Where this service call was: near Grand & Damen, Chicago

Lain called me at 8:20PM asking me if we offer 24/hrs service. I’m not usually available at this hour, but luckily I was still at the office, doing some web programming (a big in-house project coming the following months done in Ruby on Rails). He said that he has a new game, Star Wars Galaxies that crashes his computer. I wrote quickly in the service call log the entry and went on my way. In 25 minutes I was there (from Ravenswood & Irving Park).

The problem was always reproducible: the game loaded OK, the login screen and whatnot, until it actually entered the 3D World. Then the computer crashed with a BSOD.

The processor was a fairly old PIII at 1Ghz but the video card was just 6 months old, a Nvidia Geforce with 256MB of RAM. It was between the minimum and recommended specs for the game.

Usually, a user program cannot crash a computer unless there is

1. a hardware problem
2. a driver problem

1. an operating system bug

I decided that number 2. driver problem was the most likely to be it. So I got to the Nvidia driver download page and got the latest Forceware drivers for his computer.

After installing the new drivers and restarting the computer, the game worked! It needed some graphic detail adjusting, because the action was a little choppy, but after that, it worked great.

Second day addendum

Lain called the second day telling me that now the computer crashes don’t happen after 2 seconds like they used to, but… he played Start Wars Galaxies right after I left for 4 straight hours with no problems, shut down the computer and went to sleep (late night gaming rocks :) ). The next day he got right on the game like any normal person and after half an hour the game crashed taking the computer with it. Tried again, and after 10 minutes crashed again. “M#f^%^rf***r!”, he said.

So there I was, the second day, trying to troubleshoot something that may happen after 10 minutes or after 4 hours or maybe never.

The latest motherboard drivers released by Intel for this i440BX chipset were released in 2001. In the manufacturer website , the board isn’t even listed anymore on the driver download page.

The cherry on top of the cake is that after a crash more the game refused to play, saying that we needed to make a “full scan”. The full scan ended with a wonderful “Buffer overflow error”. I finally solved that by manually deleting his profile folder.

I updated DirectX to the latest bleeding edge version. I checked safe rendering, disable bump mapping and some other post-processing graphics effects in the game video settings. Finally we found some settings that made the game playable and the graphics juicy enough.

I also called Lain after a few days to check if the game has any more crashes. Success: “No man… it worked great! Thanks!”