UV Locks Up

[New York Jets]

Sometimes during combat, whether animations are on or off, the game freezes up, completely. Ctr-Alt-Del won't even work and I have to cold re-boot which I know is not good for my hard drive. Is there a way to stop these 'lock ups'?

[Cherper]

I wish I could help you, but I have the same problem. I am almost to the point of saying forget it and quit playing, but I am addicted. The only thing I can think of is that there isn't enough memory, but I have 1Gig. Nothing is running in the background, it just hangs.

[Nomad]

It sounds like a driver issue to me. I have had UV since it came out. I can leave it running in the backgound and
do other tihngs without any problems. I have had it running for 2 or 3 days at a time without a lockup.

[neuromancer]

I agree with Nomad, I've never had any serious problems with UV. I regularly start it up, and <ALT>+<TAB> to mail or whatever while I do my PBEM turns. Never had a lock up or CTD with UV.



The first place to start is simply with the question, do you experience this problem with other games? If not, then it is probably - at worst - drivers.

Seeing as so few people report problems of this nature with UV, I don't believe it is an inherent problem with UV, but rather a problem on your PC.

If you find that UV is the only program to give you a problem, then I would guess that you are looking at some sort of conflict or compatability problem. Drivers are the best guess (hit the intenet, update them all, including patching your OS up). Maybe you have some other apps running in the background that may be causing a problem (although they are probably 'oddball' apps like Music sharing apps, or such).

Now, if you find that you have this problem with several games, unless you have the bad luck to only run games that are noted as being unstable, you should take a hard look at your computer.

Significantly older hardware can be a problem, not being up to the task of running newer software.
Hardware settings can be a problem too (I had a bear of a time with my ATI R9500 video card until I forced the AGP port on my ASUS mainboard to 1.8V, been happy as a clam ever since).

Some people like to 'save' money by buying 'no name' hardware.
Important tip, in the computer biz, you get what you pay for. If you bought some wacky never heard of piece of junk from Indonesia for $25 bucks, when everyone else is paying $250 for their 'name brand' stuff, the odds are you are the one that got ripped off, not them.
With CPUs, stick to AMD or Intel, memory and mainboards have a small variety of manufacturers - but again stick to the ones that have a good rep, video cards have only two manufacturers worth anything right now - ATI and NVIDIA (both allow their chip sets to be put in third party video cards), hard drives have a few manufacturers - but some are better than others (do some research - and smply being bigger isn't all there is to a good HD).

Another sin (in my books) is over clocking. Some people love to over clock everything. And it can legitimately get an increase in performance, this is true - if done right. But most people who over clock usually screw it up (its a delicate procedure), and their computers become unreliable, run hot (reducing the life span of their hardware, as well as significantly decreasing reliability), and generally cause themselves far more trouble than it is worth.

OS is another issue. Win 95 was a piece of crap. Win 98 was better, but still not very robust. Win XP is remarkably reliable (even if it is bloat ware). I cannot speak to Win 2000 or ME (although I've head not so good things about ME).

Also, just because you have a GB of memory, doesn't mean its all available. If you have everything and its dog running in the background, you might find that the 1 GB isn't enough. We find that problem at work, that some people so fill up their memory with junk that its no wonder their machine is dog slow and/ or unreliable.

I run Win XP, Norton Internet Security (including V.S.), and not a lot else (I've intentionally kept my machine pretty lean), on 512 MB RAM with an AMD Athlon 2400+ CPU (the machine is 1 and a half years old, gettn' to be time to replace it), and almost never have problems.


If you are moderately computer savy, take some time, do some research, and see if you can figure out where the problems are on your machine. Running searches on the web can be remarkably helpful.

If you are computer illiterate (its not an insult, most people aren't very good with computers, some people have a certain prediposition to being able to use computers better than others - thats all) then you should probably find a friend that does know about computers, and have them have a look. Or take your machine into a reputable shop and see if they can help you determine what is wrong (this should be a last resort as it will be expensive).

(Note to others, if he was particularly computer savy, I doubt this topic would have even come up, so I assume he is in one of the other two categories).


Hope this helps, or at least points you in the right direction to get things running smoother.

[Cherper]

I went out and checked the BIOs, and ended up d/ling a newer version. It seems to have done the trick. As for the hardware, it could be that the PC that I am trying to run it on is also the server for my Cisco Routing lab, so it could be some issues with it getting too many calls from the other machines on the network. I thought that the 1Gig would fix it up, but maybe it is the time to hit the wife up for the idea of a 64-bit machine [:D]