Steam giving me the plunger again

T

Tanis143

Gawd
Joined
Aug 18, 2001
Messages
606
Ok, I posted this over in steampowered forums and found no help. Here's the problem. My son can not play Counter Strike or TFC, but can play DoD. What happens is he'll select a server, it will go in, download the security module, then start to precache. Right when its almost finishing the precache, the system reboots. Now, I'll give the system stats and what I've done.

AMD 1800+ @ stock
Abit KR7A RAID
512 Crucial PC2700
PNY Gf4 Ti4200
40gig Maxtor 7200 rpm IDE

Now, I've gone in and removed Steam, all steam files/directories, all steam entries in the registry. Reloaded steam in a diferent directory. Same thing. Removed the vid card drivers and reinstalled them. Same thing. Made sure no adware or virus's. Same thing. The computer boots with 408 megs of memory available, so I know its not a resource problem. Im also able to run Prime95 on it solid and ran it through a loop of 3dmark01 of 5 times with no crashes. I know its not overheating, the max temp so far is 50c *this is a pal core, so very hot* I know its not the vid card because other games run fine. Im to the point where Im about to re-install windows but I would rather not. Any suggestions?
 
Try updating all your drivers. This includes soundcard, motherboard, network card, etc. everything that has a newer version. If that don't fix it than your just unlucky and I don't know what to tell you other than start swapping hardware in and out until you find what is causing the reboot. Either that or format. Reinstalling windows might help, but I would just go with a complete whipe over a reinstall.
 
make sure you have those games 100% downloaded.
right click on the game and go to properties, then look where it says ammount aquired.
If it is not at 100% the game will quit when it starts precaching, I had this happen to me.
Im not sure if this is your problem but you can try it
 
Well, the sound card and nic are old cards, the drivers they have are the same thats been available for the past year or so. I've updated on his pc DirectX and vid card drivers, as well as the via chipset drivers. Did that when I built the pc about 2 months ago. And as I said, I doubt its a hardware issue since DoD runs fine, and other games run fine. So, I'll end up doing a full wipe.
 
I had the same problem.. Im betting you have a linksys router? To fix my problem I had to downgrade firmware to one about a year old that steam said is compatable. If you dont have a linksys they still have a long line of incompatable routers. I find it pretty stupid that Ive never had a issue with my linksys ever untill I installed Steam then it was nothing but problems. But anyways the old firmware does work do a search they have a direct link for it. My router btw is a befsr41
 
twest17 said:
did you try my suggestion?
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Yes I did. That was teh first thing I checked. However, if it had been a problem with that, it would not reboot the machine, it would just crash back to desktop, this is causing the pc to reboot.
 
Chickenmon said:
I had the same problem.. Im betting you have a linksys router? To fix my problem I had to downgrade firmware to one about a year old that steam said is compatable. If you dont have a linksys they still have a long line of incompatable routers. I find it pretty stupid that Ive never had a issue with my linksys ever untill I installed Steam then it was nothing but problems. But anyways the old firmware does work do a search they have a direct link for it. My router btw is a befsr41
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Yes, I am behind a linksys, in fact my son's pc is on a wireless adapter. I'll throw a nic in and put it next to my pc and test it. I did not even think of that. If thats the case, Im going to bitch steam out big time because Im not degressing my firmware on my router. The previous version had an issue with its buffer, and after having three pc's on DAoC for an hour it would reboot itself. So screw that. Either Steam can fix the issue with their software or my son will have to find a new game.
 
Chickenmon said:
I had the same problem.. Im betting you have a linksys router? To fix my problem I had to downgrade firmware to one about a year old that steam said is compatable. If you dont have a linksys they still have a long line of incompatable routers. I find it pretty stupid that Ive never had a issue with my linksys ever untill I installed Steam then it was nothing but problems. But anyways the old firmware does work do a search they have a direct link for it. My router btw is a befsr41
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I have a Linksys router (in fact I've had two) and I have used the factory firmware w/out problem and also their newest firmware without problems too. :confused:
 
 
Zick said:
:rolleyes: Your right since it's out there on the Web it must be true for all.
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Actually, the problem is that you can't prove that it never fails by giving an example of it working. All you've proved is that it can work.
"It works for me" is only interesting if we actually believe that something never works.

Back to buisness, you might actually be flushing out some odd memory error, even though that should have given you problems elsewhere as well. If you've got the time to spare, a run of memtest86 wouldn't hurt.
 
HHunt said:
Actually, the problem is that you can't prove that it never fails by giving an example of it working. All you've proved is that it can work.
"It works for me" is only interesting if we actually believe that something never works.

Back to buisness, you might actually be flushing out some odd memory error, even though that should have given you problems elsewhere as well. If you've got the time to spare, a run of memtest86 wouldn't hurt.
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Your very correct, and I was never stating that it never works. I was only mentioning that it works for me and that maybe it's not the router causing the problem.
 
