Black screen of death

[777fred]

It has happened with mine too...

[Acorncomputer]

Hi

I have a new non-Rail Simulator work computer that has a RAID mirrored disc set up, professional AVG and some other 'managers' that have been pre-installed. This computer at random restarts itself for no obvious reason and as I have not brought it into service yet I am very hesitant about doing so. I feel that the more computer 'management' software that is installed, the more things seem to go wrong. If I was technically minded I would get rid of everything that was not absolutely essential but unfortunately I cannot do this.

The two computers with Rail Simulator on have XP and AVG free (also both with mirrored discs) seem to run perfectly and have very little additional 'management' software. Both of these machines were built from scratch to my personal specifications with just essential software initially installed.

[smarty2]

Well i have just re installed RS from the DVD and am going to install the upgrades and dev tools, just have to re copy the content and asset folders back in and see what happens?

Thanks for the remarks

Mart

[stephenholmes]

Hello Mart
Spybot S&D will not be the cause
I have had this software longer than RS and it has never tampered with my RS installation etc
Zone alarm can do some strange things though!
Kind regards Stephen

[smarty2]

Hello Mart
Spybot S&D will not be the cause
I have had this software longer than RS and it has never tampered with my RS installation etc
Zone alarm can do some strange things though!
Kind regards Stephen

Cheers Stephen, i haven't got zone alarm, and i am at a loss as to what is causing these files to go "missing", somebody give Mulder a call! I have re pasted the assets back in (16gigs)! But haven't bothered with the content folder yet i am re installing the routes slowly back and running scenarios from them before doing so. Thing is though which is really strange, after re installing RS my fatal1ty pro gamer has gone on a jolly?????????? Weird scratching and buzzing sounds and weirdness??

Cheers
Mart

[Blackpatch]

Hope you get it sorted Mart - very annoying otherwise.

BP

[smarty2]

Just noticed something strange going on here and partly my suspicions may have been correct, was running the amazing Geislinger route on my Vista setup which wasn't working but now decides it want's to? Was driving for a reasonable time then it just hung, so i collapsed it to the desktop and had a visual runtime error that it had terminated in an unusual way? but i noticed my anti virus had just finished downloading an update! Coincidence? And the only other change i made was in the bios by overclocking my quad core phenom by 3%. Incidently my XP setup works but the sound is completely mashed up? Yes latest rubbishy non whql drivers for it, even tried older ones but no joy, dxdiag tells me there are no conflicts and everything is fine and dandy! Although the sim doesn't black screen me! I think i need a degree in computer sciences for RS

Mart

[Retro]

I have used Norton 360 on this new machine and have just upgraded to Version 3. It does loads in the background without causing problems to any of the Programs I run. My major problem this week has been with the Vista SP2 Upgrade which actually made RS run much better but unfortunately messed up the Media Centre. I also have Ad-Aware Anniversary Edition and Spybot Installed. Windows Defender is always off because it is a huge hog on resources.
Regards James.

[smarty2]

Just had this reply from Panda

"Dear customer

Many thanks for your email.

With games like these the CPU usage will be increased quite significantly, and with the AV protection enabled this put the CPU Usage up more. The best way to run games like these is offline with the AV protection disabled, as this will then allow the games to run using the CPU usage they need. "

So there you go it's my games fault! Typical. What a pain.

Mart

[alanwbrown]

Hi all
I have been using Panda AV for some years now and found no problems with Rail Sim. How ever Norton AV did clash with Panda
Regards
Alan

[smarty2]

Have a bit of a conspiracy theory going on at the moment with my sound card, since it has for some time under Vista had a tendency to be scratchy and poppy and reverberating more often than not i will most days have to restart Vista several times to get rid of this anomaly, i have an Asus mother board and several months ago had to update the bios as there were problems with it, ever since then my soundcard which is manufactured by Creative has been acting wierd and progressively getting worse over time, even though dxdiag says there are no problems and everything is fine, and checking the properties from device manager tells me there are no conflicts! Asus released there own soundcards some time ago i wonder if they added a make Creative kak in their latest bios? So you will be better off bying a new Xonar from us?

Also i was playing Mass Effect the other day (haven't got any rail sims anymore) and this game now has started to crash exactly the same way RS was, stuff going missing from folders??? Turns out though that Mass Effect has a better error reporing routine than RS and consequently told me it could not find some Dll's from DX10 and that certain dll's were missing from the System32 folder (wish RS did that) so i re-installed DX10 and copied the missing dll's from my Nvidia folder back into the System32 folder and all is well again. I would dearly love to know what is making these files dissappear?

Mart

[Oldpufferspotter]

This is one of the things that is making me nervous about installing Rail Works.
RS works fine on my laptop at the moment, but I have the maximum memory for my three year old machine installed, i.e. 2Gb.
If I do use Rail Works I think I will soon need a new machine to run it properly, I read on the RS site forum somewhere that RW will be a 6Gb program. My laptop does meet the 'minimum spec' for RW, but minimum specs often only just run a program, and not too well at that.
So what sort of machine should I go for? What sort of graphics card? Running MS System 7 will take up a good bit of memory, so presumably I shall be looking for at least 8Gb of memory? How much is it going to cost (£700 - £1200 perhaps)? Will the improvements incorporated into RW be worth the overall cost to me?
As I said in another thread, I have decided to stick with RS for the forseeable future, unless there is something really special that persuades me to upgrade all round.
regards Ted.

[CaptScarlet]

I read on the RS site forum somewhere that RW will be a 6Gb program. My laptop does meet the 'minimum spec' for RW, but minimum specs often only just run a program, and not too well at that.

That is 6GB in disk space not memory.

John

[Oldpufferspotter]

Hi John,
Yes I know that the 6Gb is disk space, but I am wondering how much of that needs to be in memory at any time one time so that there is not too much disk reading going on.
The stutter in RS (not too much on my machine, but a little is definitely there) happens when reading a wadge of data off disk while I am driving along.
Of course it depends upon how the program is set up to run. Each time a scenario is run in RS all the assets seem to be loaded up whether or not they are used in that scenario. Will it be any different in RW?
One improvement I have read about on the RS site forum is that any assets that come with the basic RW will be easily uninstalled if you think that you will never use them. For example, I only use one version of the Class 43 HST (the Swallow Tail Intercity livery) but I have four different versions on my machine. Reskinned models do require the original version to be present to work properly, so I dare not attempt to delete any of them at the moment, not knowing which is the essential original!
Keeping assets to a minimum, and keeping the number of scenery assets per tile down, does make a difference when running a scenario in RS.
regards Ted.

[smarty2]

????????????????

Mart