T42P Freezing when playing NFS Most Wanted

[agarza]

I just bought 1 week ago a brand new T42P with 1GB RAM & FireGL 128MB video card.

The problem I have is that I've installed NFS Most Wanted, and after 2-3 minutes the game completely freezes as the laptop too, so I need to press the Power Button to shut down the laptop.

I was wondering if this is normal in this game, or the FireGL is simply not meant to handle that kind of games.

I haven't had the time to test any other games, except the older Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed with the same results.

Any ideas??
Motherboard defective, GPU overheating ??

[rosemarycane]

Well, just have a couple of thoughts:

1.) Which drivers are you using? You might try the Omega drivers for ati cards to see if that makes a difference. If you do a search, you should be able to find them.

2.) Check the temperature of your Thinkpad using mobile monitor or the Thinkpad fan control utility. I can tell you from my experiences, my TP gets to be around 70-76 degrees celcius playing guild wars and counter strike source.

3.) Another option which might help rule out the heat issue is to buy a decent cooling pad and see if that prevents the freezing. You could always return it, if it doesn't work.

Hope this helps!

If you have any other questions, shoot me a PM.

[christopher_wolf]

My T43 works fine with NFS: Porsche Unleashed (Yay! ) and I tried NFS: Most Wanted and it worked great. I think this might actually be a driver problem as I have seen some machines simply have the ATI driver stop functioning in the middle of things (probably because of a bad set of function call by the game due to the drivers being an old version). The noise will loop and the game screen will freeze to the point that not even Ctrl+Alt+Delete will get you back to the desktop. As Rosemarycane says, try out the Omega driver; but before you do that, make sure you have the latest ATI drivers from IBM/Lenovo or the ATI reference drivers themselves from the ATI site. Let us know what happens.

[killswitch]

i have t42p and nfs runs well without freezing

[agarza]

My T43 works fine with NFS: Porsche Unleashed (Yay! ) and I tried NFS: Most Wanted and it worked great. I think this might actually be a driver problem as I have seen some machines simply have the ATI driver stop functioning in the middle of things (probably because of a bad set of function call by the game due to the drivers being an old version). The noise will loop and the game screen will freeze to the point that not even Ctrl+Alt+Delete will get you back to the desktop. As Rosemarycane says, try out the Omega driver; but before you do that, make sure you have the latest ATI drivers from IBM/Lenovo or the ATI reference drivers themselves from the ATI site. Let us know what happens.

Yes, that happens to me, the sound loops and I can´t do anything but to press the Power Button.

------------------------

OK, here´s the deal:

1. I reinstalled XP SP2 and installed the Omega Drivers (latest)
I noticed that after I installed the omega drivers the screen flickers a lot, also in Device Manager there are 3 different monitor types (Default Monitor, Plug & Play Monitor / Generic TV)
I tried to upgrade the driver in 3 of those to the LCD Thinkpad 1400x1050 pixels but the screen still flickers.
Noticed that in the Screens section of the Omega Drivers, the screen is detected to be 50HZ
[img=http://img163.imageshack.us/img163/9225 ... hq7.th.jpg]

Also, in Display Settings, there a weird resolutions:

Code: Select all

800x600
960x720
1024x640
1024x768
1152x864
1200x900
1280x720
1280x768
1280x800
1280x960
1280x1024
1360x768
1360x1020
1360x1024
1400x1050

2. Then I installed NFS:PU, but saw weird resolutions for the game to be played. I remember that using the standard newest Lenovo Drivers for the FireGL I was able to play at 1400x1050 pixels (until the game crashed of course), but now not.

3. I played 2 races and the game didn't crash at all, but the flicker effect is still there, is a pain in the a$$

3. Is there a way to stop the flickering and make the driver to recognize the lcd screen to be more than 50Hz and stop the flickering??

I hope someone could help me via MSN that way I could diagnose problem faster, as I need to know if I could be gaming again.

Thank you again

[christopher_wolf]

Hmmm, locked loop as I suspected.


You could try the Catalyst drivers as well, that would most likely get rid of the flickering. Another thing that you could do is download the latest, bare drivers from ATI and see how that would work. That should get rid of the flickering problem has well as the hung loops.

[agarza]

So, which Catalyst drivers are you referring from?
Are those compatible with the FireGL cards?

Today I test NFS:MW using the latest Omega drivers installed over a clean install of XP, but the game did crash again

So, my problem can be solved, or not?

Also, why some people have problems with the graphics cards (also T60p users) whilst others don't.

I need to be able to play games without freezing issues, can it be done??

[agarza]

Found this:

http://www.driverheaven.net/patje/

Let you install ATi newest Catalyst using a Mod.

However the game still crashes, the sound still goes OK, but the LCD goes black, exiting the game (by memorizing which sequence of keys to press) was able to return to Windows in a crappy 640x480 resolution.

Am I done here, or should I try something different?

[christopher_wolf]

The last thing I would try are the drivers direct from ATI; the IBM/Lenovo provided ones are modified slightly as OEM drivers.

HTW

[agarza]

The last thing I would try are the drivers direct from ATI; the IBM/Lenovo provided ones are modified slightly as OEM drivers.

HTW

I already did that. The result is the same.

Crap