I have a linksys BEFSR41 v2, with the factory default firmware 1.42.7 which is supposed to have known issues, according to that link. However, I have never seen any of those errors.

I don't think its very possible for a router to cause a PC to reboot because of one of these issues. For the router to reboot itself, sure, but not the machine connected to it. Thats just crazy. He said his PC reboots while caching the game files. This has nothing to do with network setup, his game won't even finish loading! Its crashing when loading data off the hard disk. Tanis143, you could try downgrading to an older firmware but it won't solve your probelm. Your best bet is to follow the instructions given by CyberCRAP. Or just skip the drivers and hardware swapping, backup anything crucial to CD/DVD etc. and format your HDD and reinstall windows. It sounds to me like there may be some corruption on your HDD, possibly in your pagefile, and steam keeps running into it. I know its a bitch to have to do but sometimes its the only way.
 
I say.. try the old firmware drivers and if that doesn't work

format and reinstall .... :eek:
 
From personal expierance my pc did not reboot but counter strike or half life would crash so hard it forced me to reboot as alt tab and ctrl alt del both failed. Once i flashed the firmware problems went away.. Dont kill the messenger.
 
Plus I have the option in xp disabled to automatictly reboot when a BSOD happens so that may also explain why my didnt reboot. I still think its the router.
 
TheJuice said:
I have a linksys BEFSR41 v2, with the factory default firmware 1.42.7 which is supposed to have known issues, according to that link. However, I have never seen any of those errors.

I don't think its very possible for a router to cause a PC to reboot because of one of these issues. For the router to reboot itself, sure, but not the machine connected to it. Thats just crazy. He said his PC reboots while caching the game files. This has nothing to do with network setup, his game won't even finish loading! Its crashing when loading data off the hard disk. Tanis143, you could try downgrading to an older firmware but it won't solve your probelm. Your best bet is to follow the instructions given by CyberCRAP. Or just skip the drivers and hardware swapping, backup anything crucial to CD/DVD etc. and format your HDD and reinstall windows. It sounds to me like there may be some corruption on your HDD, possibly in your pagefile, and steam keeps running into it. I know its a bitch to have to do but sometimes its the only way.
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Well, I doubt its a hdd error. For one, I've removed it completly and put it in a different location *was in c:\steam, now in c:\program files\steam*. Second, DoD and TFC run just fine. But, I did run across a different perspective. His pc is using SP2. Now, we found out that when he's playing DoD and I play CS, we both lag like a mofo. However, 3 weeks ago we both could play CS at the same time and have no lag issues. Now, I know its not my isp, I've done multiple testing both here and at work *I work for my ISP :D*, so its not my connection. And, when he plays other online games it works just fine, no lag. So, I believe its a combination between Steam, SP2, and his Linksys USB adapter. So.... to test that Im gonna run a long ass cat5 to his pc, put in a nic and see what happens. If that fixes it, at least I'll have a start point.
 
8/10 times, when I've had a game reboot on me for no reason, it's an issue with the RAM. Do you have 2 sticks or just 1 stick? If you have two, try running one at a time and see if you still have the same problem. If you have 1 stick, either try to reseat it or see if anyone has a similar stick that you can borrow. That's just my experience tho.
 
MasterShredder said:
8/10 times, when I've had a game reboot on me for no reason, it's an issue with the RAM. Do you have 2 sticks or just 1 stick? If you have two, try running one at a time and see if you still have the same problem. If you have 1 stick, either try to reseat it or see if anyone has a similar stick that you can borrow. That's just my experience tho.
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I've already covered that though. As I've stated before, he can run any other game just fine. Did a 5 loop of 3dmark01 with no problems. Like I said, I highly doubt its hardware, especially when he plays DoD he's flooding my router and killing the bandwidth for everyone else.
 
Tanis143 said:
I've already covered that though. As I've stated before, he can run any other game just fine. Did a 5 loop of 3dmark01 with no problems. Like I said, I highly doubt its hardware, especially when he plays DoD he's flooding my router and killing the bandwidth for everyone else.
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Right, but most likely, system reboots are a hardware problem. If it was crashing, I would think it would be a software or driver issue. Have you tried updating the BIOS for the motherboard?

An example I had was whenever I played Half Life, Quake 3, or most other games, they would be fine. When I was playing Unreal Tournament, the system would reboot itself after awhile.. I tried updating all drivers and everything was fine. I tried running one RAM stick at a time and it fixed the problem, but it would run fine on both RAM sticks, just not all of them at the same time. After doing some research, I found out it was a problem with the current BIOS of my motherboard. After flashing to the latest BIOS, everything worked flawlessly.

Just trying to give ya some options :)
 
I would be tempted to believe that if the system had not run perfectly fine for 3months, plus ran fine for the year and a half that I used the same mobo and ram, with the current bios.
 
::update::

Well, fresh install of windows did the trick. Now he can play CS with no problems and network activity is back to normal. Must have been something in windows in regards to the way CS saw the network. Oh well, its done.
 
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