BSOD woes!

I have WinXP running on Boot Camp on a Macbook Pro. I've been playing Oblivion fine for days and days, but a couple of days ago I got Railroads (excellent game by the way) and I've started having enormous problems.

It would crash out to desktop quite regularly, which is annoying but not so bad as it auto saves every minute and I assumed it was a problem with the game. But then last night it started to crash out to BSOD. Because it's a Macbook, the BSOD would only stay up for about a second before the machine restarted itself, so I could never manage to note down any of the particulars.

Anyway, this morning, I find that within a minute of opening WinXP itself, the whole machine crashes out to BSOD. I now have an unusable Windows section! The machine has only been on five minutes so it's not too hot.

And I can't see it being a frazzled component because the OSX partition runs just as nicely as ever.

Any ideas?

I may have spoken too soon. In OSX, about ten minutes after startup, I had the thing where the screen darkens from top to bottom and a message appears in four languages saying "You need to restart this computer. Press and hold the power button for several seconds."

Is that the OSX equivalent of BSOD? And if so, what the hell is going on?

You made the mistake of putting windows on the MacBook. :)

Well, I realise it's not ideal but the whole reason I got the macbook was to have both OSs without buying two machines. Do you mean it's a problem because it's a laptop or because it's a mac? And in any case, surely I can expect WinXP to just work to a basic level - all I have installed on there is a couple of games, nothing too complex.

I reckon it's Railroads. It wasn't acting up like this until I installed that. I just played it on my old PC, and it struggled along for a couple of hours until it finally crashed out with Windows saying that my drivers had stopped functioning properly. I reckon I'll be taking that back, reinstalling Windows and pretending Railroads never happened.

Or maybe not. OSX isn't surviving 5 minutes without a critical failure now. God, I hate computers so much.

Just ran Hardware Test, and it instantly told me there's a problem with my memory. Just after I deleted Bootcamp, annoyingly. But at least I know what the problem is now. Is it at all possible that a game can cause the memory to malfunction? Or is it more likely that it was on the way out anyway?

Software won't cause a memory malfunction, it's much more likely to be a physical problem (overheating, badly seated modules etc).

Sounds like duff hardware to me too.

99.9% cant a game damage your ram

.1% - change bios settings without the user , or other hacks but i mean "its Mac not a PC"

Help this ?
http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/macbookproefifirmwareupdate12.html

http://www.intel.com/technology/efi/

I did find a thread about this...
http://forums.macnn.com/104/alternative-operating-systems/308960/solution-crashes-blue-screens-freezes/

Seems I need to underclock my GPU - seems OSX has it underclocked to get round overheating, but WinXP hasn't by default. Maybe the game overheated the memory...?

Quite possible. Should be covered by warranty, if it's not too old.

Yeah, it's under warranty - put it in today. Just wondering what to do about it when I get it back. I don't want to risk something I'M doing wrong frazzling something again...

I ran Oblivion for several days before experiencing overheating problems...I think the heat coming off of the graphics card caused the cpu to bork out.( bios temp of cpu went up to 92+ degrees )

Fortunately on a desktop you can leave the side off ;)

Many people on Oblivion forum say that the game is a PC thrasher with several accounts of damaged hardware after a few days of play...the ultimate burn in test.

Blimey. Would underclocking help with that? Especially on a laptop?

Oblivion has never caused me a problem with heat *touches wood*.
It seems strange that the Mac underclocks your hardware to resolve a problem with their cooling...

You didn't do anything wrong. However I would look into that underclocking business and see if 1) it's actually true and 2) you can replicate it in XP. Seems like something they would have to document somewhere...


It makes sense to me. Good internal design and high powered cooling systems can only go so far - if a product is designed around marketing, there will undoubtedly be problems. Like case size is 1mm too small, or there's a curve in plastic somewhere that a component would fit best...