs at about 35C with LFS
Run DXDIAG graphics test – no errors reported.
Updated RealTek Audio driver
Run without Logitech Winman Profiler
Used MemTest to run a memory test for 1 hour - no errors
Run with PC side panel removed to aid cooling
Reset before playing LFS
V-Sync on in LFS
Hard drives set to “never turn off” on power saving options
Used Process Explorer to try and see if anything is hogging the CPU during the freezes.
Turned off automatic Windows Updates
Tried running LFS with Netgear USB wireless network receiver uplugged.
Tested main hard drive with HDTune and did surface scan of hard drives - OK.

Still to try
Run LFS with all USB devices unplugged.
Run LFS with integrated sound disabled.


Firstly, thanks for taking the time to read my post to the end! If you have any suggestions I’d be very grateful. I don’t mind if I have to replace components of my PC, as long as it solves the problem. There are several other threads around discussing the same or similar problems so if I can’t get this fixed I may post it as an LFS bug as no-one has reported having the same problem with other games and as far as I could see no-one has reported this as a bug either.

Could anyone with similar problems please describe them and post your full PC spec - maybe there is something in common?

I’ll keep this post updated with things I’ve tried and any other observations.

Wow Nick, that's some list!

OK. How 'bout rolling back your Nvidia drivers to a previous version?

i.e. Did the start of the problem coincide with a driver update?


EDIT: Also, how's your power supply? a) Is it healthy and b) Is it sufficient? (graphics cards can play up sometimes if they're starved of sufficient power and driven hard).

b.t.w - What temp is the graphics card runing at (I know you've taken off the casing, but my Nvidia card only got better when I cleaned out all the dust from under the fan cover and around the cooling fins )

I have the same problem. I have absolutely identified the culprit. Its my hard disk. Its too slow. Its an older one, so I'm going to update it. On my old one which was much better, I never had this problem. With this one, I do. I tried everything to eliminate the stutter, but nothing worked. I finally noticed it happens even in windows, or in any program. Its the hard disk. Update it to a faster one.

Ven

Quote from dungbeetle :

Wow Nick, that's some list!

OK. How 'bout rolling back your Nvidia drivers to a previous version?

i.e. Did the start of the problem coincide with a driver update?


EDIT: Also, how's your power supply? a) Is it healthy and b) Is it sufficient? (graphics cards can play up sometimes if they're starved of sufficient power and driven hard).

b.t.w - What temp is the graphics card runing at (I know you've taken off the casing, but my Nvidia card only got better when I cleaned out all the dust from under the fan cover and around the cooling fins )

Thanks! I don't think it's the NVIDIA driver, becasue I've tried 2 different graphics cards, and thry used different drivers.

This problem has been around for ages - I can't remember when it started. I've just lived with it until now. A lot of people reported problems like this starting at Patch S though.

The power supply suggestion is an interesting one. I bought a new one a year or two ago after suspected problems with my old one. It's a 400W one, and I did check out the max currents at various voltages (I believe you need a lot of 5V current for devices) before I bought it. It was cheap though (£18). Is there a good way to test it? Maybe I will try plugging everything in and see if the problem becomes more frequent.

My GFX card doesn't display temperature, but I have cleaned it out, and remember I have had similar problems with a totally different card.

Thanks for your suggestions!

Quote from Venus :

I have the same problem. I have absolutely identified the culprit. Its my hard disk. Its too slow. Its an older one, so I'm going to update it. On my old one which was much better, I never had this problem. With this one, I do. I tried everything to eliminate the stutter, but nothing worked. I finally noticed it happens even in windows, or in any program. Its the hard disk. Update it to a faster one.

Ven

Thanks. It is less of a stuttering though, more of a temporary freeze. Also, I have tried it on 2 different hard drives. Both 80GB, but I will check their write speeds tonight.

Quote from Nick A :

My GFX card doesn't display temperature, but I have cleaned it out, and remember I have had similar problems with a totally different card.

Thanks for your suggestions!

No problem.

Sorry nothing came up trumps

Oh, by the way. For future reference, if it's an Nvidia card you've got, you can monitor its temperature via the Nvidia Control Panel.

