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[BloodBird]

For the past 2 months I have been fighting a losing war with my own PC - it has developed a generic memory leak issue that is slowly, but surely, killing my ability to play games and I suspect, eventually it will lead to a situation where I can hardly do a thing without having forced re-boots.

In the beginning all games ran fine. I could game whatever the hell I wanted for hours if I so desired with no crashes or whatever besides a few quirks in specific games. Then Shogun 2 started re-booting my PC violently COMPLETELY at random whenever I was in the menu or on the campaign map. NEVER while in actual battles, unless I paused the game and left the keyboard. It was so random that I could game for hours before it re-booted my PC, or maybe it would re-boot before I got into the campaign map - and at times, when I start it up after a re-boot, crash it again in 5 minutes. This could go on in a predictable pattern of turn on pc -> run game -> access campaign map -> play for 5 minutes -> re-boot -> repeat.

Now this issue impacts Shogun 2, Starcraft 2, Dead island, Dawn of War 2 (any version), Deus Ex: Human Evolution, most recently Left 4 dead 2, effectively making all of these entierly unplayable and a huge waste of my money. What these have in common is that all of them ran with no problem on my PC before this and now all re-boot my PC. Fallout; New Vegas don't re-boot but does freeze, I've been told it's the same cause with different sympthoms.

I have ensured all my drivers are updated. ALL of them. While I am not sure I can trully trust this info all sources on my PC claim they are updated. I have set up my critical error protocol to NOT re-boot my PC upon an error that would usually generate a blue screen - so that I can get the info on what failed and perhaps learn more on this. Despite this, the blue screen fail to load and the PC simply re-boot regardless. I have checked CPU overheating out of the list of possible reasons, I run pretty much all these games in admin/compatible modes despite never having needed that before.

At this rate with more and more programs suffering the same problem and pretty much all options I had exhausted, my last option remains to save what I can't replace and reinstall windows and my anti-virus software. Said software claims that, all is well - if this was a virus it is beyond my skills to find.

One of my friends is far more PC-savy than me and he's out of options. If none of you have any ideas or hints re-installing may be my last option - I am just not sure it will actaully help and it will be quite the pain.

[Katrina Oniseki]

If you have an epidemic of the same issue spreading through your games, it's time to start backing up your savegames and personal files. Do not backup any third party programs you've downloaded over the years. If you tend to download... less than legal movies or songs or what have you... do not restore them immediately to your computer. Just in case it IS a virus.

It doesn't sound like a virus to me anyways. It sounds like a problem with your OS.

So to a full reformat of your hard drives (all of them) after backing up your stuff, then reinstall Windows from scratch. If you don't have an extra activation key for windows, call their support hotline and explain the situation to them. They have been very accommodating with me when I used to have PC problems.

After you get Windows running, and your drivers and essentials installed and updated.... install Shogun 2. Install ONLY Shogun 2. Play that game, and see if it reboots you again. If it does, then you might have a hardware issue on your hands*. I dunno what you mean by memory leak, but that sounds like a RAM issue. You may need to replace your RAM.

If Shogun 2 plays fun, continue installing all your other stuff and restoring your files. When you've finished that, try Shogun 2 again and see if you reboot. If you do, something in your restored files or newly installed programs may be causing it. Try removing those programs to find the culprit (assuming the issue isn't permanent once it shows up).

That's what I would do.

* - We already know it isn't Shogun 2 causing the problem, because it happens in other games too.

[Louella Dougans]

have you run a memory-checker utility? to check teh SIMMS or DIMMS or whatever the memory modules are called nowadays ?

[Mizhara]

If memory serves, (badum psh) memory is still cheap as hell so I'd either just borrow a few sticks or even just buy new memory just to see if that solves the issue. It'd help if we'd get the error message/BSOD dump too. Whether it reboots or not, it should create a dump of error messages when it reboots. Find those logs and you should get an indication of what's wrong.

[Louella Dougans]

I asked about the memory checker, because on one of our old machines, it would run fine, except the EVE client would just disconnect, no error messages given.
Then, several months later, other programs would start to quit unexpectedly.
And then, later, you'd be doing stuff, and then *paf!* restart, just as if you'd pushed the hard reset. No blue screens, nothing, just *beep* and startup sequence again. Could even hear the drives powering down and stuff.
All this time, the startup memory check in the BIOS didn't report any problems.

