Ok, this one isn't good. I was in Earth Space Dock recustomizing my ship when the game locked up. This required a hard reboot. Wondering if I had found a reproducable bug I decided to retry the steps. It worked, the game locked up, but now I blue screen either during Windows start-up or within a minute after. Here's hoping this can be fixed soon. I can't submit a bug report since I can't get back into STO so this will have to do.
If someone at Cryptic wants to check my character data, it's Komar Risot. Allien (Cardassian actualy), Tactical level 23. I'm flying a Heavy Escort. I didn't modify it (or even look at it in the ship customizer) when I got it so it was a stock Akira class, Andromeda textures.
Steps to reproduce:
Again, I did this twice. The first time I had just booted up the game, went and accepted a quest reward for one of the patrols in the Psi Velorum sector, equipped the deflector dish I had been awarded (it was the one that was something like Deflectors + 11 and Deflector Field +23) and transwarped to Earth. I docked and the first thing I did was to go to the ship customizer. I then clicked the Oslo button, The Zephyr button, the Oslo button again, rotated the ship so that the bridge was on the left and the nacelles were on the right, opened the advanced tab and clicked Randomize. Immediately the game locked up.
I had a sound loop of the button pressed beep that didn't stop. It sounded like it was just looping on the beep as it played completely and repeated about once a second. Nothing in the game responded though I could move the mouse and it still had the STO cursor. I tried alt-tabbing, hitting hte windows key and ctrl+alt+delete but no dice. Things did seem to appear in the background. If I moved my mouse to the right position the cursor would change to a windows cursor and then to a resize cursor. If I clicked and dragged it would behave like I was resizing a window on the desktop, the resize cursor would only reappear when I moved the mouse back to the position where I stopped dragging. Also, it seemed like if I wasn't hovering over a window the mouse cursor would change back to the STO one. The last thing I tried before rebooting was to hit the power button on my PC which tells it to go into standby. After about 30 seconds nothing happened so I rebooted.
So I decided that after I rebooted I would see if I could duplicate the bug so that I could report it. Started up the game, chose the same character and was spawned back where I was, directly in front of the customizer. I opened it and repeated my steps, except that I turned the ship first, before hitting any buttons. After hitting the Random button, same thing, locked up and sound looping on the beep sound. I hit reboot again.
Here's where it got bad. In the middle of loading Windows (XP service pack 3) I got a BSOD, which disappeared before I could read anything on it. The computer started rebooting, asked if I wanted to hit safe mode or not and I selected no. Blue screened during the Windows load again. Rebooted again, selected Safe Mode with Networking and it stalled halfway through loading the drivers. I didn't think to write down which one. Started typing this up, decided to reboot again for the hell of it and I managed to get to the desktop. I noticed that the startup sounds sounded poppy or choppy. Sort of like someone was plugging in a microphone into a speaker that was on.I'm running on integrated sound right now, Realtek AC'97. Within a minute I blue screened again but this time I could read the words BAD_POOL_HEADER on it before the computer rebooted.
Good news is that while writing this I tried one last reboot and it's been up for a few minutes now, although I haven't touched anything yet. I'm writing this on my laptop so I'll see if I can get a dxdiag dump without blue screening again. Hope this info results in a fix. Thanks.
Edit: Ok, got into my desktop, here's the dxdiag info:
http://pastebin.com/aaW18k1D . Sound is still choppy but it seems to be on deeper sounds only. I'll play some music after I save this, see what happens. This mobo's only a year old but who knows, maybe the sound is dying.
Edit 2: iTunes loaded, music's playing just fine, no popping or anything. Who knows.
Edit 3: What the hell, more info couldn't hurt. I've been playing the game for a while, customized ships before so this isn't the first time I've played that specific sound before. I'm running the latest version of the drivers from the realtek.com.tw website. STO verified all files after the first crash, it still happened again. I'm reloading the game again, going to just change my ship to the Zephyr configuration and that's it. Going to see if the problem goes away but if it doesn't I have a sound card that may or may not work that I can try.
Edit 4: Got in, recustomized my ship and I'm still pushing bits so that's good. I think I'm done spamming this with updates now.
Comments
Set Windows to not automatically reboot from a BSOD so you can get all the details written down.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/helpandsupport/learnmore/russel_02may13.mspx
Recovery Settings
One of the things that is quite different about Windows XP compared to Windows 9x (9x is shorthand for Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows Me in all their various versions), is that one can control how it responds to certain critical errorsthose that cause the infamous Blue Screen of Death (BSOD). In Windows XP, the default setting is for the computer to reboot automatically when a fatal error occurs. If that fatal error only occurs when you're shutting down, the system reboots automatically.
If you haven't changed any of the system failure settings, you should be able to see the error by looking in the Event Log. But a better long-term solution is to turn off the automatic reboot so you can actually see the error when it happenschances are it will tell you enough about itself to let you troubleshoot further. To change the recovery settings to disable automatic rebooting:
- Right-click My Computer, and then click Properties.
- Click the Advanced tab.
- Under Startup and Recovery, click Settings to open the Startup and Recovery dialog box.
- Clear the Automatically restart check box, and click OK the necessary number of times.
- Restart your computer for the settings to take effect.
Now when you go to shut down and a fatal error occurs, you'll at least see it and it won't cause an automatic reboot. You still have to sort out what's causing the problem, but that gets us to the next section quite nicely.You might end up having to do XP System restore
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/304449