System Flakyness

[Kevin Brown]

OK, well I've spent time trying to figure the problem out and the only
conclusion I can come to is that Verant (makers of EQ) just suck at
programming.  My system is fine until I run even just the patch program for EQ. 
At which point I have to reboot the system if I want to do anything other than
EQ.  I guess this is the end of that game for me, time to violate the user
agreement and give it to my friend and let him play the characters.

The memory is good as far as I can tell (made it through 18 hours of the
memtest86 program without a hitch) and runs every other program I want on it no
problem.  The heat sink never gets too hot to touch, the system has lots of cold
air blowing through it and is kept clean of dust and other detritus.

These problems didn't show up till verant released the Scars of Velious
expansion for EQ.  Since then I get nothing but trouble trying to play.  System
locks up at least twice a night, same with my two friends.

I would like to thank everyone on the list for the help, guess it's time to find
a new game to play.

> > OK, not totally linux related, but hoping someone might have some suggestions.
> > I have an Athlon 650 running Win98SE (yeah I know, boo, hiss), but I use it for
> > games and such that don't exist for linux (Everquest).  My system has been
> > acting up (Blue Screen of Death, etc...) and since these behaviors seem to have
> > become a common occurance (well more often than usual) in recent months I'm
> > beginning to suspect hardware trouble.  I was wondering if anyone knew of a
> > utility (windows, dos or linux) that could do things like test my systems memory
> > for errors to see if that is the culprit.
> >
> > I suspect the memory more than an overheat because the errors only seem to occur
> > when I'm playing EverQuest, and EQ needs far more memory than anything else I
> > use on the system.  It currently has just 1 stick of PC133 128MB RAM.
> 
> It may not be a RAM issue (but certainly don't discount it). My brother
> runs an Athlon 850 with 256 MB of RAM. Everquest periodically locks
> up for him, often several times in a day. It locks up especially frequently
> when he overclocks it, so I suspect that processor heat may be the
> culprit.