Vista 64 and game freezing

[raylion]

Been away from boxing for a while and decided to get back into it. Got myself a spanking new PC with Vista 64 and installed WoW, sadly, can get to the character load screen, choose a char, load the game and then it freezes. CTRL-ALT-DELETE doesn't work and no response from CAPS-LOCK or NUM-LOCK so am forced to hard-boot. Have put a message on Blizz tech support to see if they have any general guidelines but figured a fair few boxers here probably have Vista 64 so just curious if anyone has had a similar experience?

PC is pretty high spec with Intel i7 quad core, ATI Firepro V5700 with 12 Gig of Ram. Nothing else out of the ordinary, had suspected the graphic card as it's more business focussed but am aware of someone with an NVidia 8800 having similar problems.

[Biomehanikka]

i'll start by assuming your playing windowed mode. sometimes vista 64 and WoW have issues generating the fancy little vista preview screen when u mouseover the program on the start bar.

to fix this right click on computer(equivalent of My Computer for XP), select properties, choose the advanced tab, click the settings button under performance, and select the bubble for adjust for best performance.

this will make vista look almost exactly like windows XP so if u enjoy vista for the visuals you will be disappointed, but this solved all the issues me and my friend were having with windowed WoW.

[raylion]

Thanks for the advice, gave it try but wasn't much change sadly. A little good news though, forced it to run in OpenGL mode by writing SET gxAPI "OpenGL" in the WTF file and managed to get about 4 seconds of playtime before the freeze so looks like a graphic card driver type of problem which gives me a direction to go in. Off to the ATI site to see what those chaps can do for me! :-)

Cheers!

[Coltimar]

Sounds more like hardware than software to me :/ What card are you running and version of driver for it?

[raylion]

It's an ATI Firepro v5700 with ATI Catalyst driver v8.563 (latest version on their site). Curious thing is that I've managed to get the game 'running' but all the NPCs names are 'Unknown' and there are no players so it would seem there's a network issue here as well. Game times-out after about 30 secs which is about the same for a normal disconnect so will have to look more at it. I've got some Belkin wireless card which I bought at short notice as I couldn't find a decent netgear card, I think I'll get a netgear card as I've got more faith in the brand.

[Phanes]

You may have issues trying to 5 box on wireless. Although I am not a network guy so I could be completly wrong. I would get a Nvidia 260 they are really cheap right now and can wreck WoW even on a 5 box.

[spannah]

Try a different video card and see if it works, if everything else is fine but WoW (can you try another 3D game?), chances are some aspect of the 3D graphic handling is not working correctly.

[raylion]

Thought I'd provide an update to this as I've now solved the problem just in case anyone else has had a similar issue. Basically it was the wireless network card that was unhappy and kept freezing the system...I've been through 3 brands (netgear, belkin and edimax) which all failed (edimax was the best but it only could last about 20 seconds).

What I've done instead is to 'trick' the PC by buying a wireless bridge so I can plug the LAN network card into the bridge instead (I'm forced to use wireless for boxing due to having a silly house). The specific bridge I bought was also a print server (which is handy) and is the Netgear WGPS606 Netgear 606 Link ('http://www.amazon.com/NETGEAR-WGPS606-Wireless-Server-4-port/dp/B0007OWNCC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1244821890&sr=8-1').

I can now use my beasty 12gb, quad core, i7 to get down to the serious business of 5 boxing once again...Northrend had better watch out! :D

[Ualaa]

At home, I play on a wired connection.
Killer NIC, high-speed cable.

Last summer, I was visiting my dad for 4 months.. working out there.
Took my PC with me.
I used a USB Wireless NIC.. a Linksys, from future shop (like best buy).
I think it was like $30 canadian.
It could handle 5-box very easily.