EZ Server

Hey guys, looks like I am out of commission for a couple days unless someone has a fix to this problem that I have not thought of yet. My computer must have crashed tonight when i was AFK and when I came back it appeared to be in safe mode with the poor resolution and large icons. I rebooted and had no luck. I then went online and researched and found that it is usually a driver issue so I re-installed the latest driver for my OS(Windows 7 64bit) and restarted my computer and still no luck. My card is a Nvidia GeForce 8500GT(I know a little old but its all I have for now). I have since taken the card out and am running the on board graphics so I can actually see the screen but cannot play games on this. Anyone have any ideas? Its seeming to me like my card is simply done for but I figured I would ask as I am not the best with things like this.

A) You using HDMI or VGA/DVI cable from video card?
I had a similar issue with a dead VGA/DVI cable. I spent 5 hours trying EVERYTHING I could think to test, even changing out cards. I finally made the connection that it had to be the monitor or the connection. Sure enough, went to HDMI (or really ANY OTHER CABLE) and it popped back in to 1920x1200.

B) Did you fully uninstall, restart, THEN reinstall video card drivers?
This can cause nightmarish issues at times. Installing over isn't always as thorough as it should be. UNINSTALL all nVidia software via "Add/Remove Programs". DELETE C:\Nvidia (may be C:\Program Files\Nvidia). RESTART computer. Install now. If you are still getting a boot to safe mode, you may have a much more serious issue.

C) Were you using new(er/est) drivers?  If so, you may want to go to nVidia's site and download OLDER drivers (like 3-6 months older). This can help if current gen drivers roflstomp your performance or stability.


-Hate

Another question to be asked is, do you have any drivers that auto update. If you do it possibly can be a driver conflict. This can includes audio, motherboard, chipset, even Windows or any other device you have installed/previous installed but didn't delete.

Thanks for the reply guys. I tried a couple more things based on some suggestions including yours hate. It was not a cable issue as it works fine if I remove the card and plug the monitor back into the on-board port. I did delete the drivers completely and re-installed which appeared to have helped, but I was let down to know that only the color and resolution was somehow restored, but not function of the graphics card. When I run dxdiag, under display settings is says N/A for most of them indicating there is no card present. When I try to run EQ now it gives me an error saying "No 3D devices were found". I have seen this problem on other websites but it seems to be a directx problem and with windows 7, I do not believe you can un-install or re-install directx 11.

When/if I get home from work this evening, I'll blow up your forums messagebox. There are a variety of programs that allow quick, one-time remote access (both free of charge and safely). If you are comfortable with that, go ahead and download TeamViewer 7.

Assuming I get home at a reasonable time, I can try to debug it further.

-Hate

When the card is installed, does it actually show up in device manager? You can still use your onboard video to troubleshoot even with the card installed by changing your BIOS to use onboard rather than PCI express video.

No there is no graphics card present in the device manager.

Have you tried removing the card from the Motherboard. reboting the system, shutting down, then reistalling the card into the mother board and restaring? if not do so and see, if it then (the device manager) see's the card.

Yes I tried that and had no luck. I even took the card out, completely deleted the driver, put the card back in and re-installed the driver to eliminate any corrupt file chances and still had no luck. I am on the side of the card being no good any more. The fan is still running and the monitor is plugged into the port on the card not the port on the motherboard so I am clueless at this point.

Minor delay.... I have no power atm. So yeah, will be a bit.

-Hate

Ok, power has been stable for nearly an hour. If you want to use TeamViewer to let me debug, start blowing up my messagebox on forums or reply to this thread Hurley.

Past 2am, sleep time.

-Hate

Hey hate, sorry I didn't reply last night but I was not at home. I will be home all night tonight after about 7pm so any time you have free just let me know and we can try something.

Don't worry, it was a rather "off-the-cuff" planning. I will be home ~9pm EST. We will try then.

Please make sure you install TeamViewer 6 or 7 before this evening though. We will need it.

-Hate

Well there are two ways to fix something, knowledge/skill and luck. I believe I am a recipient of the later as I re-tried everything I had already tried one more time and for some reason, it worked and I am back in action. Thank you for everyone who contributed ideas and thank you Hate for the offer to help out even further. I will see you all in game.

Fantastic, glad to hear it! Welcome back.

-Hate

It seems I spoke too soon. I got excited, loaded up my toons, spawned a boss in T4, get halfway through it and complete freeze. After i boot back up, same problem as before. Still not sure if its a driver issue or a hardware issue.

rofl, see you at ~9pm then.

