Anyone know what might have caused this?

[NightfallGemini]

Well, I had been running FO2, alt tabbing out every now and then to check Steve's great walkthrough (http://www.the-spoiler.com/RPG/Interplay/fallout2.3/ Beware, spoilers abound ). As soon as I had alt-tabbed out at one point in Vault City, the computer suddenly rebooted. Is this just because Windows XP is weird with FO2 and alt-tabbing? Or is there something legitimately wrong with a certain part within? This hasn't happened with any other games I have.

Specs
--
1.67 GHz Athlon Palomino "2000 XP" model
512 MB DDR RAM
Windows XP Home
Radeon 9200 (128 MB card)

And, just for kicks, 350W power supply. Not sure if the heat the supply would generate would come into anything..

But yeah, I hadn't turned off the option to auto reboot upon blue screens, so I'm not sure what it is. I'm suspecting some kind of driver thing though.

Also, would D3DWindower fix this problem? It sounds like it'd be easier on my poor little machine here than constantly alt-tabbing out.

EDIT: Oh, and I'm using the latest official patch. I know some fanmade patches cause stuff like this so I felt I should specify which patch.

 

[Per]

Some of the measures discussed here might be relevant.

 

[NightfallGemini]

May also want to look at the event viewer.

Start-> Control Panel-> Administrative Tools-> Event Viewer

Then look at System and Application Events, and look for ones that occurred when the system crashed. If necessary cause a crash and see what gets listed topmost.

9/10 the problems get listed here, and usually it gives a good clue as to what the problem is. Doubt it's FO, more likely video related. I've had quirks that have only affected old games, and they turned out to be due to some corrupt legacy drivers/files.

Working with the info given in that post...

Well, the only thing I saw that really stuck out was in the System portion.

The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck. The bugcheck was: 0x1000007e (0xc0000005, 0xb42860be, 0xb653ec18, 0xb653e914). A dump was saved in: C:\WINDOWS\Minidump\Mini070107-01.dmp.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

I have no clue what that is, aside from..

Details
Product: Windows Operating System
ID: 1001
Source: Save Dump
Version: 5.2
Symbolic Name: EVENT_BUGCHECK_SAVED
Message: The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck. The bugcheck was: %1. A dump was saved in: %2.

It looks like something went majorly wrong that it wasn't able to solve without completely scaring the living jesus out of me. =P

 

[Sander]

Have you tried any of the *solutions* offered in that thread?

Also, Per's guide is better than Steve's, honestly. Steve's guide seems to be lacking quite a bit. And some of his character creation advice seems downright wrong, but meh.

 

[NightfallGemini]

Have you tried any of the *solutions* offered in that thread?

Also, Per's guide is better than Steve's, honestly. Steve's guide seems to be lacking quite a bit. And some of his character creation advice seems downright wrong, but meh.

The situation in his case seems a bit different. My machine doesn't downright *turn off* to where I have to actually press the power button again to get the thing back on. It reboots, and from what I can tell, it seemed rare and it seemed to only happen when I was alt tabbing while in Vault City. Plus, his specs are entirely different from mine, OS aside.

To give you an idea of how rare it actually was, several days of about 5 or 6 hour sessions of Fallout 2, and until now it hadn't done this. =P Plus, I'm not really too sure how to recreate the error to actually figure out what I could have done wrong aside from simply being in Vault City (which is strange, because it hadn't done it the 6 other times I had entered in my adventures). It's like a really bad special encounter. =P

 

[Sander]

The situation in his case seems a bit different. My machine doesn't downright *turn off* to where I have to actually press the power button again to get the thing back on. It reboots, and from what I can tell, it seemed rare and it seemed to only happen when I was alt tabbing while in Vault City. Plus, his specs are entirely different from mine, OS aside.

To give you an idea of how rare it actually was, several days of about 5 or 6 hour sessions of Fallout 2, and until now it hadn't done this. =P Plus, I'm not really too sure how to recreate the error to actually figure out what I could have done wrong aside from simply being in Vault City (which is strange, because it hadn't done it the 6 other times I had entered in my adventures). It's like a really bad special encounter. =P

If it only happened once, then it's probably just a fluke. Could be anything, from a loose contact in the machine to a background crash of Windows.

 

[Nim82]

Ah, sadly the bugcheck error can mean a lot of things. If your lucky the event viewer often points to the exact driver that borked.

From a quick look at the codes, it most likely was a memory access violation, that could mean a lot of things too.
Chances are it could just have been a one off glitch or conflict, nothing major.

As Sander said, if it isn't recurring - forget about it

 

[NightfallGemini]

Ah, sadly the bugcheck error can mean a lot of things. If your lucky the event viewer often points to the exact driver that borked.

From a quick look at the codes, it most likely was a memory access violation, that could mean a lot of things too.
Chances are it could just have been a one off glitch or conflict, nothing major.

As Sander said, if it isn't recurring - forget about it

It seems like it. I googled the error codes and checked the IRQ addies.

It was a system thread exception "not handled," and an access violation. The IRQs effected were, strangely enough the primary IDE channel and for some inexplicable reason the ethernet card. My theory now is that it was Windows eating itself. =P

 

[Wr4i7h]

My PC, with some versions of the nvidia drivers, used to BSOD and reboot sometimes when I switched to/from any fullscreen directdraw or direct3d apps. Fallout and Fallout 2 are directdraw apps, if I recall correctly. You could try updating your graphics drivers if it keeps happening.

Also, use Per's guides. Those are the best there are.