There's a ghost in my machine?!

[phobosdeimos1]

Today I woke up and had a brainwave, after having OpenGL Doom ports failing horribly on my computer after updating my graphics card driver a few weeks back, I rolled back to my previous version as I never used to have problems and was even able to run models in Doomsday smoothly.

Anyway, so I immediately loading glboom and WOW! It actually worked! Then tried Skulltag's hardware renderer online with no problems, it worked a dream, no lagging, smooth fps, so I got overexcited and downloaded Risen3D and wahey! It worked perfectly, I was over the moon.

Then I shut off my computer as I had to go somewhere. After a few hours when I got in, I went back on, loaded up skulltag and OUCH! My computer restarted. So I tried Gzdoom, the same thing happened, and so on with all hardware ports, yet of course had no problem with software renderers.

I turned off Automatic restart and waited for it to happen again. Then I was able to run gzdoom with Opengl perfectly, then Skulltag, then Risen3D. To cut a long story short, each time I started up my computer, at least ONE of any of my OpenGl Programs would cause the computer to restart, although now as I'd turned off automatic restart, instead of restarting it would bring up the blue screen of death.

Now I would just accept the failness of OpenGl on my computer if I hadn't been happily running Skulltag, Gzdoom, Glboom and Risen3D's OpenGl capabilities perfectly a matter of hours ago.

I know this isn't a computer forum, but last time my computer screwed up, the advice from fellow Doomers saved it.

P.S, I know the obvious thing is to just get a new PC, but I couldn't afford one in a million years, and my computer has successfully ran all this OpenGL stuff perfectly many times.

What the flurbills?!

Why is this seemingly random problem occuring :(

[Mr. T]

What card and how many watts is your PSU.

[phobosdeimos1]

Mr. T said:

What card and how many watts is your PSU.

Intel Extreme Graphics (I know that's rubbish but as I said it run everything perfectly earlier)

And there's no sticker on my Power supply, how do I find out the wattage? Is there a way via the computer?

[Aliotroph?]

Post the contents of the bluescreen. They often point the way to the failure, although sometimes they're next to useless.

[phobosdeimos1]

Aliotroph? said:

Post the contents of the bluescreen. They often point the way to the failure, although sometimes they're next to useless.

Well the stop sign is BAD_POOL_CALLER

I've only just read it as I didn't notice it up the top before, and after googling it says it's common when you've installed new drivers.

I found this: http://windowsfix.info/how-to-fix-bad-pool-caller-error-instantly-3-easy-ways/

Should I fix my registry? I have a tool that does this already, but I haven't done it for a while

I'll try that and investigate more, have you ever heard of this before?

[Jodwin]

phobosdeimos1 said:

I found this: http://windowsfix.info/how-to-fix-bad-pool-caller-error-instantly-3-easy-ways/

Should I fix my registry? I have a tool that does this already, but I haven't done it for a while

Those are bullshit websites with the intent of getting you to download their "instafixer software" that's actually malware. Ignore.

[phobosdeimos1]

Yeah it was just the advice it gave I took, I just defragged my HD, fixed my registry, re-downloaded my openGL ports and it all worked fine until again, randomly after a few plays of skulltag on opengl mode which went fine, it just went to the blue screen again, but this time with no specific error.

Ah well, looks like it's just software rendering for me then.

I hope I don't get left behind, and they carry on adding features of GZDoom into Zdoom.

[Jodwin]

phobosdeimos1 said:

Yeah it was just the advice it gave I took

But the advices are all stock, they basically have a few generic pieces of advice that are made to sound genuine while in practice they might have nothing to do with the real problem.


The root of your problems is apparently in drivers. Since you rolled back either there are bits and pieces of the previous drivers left somewhere or the bad drivers broke something else which is now acting up. You could try to do as clean uninstall of the drivers as possible and then install back the drivers which are supposed to work. If possible try to find out what files the faulty drivers added/changed so that you can clean absolutely everything manually if need be. For example maybe the drivers installed new OpenGL drivers that the card doesn't support, and the older good drivers might not be overwriting those.

[Maes]

If you get intermittent failures like these with no apparent reason other than using an "advanced" functionality of your computer, then it's almost always a power supply problem. This includes motherboard power converters such as transistors, caps, badly soldered/warped ICs etc.

I understand that you have some laptop, so I would try getting a new generic CPU (although it's much more likely that the problem is somewhere in the power conversion INSIDE your computer).

I once had to deal with a damaged mobo which worked fine UNLESS I used anything OpenGL/D3D, with any graphics card, due to physical damage, regardless of how good a PSU you plugged in.

[hex11]

Maybe your computer just likes vanilla Doom, and gets sick when you feed it bad stuff. :D

[GreyGhost]

Don't look at me, I prefer to haunt servers. I agree with Jodwin, it appears the driver rollback hasn't gone smoothly. Do you have a system restore point that predates the driver update?

[Csonicgo]

Maes said:

If you get intermittent failures like these with no apparent reason other than using an "advanced" functionality of your computer, then it's almost always a power supply problem. This includes motherboard power converters such as transistors, caps, badly soldered/warped ICs etc.

SO MUCH THIS.

Dell had a huge problem with this in the mid 2000s, which dozens of computers sold all died/froze constantly around the same time. Turned out to be faulty capacitors.