-Hate

Hurley, at home. Either message me through forums or start emailing hateborne@gmail.com

Go!


-Hate

E-mail sent

I am out of ideas. Hurley and I tried a variety of things and the conclusion seemed to be hardware failure.

Each time it kept re-inserting a bad driver automatically.

Uninstalled nvidia drivers, deleted C:\Nvidia, restarted. Failed
Updated the driver manually through Device Manager, restarted. Failed
Uninstalled drivers, deleted anything Nvidia, ran Driver Sweeper, restarted. Failed
Installed via nvidia driver tool, custom installation, "Clean Installation", restarted. Failed

After all the attempts, I can only assume hardware failure or OS drive cache corruption.

-Hate

Yup, it seems I am doomed to get some new hardware. Thanks again for all your help Hate.

Just throwing this out there to keep in the back of your mind, but power supplies can cause a whole slew of seemingly unrelated problems.  It would be more relevant in this case if the card in question took additional power.  If possible, slap the card in a different machine, or try a different power supply if you have one on hand.  Don't make a special effort to get one, though.  Probability-wise, I think it's the card.

Nah the graphics card is the only real problem. If i take it out and use on-board card it works fine. My only problem with that is, my on-board card is not compatible with DirectX 11, so playing anything is impossible at the moment and as far as I can tell, downgrading DirectX is not possible.

Are you actually trying to play something that requires DirectX 11?

DirectX is backward compatible so you can use anything that your card supports (I assume DirectX 9 or 10) and below. 

The only small wrinkle is that EQ is linked against a specific version of DirectX 9, and you need to make sure you have the matching DLL file.  If you install the runtime linked below you should have no trouble with EQ as long as you have the right drivers for your onboard video installed and it supports at least DirectX 9.

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=35

Whe I try downloading that file it tells me a more current version of DirectX is currently installed and installation is not necessary. However when i try starting EQ, it gives me an error that says "No 3D device found"

Well that's precisely why I'm saying to keep it in the back of your mind.  The integrated video no doubt takes much less power than the dedicated one, so just because the integrated works doesn't prove the health of the power supply.  I think you're right in that the problem truly is the card, but if you get to a point where you are about to go down the rabbit hole, pull the scope back a bit to include the PSU.  I've seen too many techs swap out motherboards, CPU's, etc., when all along the problem was the PSU.

Well, you do need to run the eq options editor to change the video card it looks for after you've changed to a different one.  They look it up by name/guid and don't just use the first/only one available.

Already done that.

I will say that I had an issue with EQEmu where I had to replace dsetup.dll with one extracted from the DX9 installer.  This file also gets patched to one that doesn't work by Duxa's.  Try it to see if it makes any difference; I could not even start EQ until I slapped this in the main EQ directory.  For your own peace of mind, scan it at virustotal.com or virusscan.jotti.org.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3580324/DSETUP.dll

Do any Direct3D games work?  Do the dxdiag tests complete successfully?

P99 distributes a modified dsetup.dll file to enable their mq2 and showeq detection along with the client hacks they use.  Nothing else would ever modify that file.

No, none of the direct 3D games work. The dxdiag runs and shows the onboard intel chipset but under Direct 3D acceleration it says not available.

Sounds like you're missing video drivers.  You should be able to get them at your motherboard manufacturer website, or possibly here at the Intel website if you know what chipset it is.  http://downloadcenter.intel.com/  Their auto-update utility might work too, but I haven't tried it myself.

Nope, I also tried installing them and it tells me they are all up to date.

I haven't read all the pages and I hate video card problems. Last resort maybe get a new video card? I know you can get some good ones for $30 but then again probably depends how many boxes you want to use. Computers and their parts are becoming so disposable (affordable) these days.

Yeah Hunter that seems to be the consensus at the moment as I have tried everything I know of and to no end. Hateborne even helped me with some more solutions he knew of but still could not fix it. My issue at the moment is that it is an older computer(About a 6 year old store bought HP from college) and a lot of the other parts are starting to become outdated. My power supply is only 250W so getting a decent card would be an issue as it seems most of them require 400+ these days. I am going to just build a whole new PC so I wont have these problems again for quite some time.

Yes, if your box is over 6 years old, you should def get a new PC.

If we go in that direction, what can we get these days?

I've had 5+ PCs from the retail stores (1995-2002) then eventually started getting custom built PC's and been much happier with them. I end up getting exactly the parts I need, and no junk packaged programs preinstalled on the Windows.