Go to:

3D Settings > Performance > Monitor temperature levels.

It logs temperature over time and produces a graph.

Hope you get it sorted soon.

hi !

if you are on AGP card, try to use AGPX4 speed not AGPX8.

bye !

Quote from dungbeetle :

No problem.
3D Settings > Performance > Monitor temperature levels.

I just found out that NVIDIA have taken out the GPU temperature monitoring feature on the latest ForceWare drivers - useful!

I measured my PSU voltages last night: 12.15V on the 12V rail and 5.16V on the 5V, which is well within spec. I'll keep an eye on them under load to check that they're stable.

I have tried looking at freezes using Process Explorer now, and couldn’t see anything untoward happening when the freezes occurred.

I'm also going to try using MS Process Monitor to monitor disk activity.

Quote from Richthofun72 :

hi !

if you are on AGP card, try to use AGPX4 speed not AGPX8.

bye !

Thanks, havn't tried that. How do I do it?

Quote from Nick A :

I just found out that NVIDIA have taken out the GPU temperature monitoring feature on the latest ForceWare drivers - useful!

Hmm ... that's strange, 'cos I have the latest drivers installed here.

ForceWare has two types of user interface. Have you checked in the 'Advanced' user interface as opposed to the basic one?

Quote from Richthofun72 :

hi !

if you are on AGP card, try to use AGPX4 speed not AGPX8.

bye !

Maybee that's going to shift/solve/better the problem, i noticed myself (ATI) that the freezetime is approx. the same in ANY direct3d utilization, even on the oldest direct3d Nfs or total racing even Viper racing stutters ONCE then everything runs smooth for about a few hours then another stutter occurs...

i'm out of ideas too.

regards

Do you have more than one soundcard?
Didnt find anyone in your list, but youll have one internal on your motherboard.
My PC has one internal and one external, I shutted down the internal one in bios and havent had any freezes since then... 2-3h driving.

Quote from mike20002 :

Do you have more than one soundcard?
Didnt find anyone in your list, but youll have one internal on your motherboard.
My PC has one internal and one external, I shutted down the internal one in bios and havent had any freezes since then... 2-3h driving.

No, I just have the onboard one. I read somewhere else that this problem can be cause by a conflict between onboard and external soundcards. It seems there are a lot of things which can cause this problem though!

Quote from dungbeetle :

Hmm ... that's strange, 'cos I have the latest drivers installed here.

ForceWare has two types of user interface. Have you checked in the 'Advanced' user interface as opposed to the basic one?

I will have another look tonight, but as I've tried two graphics cards I doubt that overheating is the problem anyway.

I had a strange one last night, the cocpit turned black, then a strip of track around an opponents cars turned darker. But no freezing.

I am becoming suspicious that it might be a power problem. I aslo got a momentary graphical glitch last night and at the same time my infra-red headphones picked up some momentary interference. Also, I noticed my hard drive sometimes (maybe every 10 mins or so) makes a noise (it's like a little screach), the same noise it makes just before it turns off. The 5v and 12v voltage still look steady enough though.

I'm running out of ideas again so I'm starting to think about replacing some components, it's taking up too much time diagnosing it. I may try buying a cheap new motherboard and PSU.

I briefly had newer nvidia drivers and noticed that some features had moved and you had to use ntune to access them ( i have a feeling that Temp monitor was one of them)
I went back to the NGOmodded97.92's though. The best drivers for my 6800GS by far.

Do you use a good driver cleaner before installing new drivers? You certainly should to avoid conflicts.

Hard disk speed really shouldn't matter....after my newer hard drive died i've been forced to use my old 5200 speed drives, but i have no problem with LFS( or STALKER, which seems to induce a lot of disk activity but no stuttering or freezing occurs)
Though the strange noise your hearing with your HD is certainly worrying....i would back up any important stuff from that drive NOW. I lost 80gigs of music because i left it too long. A mistake ill never make again

You say you've run memory tests, but i still have a funny feeling there might be a problem in that direction. Can you borrow a stick of memory from someone to try instead of yours?