Anyway, we ran a memory checker utility, and it said one of the modules was faulty. Replaced, and it worked just fine.

[Lyn Farel]

Start by formating before buying anything.

[Myrhial Arkenath]

Virus check through linux distro run from a disk. But honestly, this sounds like failing hardware to me. Memory tester may yield results. Or borrow hardware if you can and test that way. Format may be annoying but it's not bad to do it every so often. I'm going to assume nothing on your system is overclocked right? Did you ever tinker with the BIOS? It could just be an accidental change of the memory values.

[Lydia Tishal]

Going to jump on the bandwagon here...it sounds like you have a dying memory module. Everything runs okay until something critical tries to read/write to a bad sector then BLAM, hard reboot.
As time passes and more sectors go bad, the problem gets worse.

If you have enough memory in your system, you can try pulling out some of the modules to try and isolate the bad part.

[BloodBird]

The PC is by now 3 years old or will be, in a very short time. I don't recall exactly when I got it but that's roughtly how old it is. When 3 years have passed the insurance will die and I can open the tower to clean out dust, replace parts etc. Until then I'll try any other option as I'm not in the financial position to buy new hardware atm, even if I could put it into my PC.

Thanks to you all I've a couple ideas for what I can try before a reformat/re-install, and if that don't work I've atl a good idea what the issue is about; this does, when all is said, sound most like failing hardware.

I've yet to figure out where a BSOD message get stored when it's not shown - if it is at all - so, so far that has not been able to help me. Previously I did alter the allowed memory for my PC's functions; it was not even running on 10% of what it could before it started to get somewhat tight. Turned that allowed amount up to roughly 80% and it's not shown any improvement yet; I did this about a month ago, after all. I've not fiddles around with any core settings or run anything in DOS/outside of windows vista for the exact reason that I've not yet needed to and don't want to break anything I can't fix - I'm not computer savy enough to navigate DOS confidently.

That leaves memory-checking software, trying to double-check for known viruses or any issue that eats more memory than it should, and if none of that works out or grants any better leads, reformat. Ultimately, come february next year my debt has been paid off and I can save up for whatever extra/new hardware I want/need and thus any hardware issues should be solved... provided the insurance is gone or I decide to void it ahead of what little time remains.

Now, onwards to possible fix nr1. Got to get a memory checker working, don't know where to get one but I'll start looking around.

[Louella Dougans]

if you have a floppy drive, the simplest thing would be to download memtest86+ from http://www.memtest.org/

The thing you'd want for using a floppy would be:
http://www.memtest.org/download/4.20/memtest86+-4.20.floppy.zip

unzip that into a suitable directory, there's a readme that explains what you have to do.

there's other versions of memtest86+ that use bootable CDs or memory sticks, but I don't know much about those.

Your friend might be able to help with those, if necessary

[lallara zhuul]

For me, after three years Vista went completely and utterly bonkers.

Installed Win 7 and the whole thing runs fine.

Even games that were hard on the hardware are running smoothly with better details now.

[Merdaneth]

Symptoms seems like problems with your memory. Check out your regular memory first, if that checks out, maybe be your video card memory, especially if crashes often occur during gpu intensive applications (like games).

[Myrhial Arkenath]

Good god yes, get Win 7. It's been a vast improvement for me, and then not just because Dell seems to think it is ok to deliver a 4GB memory setup with a 32 bit version of an OS. Shame on me for finding out way too late though. It's not perfect, I still get crashes every once in a while, but it just feels a lot more fluent.

[Wanoah]

While you're scratching around trying to find the fault, it's probably worth giving things a good clean with a can of air - dust can make the difference between running at a normal temperature and tending to overheat. All it can take is an overheating memory chip on your video card to give you some awkward problems. Check that fans are all spinning properly too. It's easy to overlook things like this. It's worth noting that some hardware faults, especially ones to do with memory, can crash your machine instantly: Windows doesn't even get a chance to generate one of its handy STOP errors to let you know what has happened.

[Crucifire]

I had to deal with a memory leak a few weeks ago. I think it was an update to Avast! that was the culprit since the issue started right afterwards and progressively got worse, but I'm unsure.

Instead of fuddling with it though I took the cheater's way out and just reinstalled Windows 7. Confirmed for me it wasn't a hardware issue, no more memory leak, got a squeeky clean OS install and it's easy to backup everything important of mine. For most people formatting their systems isn't such a simple step to take in troubleshooting, though.

Good luck!