So, getting to the point, how many toons to you box? Are you a 6 boxer? Would a $500 custom PC via some website work? I haven't looked since I got one for SC2 about 1 1/2 years ago so I'm sure specs and prices have changed a lot.

Any experts here can give advise on Price vs Multibox?

I box 5 toons atm but I want to add another dps or pally. I am going to build a new one, I have a couple people I know who are pretty up to date on this stuff and are going to help me put together exactly what I need. Ive never put together my own computer but it is time to get exactly what I want. I dont think a $500 store bought would do it for me as I want something I wont have to touch for a couple years. Im going to spend about $1000 and just really pimp one out. Any input is welcome if there are any experts who read this.

I used to go the $1k route and get about 4 years +/- out of those builds (pre-packaged or white box), but after several years and a constant drop in price of components I have finally settled on low end pre-packs that run in the $350 range from Best Buy.  They last about 2 -3 years and when they die it's pretty much a forklift upgrade (replace everything.. except monitor).

As you pointed out the downside is almost always the power supply which I replace with a 400 or 650 watt also from Best Buy at $65 - 100.  Generally, you can negotiate the price of the power supply and/or the install fee of $50 with the manager by paying full price on the box and the video card.  You might have to spend a little extra time in amicable chat time with the store manager, but you can almost always walk away at about $500 for the latest hardware/software.

With one of these setups you probably won't be able to run Skyrim at full graphics, but it will be a pleasant enough experience and the money you save will make it that much more enjoyable.  I run on one now and it handles 12 EZ toons comfortably and 14 with a bit of stress.  Just another angle to consider.

Bought mine piece by piece from newegg. I recycled my video card as it is still good. I spent $300 on the processor, motherboard, ram and case. I can run skyrim on max settings and load up 6+ toons and a browser with a flash game going. All at the same time.

I bought a laptop for $500 from Office Depot and I have absolutely no troubles running 6.. Have gotten 8 in before, but haven't gone over that, and I have had no problems. (The laptop screen is ~19" so arguably that is where a good chunk of my money went and it still runs very well.)

Can buy a desktop nowadays from Best Buy for dirt cheap. Nice processor, 1 terrabyte hard drive and like 6 gigs of ram or something for around $500, maybe cheaper. Pukagiz just recently bought a new desktop, he could probably fill you in on some prices and what not.

As Hunter said, computer parts are so disposable anymore it doesn't cost a lot to get a machine up and running for multi-box EQ.

Best buy in my opinion has always been over priced. Their motto is give them the geek squad and they will pay more. They've even said they are having a problem because they don't go with the low price motto. And I don't mean they sell the good stuff, they just sell the same stuff, over priced. Usually when I have found an item at the same price as somewhere else they have one of those nifty rebate things that makes it that prices. Rebates are there to lure people in with a price and hope you wont go through the harassment it takes to get the rebate.

I refuse to do rebates too. If they are going to knock down the price, do it there at the cashier, not 'maybe' 2-3 months down the road in the mail.

In general, Best Buy is more expensive than buying the same thing via mail order at somewhere like NewEgg, but they do occasionally have some pretty decent sales.  The nice thing is you can go and buy something and have it in your hand immediately even if it is a little more money.

If you are looking to buy something pre-built you can watch sites like http://dealnews.com/ or http://www.techbargains.com/ for some good deals.

Building your own is kinda fun, but it can be a hassle too especially if it is the first time.  If you do go that route you can find samples builds in a lot of places that may make it easier than trying to figure out what will work together on your own.  Some sites where I've seen decent sample builds are http://mmo-champion.com and http://tomshardware.com although there are many more places to find info.  Plus, nothing beats watching a bunch of geeks argue over which processor or video card is better. :)

I've had good luck with rebates on tech stuff, mostly from NewEgg, but all things being equal I'd usually avoid them too.

Thanks for all the input guys, finally got the PC on order today and hopefully it will all arrive by weeks end and I will be up and running by next weekend.  Lets hope this thing lasts me a while as I spent a decent amount on it. I went with the Intel i5 2500k, Geforce GTX 550ti 1GB GC, 16GB DDR3 1600 RAM and some other goodies. I think 6 boxing will be plenty easy enough now :)

Another really good place to go to see if a particular motherboard will handle a particular processor is http://www.cpu-upgrade.com/index.html. You pick out your motherboard and it shows a list of processors that will fit into it. That website was a huge help in making sure I didn't get any surprises when my parts arrived.