Pc game stopped working suddenly

[Cov]

Hello people

I'm not sure if General Discussion is the right forum for my problem, but I just try and see what happens.

My current PC is a NEC Powermate VL4 from 2003, Pentium 4 / 2.8 GHz / 768 MB RAM.

It is just about enough for most tasks but I used it a lot for playing one particular PC game: Halo - Combat Evolved.
The performance is poor for 3D gaming with low FPS rates and low resolution (800 x 600).
It's not ideal but I played it a lot anyway ... until it wouldn't start up anymore since Friday.

When I double click the Halo icon the Halo startup screen comes up, the hard drive becomes busy (like usual) and then closes down and a window pops up, saying: "Gathering Exceptional Data" ... then another window asks if I want to send a report to microsoft.

That's it. ... De-installing and re-installing didn't help.

When I think of what I have possibly done before to have caused that sudden behavior ... I can only think of the following:

1. I am on wireless internet.
Recently my internet connection was cut off because I fiddeled around with the driver of my wireless PCI card, and I took my PC to the main PC which is hard wired to the router of our house, to put the ethernet cable into my PC for only a few minutes and make it download the driver for my wireless card again.
When I did it, I plugged into my PC the 16:9 Monitor of the main PC instead of my 3:4 Monitor.
I played a little bit around with changing the resolution, but when I was finished with downloading the driver for my wireless card, I changed everything back to the way it was because my wireless connection then worked again.

Went back to my room, hooked up my 3:4 Monitor - and everything was good again.

2. I recently noticed that a few of my drivers were out of date (I remember now that was the reason why my wireless one stopped working in the first place because my update attempt failed initially), and I made a list of what I have and what else I could update to.

- My display driver (Intel 82845) was from 30/12/02 and the update brought it to 28/06/05.
- My IDE ATA / ATAPI Controller was from 02/07/2001 and after the update from 01/10/2002.

Strange thing now is: when I updated the graphics driver, the display quality of the characters has become blury - it was much sharper before.
All settings are like they were before and it is 100% the correct driver as well.

What is going on ?

I tried to reverse the driver to the old one from 2002, but then the problems became really persistant. Windows asked 10 times where to get this & that little file - a nightmare.
No, the original Windows CD didn't help.
So for the moment I re-installed the up-to-date driver again, the one which is a little blury ... great.

Have run different utulities like XP manager and CCleaner to get rid of any ballast files, but that didn't help.

The only reason why I don't format my hard drive and re-install windows XP from scratch is that I cannot back up my 85% full 100GB hard drive.

As soon as I get my new PC (can still take a few weeks at least), I will transfer all data to the new 500GB SATA II hard drive but as long as I can't save it, I can't go the easy way out and just re-install windows.

Have you guys any idea please ? Please help ... this is driving me nuts.

[Behemoth]

Have you tried changing the refresh rate in display properties for your monitor ?

Really should be in the hardware section, I'm sure a mod will move it later.

[directhex]

probably the video driver update

intel's drivers are *fragile*

[kalniel]

It's because you were so nice to Windows earlier

Did the error report from Microsoft come back with anything?

[Cov]

@ Behemoth ... the refresh rate is at 60Hz like usual. I remeber to have played around with the frequency (60/65/70/75) but had it set back to 60 again.

Regarding the hardware section, where would you put this kind of posting exactly ?
There is no tab for miscelaneous hardware problems.

@ directhex ... I understand the sense of driver updates in general, but why do some of them have to hijack you and take over the control of your computer ?
It's a massive file which installs something with a user interface ugly like the darkest night. Software developers don't seem to care what the users want.
Why can't drivers just install themselves to stay in the background where they belong to, and let every settings be business of the OS ?
Everybody is cooking their own soup.

Why has the display quality deteorated instead of improved, hmmm.

@ kalniel ... unfortunately I need windows for gaming, but maybe you're right - I should get an x-box 360 for gaming. You made me seriously thinking now.
Gosh, I wasted so much money on PC games ... pffffffffff

And no, there has nothing come back from Microsoft (yet) ... I guess I have to format the hard drive in order to sort this crap.
How am i gonna save my important data ... pfffffffff
Looks like the best way to avoid Windows getting cluttered again is to leave the PC switched off, haha ...

There we are back to X-Box 360

[Thorsson]

Even if 85% of your HD is full, you wouldn't have to back up anywhere near that amount. You only need to back up the data that is yours, so Windows, and even Halo (with the exception of such things as saves) don't need to be backed up.

If you have an LCD monitor 60Hz is the correct refresh rate. If you have a CRT the higher the better generally. If you have an LCD monitor though, 800x600 is not its native resolution and you wouldn't expect a good picture. Is it on 32-bit colour?

It sounds like Halo is not seeing your card as capable of running the game. Although this could be down to the drivers, I couldn't find any reports of problems with them. Therefore it seems more likely that the installation on your PC has corrupted something, probably a windows component. You could try a Windows Repair, it does work occasionally and doesn't take too long or require wiping anything.

P.S. Why is the PC in your "My System" completely different from the one you describe?

[Cov]

@ Thorsson ... thank you for your suggestion. Yeah, I keep on installing and de-installing a lot of different things, and a sudden wired behavior of Windows was to be expected - sooner or later anyway. Considering that my last clean installation was about 1 year ago ... ergo: I'm overdue !

I'll try to repair or install windows over the existing installment without formatting. That wouldn't delete any 3rd party data ... thanks for the idea.

Oh, and the spec in "My System" is just wishful thinking haha.
I want to get exactly these components but before I place an order I want to make sure the retailer has everything in stock. Well, as you might know there is a serious shortage of the new Dualcore. (I have changed my mind from Q6600 to E8400) ...

Specs are now updated.

[directhex]

an unfortunate side effect of just how enormously complex the driver infrastructure for modern graphics cards is are regressions - where something gets worse than it used to be

it happened to me a lot in the late 1990s, with ati's terrible drivers (i could have crashes or i could have half the screen not drawn and the other half flickery and purple in opengl apps). it happens to me a lot with my office laptop (in xp, if i use any driver newer than the one provided by dell, it becomes unstable)