Probably no help but i thought I'd throw out a few random ideas

Quote from The Moose :

I briefly had newer nvidia drivers and noticed that some features had moved and you had to use ntune to access them ( i have a feeling that Temp monitor was one of them)
I went back to the NGOmodded97.92's though. The best drivers for my 6800GS by far.

Do you use a good driver cleaner before installing new drivers? You certainly should to avoid conflicts.

Hard disk speed really shouldn't matter....after my newer hard drive died i've been forced to use my old 5200 speed drives, but i have no problem with LFS( or STALKER, which seems to induce a lot of disk activity but no stuttering or freezing occurs)
Though the strange noise your hearing with your HD is certainly worrying....i would back up any important stuff from that drive NOW. I lost 80gigs of music because i left it too long. A mistake ill never make again

You say you've run memory tests, but i still have a funny feeling there might be a problem in that direction. Can you borrow a stick of memory from someone to try instead of yours?

Probably no help but i thought I'd throw out a few random ideas

ThanksWhat you say about the temp monitor being put into ntune tallys up with something I read the other day.

I have all my music and docs backed up onto an external HD so no worries there.

I have never done a driver clean actually. What program do you use? Sounds like it's worth doing anyway.

I tried to identify which HD was making the squeek. Turns out they both do it when the power goes off so perhaps it is a normal noise in that situation. Then a promising discovery this morning: there is a bad connection on the power lead to the HD. if I poke it, the HD makes the squeeking noise it makes when it shuts down. I have also heard this noise in the past intermittantly from the PC (without moving anything). Tonight I will move the connectors round and try again. I didn't have any problems last night anyway though so it may be a while before I know whether it has solved the problem.

Plug off the WLAN USB Device.
Sometimes, this Devices causes freezes. I had the same problem with an D-Link USB Wireless Stick.

Plug the Netgear WG111T Wireless USB Adapter off, restart and try again in Singleplayer.

Greetings

If the power connection doesn't solve it I'll definately give that a go. I just did a search on the net and found quite a lot of references to this problem due to the WLAN USB, but most were for the WG111 rather than the WG111T. It seems they draw a lot of power and get very hot, so fits in with my thoughts along the lines of power problems. Thanks!

Quote from Nick A :

I have never done a driver clean actually. What program do you use? Sounds like it's worth doing anyway.

Driver Cleaner Pro http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=745

I always do a proper driver clean before installing new versions. Make sure you read the readme first

Strange problem indeed... All I can say is that I hope you solved it. You already did a thorough diagnostic job.
I am curious about it, however... You said you tested 2 different hard disks, but you didn't say if you tested 2 different installs of Windows XP on separate HDs, and if both HDs were connected at the same time to the system or not. It could be related to some momentarily unavailable resource being polled by the OS during the freeze, and it doesn't necessarily have to be related to LFS, so two different installs of LFS on separate hard disks wouldn't exclude hard disk problems. The sound your hard disk is making is interesting, it shouldn't happen while the PC is working. Is there any clue related to HD problems in the Event Viewer, or is it clean? Any non-cosmetic errors? Did you test both your hard disks? You could try HDTune, checking the performance first: it should be steady enough, with no significant long dips, then you could check SMART parameters and do a full surface scan, all of this after being sure the file systems are clean.

Quote from Albieg :

Strange problem indeed... All I can say is that I hope you solved it. You already did a thorough diagnostic job.
I am curious about it, however... You said you tested 2 different hard disks, but you didn't say if you tested 2 different installs of Windows XP on separate HDs, and if both HDs were connected at the same time to the system or not. It could be related to some momentarily unavailable resource being polled by the OS during the freeze, and it doesn't necessarily have to be related to LFS, so two different installs of LFS on separate hard disks wouldn't exclude hard disk problems. The sound your hard disk is making is interesting, it shouldn't happen while the PC is working. Is there any clue related to HD problems in the Event Viewer, or is it clean? Any non-cosmetic errors? Did you test both your hard disks? You could try HDTune, checking the performance first: it should be steady enough, with no significant long dips, then you could check SMART parameters and do a full surface scan, all of this after being sure the file systems are clean.

