Crash and sound loop

[snowieken]

My girlfriend's pc has WoW installed for me to be able to play at her house while she is studying, and also for her very casual WoW needs. In any case, since recently it has a severe problem running WoW.

It crashes. A lot. All the time, actually. Sometimes I can play for half an hour, but that is basically the absolute maximum. Whenever it happens, the screen freezes and the sound starts to loop (hang), and the only thing I can do is push the reset button on the computer. But I know it's useless then to try again, because after it happened once, I can hardly stay two minutes in-game before it happens again.

Overheating problems was the first thought that popped to mind, but that isn't it. PC isn't heating up at all and other games are fine. It's only WoW that makes it crash. Besides, I browsed the official WoW tech forums and several people seem to have exactly the same problem - no one found a conclusive solution though, and since it's weekend, the tech guys haven't posted yet.

Anyone experiencing the same problem? Anyone got an idea of what it might be?

[Tanitha]

Try disabling hardware sound acceleration in the OS. A quick test might be to run World of Warcraft with a nosound command line (If there is something like that)

Guild Wars suffers from a similar problem recently, it would lock up with no indication of any wrongdoing from a thermal / memory or other perspectives and only with Guild Wars.

Who knows - maybe WoW has been infected by the same disease?

[snowieken]

I forgot to mention that I already tried running it with no sound, to no avail, although I merely disabled it from the options menu. I'll experiment a bit more.

EDIT: Nope, crashed again, with hardware acceleration turned off and the nosound mode (which works indeed). Guess I have to wait for an official answer...

[Kalos]

What are the specs in that machine? It could be something like the fabled AC'97 sound provision playing up again.

[Clavina]

Also make sure all the drivers & directx are up to date

[snowieken]

Everything is up to date.

Quick update: I am now back at my girlfriend's place and the problem persists. I have read a few threads about this on the official forum, and while no solution is presented yet, some people have claimed that it happens when their character is at rested state. Sounds quite ridiculous, but I tried to make a new character and I can play that one perfectly. When I log in an existing character, however, I crash shortly after that. So I have to say I am getting rather intrigued by the "rested state" theory.

It sounds more as if my existing characters are corrupted somehow, rather than that their rested state is to blame. Nevertheless, I wish I could test it out with an existing character whose XP bar isn't blue, but that is hardly possible at the moment. I'm a casual player and I've been doing quite a lot of PvP lately, so all of my characters have a rather lengthy rested XP bar. Since I can't stay in-game for longer than about 10 minutes it's not really possible to experiment.

I have actually sent a report to Tech Support via their webform, I hope it gets sorted out soon - as I spend quite a lot of days with the girlfriend and she has to work a lot lately, it would be nice if I could play when I'm here.

[Zachariah]

I am having the same problem, crash then sound loop. I can play with no problems for a few minutes, then whammo. Other games don't do it, nor does normal web-srfing use of the PC (I'm writing this on the same computer).

Got an old Athlon 2500 CPU with 768MB RAM, Radeon 9800 Pro gfx. Running Wow at 1024 with default settings.

And also annoyed at getting killed by lag, but hey you can't have everything.

[Zachariah]

PS I don't think it's anything to do with sound. I updated to latest Radeon drivers (as of today Dec 24th). Am also running chkdsk on my drives just to be sure. AV is AVG 7.5 all updated. MS updates all installed.