Taming The Beast . . .

We have two Windows desktop systems here -- Jameece's "Beauty" 3.3 HGz i5/ 4 GB DDR3 / 1TB HDD / Windows 7 screamer . . . and "the Beast" (2.8 GHz P4 / 2GB DDR2 / 350 GB PATA HDD / XP SP3), some of the components of which are older than my goddaughter.

We got Beauty with a tax refund check because The Beast was behaving, well, beastly. World of Warcraft was undergoing random abnormal terminations, locking up the system and causing video to go completely away every few minutes. Installing the final patches of WoW patch 3.3 was a hell of "download incremental patch . . . attempt install . . . fail install . . . troubleshoot . . . repeat."

When my trusty MacBook migrated to "format and reinstall" land (Apple - gear, double flash startup), I grabbed Beast for my various WoW playing stuff. I need to wait a week or two to buy a Snow Leopard CD (my old one did not make the trip to Fresno last year).

Until them, I had to make the Beast work for games.

Round 1 of troubleshooting: memcheck found some bad RAM, which we replaced.

While we were at it, we also upgraded the video card (because Jameece also got a new Viewsonic monitor that seems to work best with ATI hardware . . . we had an nVidia in there) and reinstalled Windows XP.

The memory errors went away, but WoW and The Sims 3 were still randomly crashing. Ran Windows Update and applied all updates. Still crashing. I ran dxdiag. It showed DirectX 9.0c was up to date and completely functional. I installed the latest and greatest video card drivers (Radeon HD 3460), applicable hotfixes, etc. I updated the motherboard AGP bus (I know, sad , . . .) drivers, tweaked the AGP aperture in BIOS . . . nada, Ran temp monitor software on the GPU -- even with ambient cooling this card's GPU temperature does not exceed 75 degrees C. Card is not overclocked. No spikes or error messages are logged -- ever.

Then I ran an OpenGL stress test on the GPU -- No issues.

It took me just five minutes to find out how to force WoW to use the OpenGL renderer.

No more issues. I played WoW for several hours on the Beast with no issues at all.