Yes, it's a seperate installation of XP. As for whether the second HD was plugged in at the time or not, I can't remember unfortunately, but they were probably both connected. Last night I ran LFS for about 3 hours and had no freezes but the second HD was unplugged, could just be a coincidence but I'll keep an eye on it.

What's the event viewer? ProcessMonitor? That seemed to give so much output I didn't knwo where to start!

I'll add HDTune and the surface scan to my (growing) list of things to try - thanks .

I tried triggering the dodgy power connector I found yesterday while running LFS last night to try and replicate the problem. Got the HD noise plenty of times, but it never caused LFS to freeze so not so confident that's the problem now. I havn't switched the cables yet because I wanted to be able to replicate the problem before making any changes to try and solve it.

Start, run, type eventvwr.msc (you have others way to reach the event viewer, anyway). Relevant sections are - generally - System and Application. If you find something interesting go to www.eventid.net to check it, or visit MS Knowledge Base.
Process Monitor has to be filtered a lot to be readable in short times... It's extremely powerful, but maybe a bit too much.
As for replicating the problem, it could be tricky since you could be looking for a problem that affects LFS but it's not related to it, such as a system process hanging for a short period of time because of momentarily unavailable system resources. Hard disks timing out do that sort of stuff in some cases, but it's not the only thing to bring such behaviour. For instance once I had a Windows 2003 Server that was completely freezing for minutes because of a software (MDaemon) polling a directory with an enormous amount of files in it. But then again, my thoughts are nothing more than a guess in this case, and I could be completely wrong.

RE: Event Viewer - go :

All programs/Administrative Tools/Event Viewer and see if there are any error relating to the time of the last crash.

Sorry - should have suggested this when you first mentioned the problem.

Here's a quick update:

I thought for a while that the Netgear Wireless USB dongle might be the cause of the problem as I read on the Netgear forum that many people had freezing and 100% CPU usage problems and that it tends to overheat. I unplugged it and it was Ok for a few hours of LFSing but then it froze again

Also used HDTune (great program - thanks for the tip) to do a full surface scan (no errors reported) and 3 benchmarks, screenshorts attached. The first one does have a bit of a drop - what do you think?

I also checked out Event Viewer (also very useful) but no errors were reported for last night, when I had 2/3 freezes.

So I'm no further forward really so again I'm owndering about buying a new motherboard and PSU if I don't make some progress soon. Keep the suggestions coming!

Edit: Results for hard drive 2 below, results for hard drive 1 at the bottom.

Some drops are common, although they may suggest keeping an eye on the hard disk. They can be related to OS or other software activity during the scan, although one drop occurs always in the same place in all three scans, so there may be some kind of trouble there; unfortunately doing a certain diagnosis in this case is really difficult, especially if SMART parameters are okay. I had only a case where the hard disk was deemed perfect by diagnostics and benchmarks but it was, in reality, faulty, just because of a performance drop like that, more severe perhaps (I can't exactly remember) and plenty of hard disks that showed the same drops that had no problems at all. Only a direct comparison with another HD with the same exact content would help making a decision. This isn't hard to do, you only need some imaging software (like, for instance, Acronis Migrate Easy, but there are others) and a new HD, but I realise you need to have some stuff available, and this may not be the case.

I'm afraid I've run out of suggestions. Since I do tech support/administration for business pcs and networks I'm afraid I've run out of suggestions, but hardware buffs may help more.

I'd personally try to strip down the system to a minimum shutting down unneeded software and services, even uninstalling some stuff, especially programs that may interfere with input/output activities (such as indexing software, firewalls and antiviruses), but this doesn't sound like the culprit in this case.

Anyway I'm impressed with the job you did.

@nick

i was wondering what kind of hd you where using, because i always get a curve like this: (fast test of a Ide).
is it a S-Ata drive, or does your hd-infrastructure limit your bandwith to your drives, or are they just plain fast?
Because even the tests of the c't (well known magazine here in germany) get's results similar to mine...

regards