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Dell inspiron woes


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Wow..I am bummed

I love CM and bought a laptop for sole purpose of playng CM by pbem..

I installed CMBB and when it loads I have hard time moving mouse over opening menu..it usually freezes...it only gets worse..after hitting ctrl-altesc, i can reopen game and then it becomes clear my system is woring hard...the fans are running and the machine obviously heats up..

shortly afterwards, I get a blue screen that tells me that i have an error and my computer restarts...the error then takes me to internet explorer which tells me that it is probably a driver issue...

I updated my driver, bios and directx..nothing has helped

I have the following laptop

Dell inspiron 4150

pentium 4

1.7 gig-M, 14.1 SXGA +ATI 16mb video

windows XP

384 mb RAM

What do i need to do to play this game on a laptop

some one please help

Do i need to change to machine other than dell or how can i change my dell?

I found the greatest military game i have ever played and i want to play it in other places then my desktop

Desperately Dave

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Here is some more info to add to prior post

i reloaded game and got same blue page and warning that has following info

stop 0x0000008E 0xc0000005

ATI 3d.AG.dll

address BFA38D65

Base at BF9F2000

Datestamp 3d932608

Then it procedes to form a physical memory dump then pc reloads

gonna reinstall and try softwaaare mode

Desperate Dave

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Playing on a laptop is probably going to involve more frustrations that a desktop would, but people want laptops...

CM runs the CPU at near 100% for almost the entire time it is running, which most laptops aren't really engineered to handle. So the laptop getting warm and fans running is to be expected with CM.

As far as I'm aware 'software mode' doesn't work with CMBB. 800x600 is the minimum resolution. If you select the 640x480 resolutions, your screen will be cropped and you won't be able to control features of the game or select things properly.

I suggest making sure that all other programs have been shut down, including anti-virus programs and any other utilities that may be running in the background. A Ctrl-Alt-Del should reveal programs and processes that are running that could be causing problems. Do this before uninstalling and reinstalling any software/drivers (and playing CM).

I suggest uninstalling your video drivers for now (with the Add/Remove Programs control panel or possibly the ATI-specific uninstaller). Hopefully WinXP can't fully recognize the card and will install it as a 'VGASave' adapter.

Have you installed DirectX 9.0 ? I doubt that it is necessary, but it does offer a reinstallable version of DirectX for XP. The latest driver for the Dell Inspiron 4150's ATI Mobility M7/7500 is 7.75.1 (A03), which you've probably already installed (and hopefully uninstalled by this point).

After uninstalling the ATI M7, rebooting and redetecting as a VGASave adapter you can now optionally install DirectX 9.0 if you want to (but first make sure that you've 'killed' all other programs). After the requisite reboot you can attempt to reinstall the video driver. Reboot again and run the DXDIAG from the Run command on the Start Menu. On the Display tab check to see if all three 'DirectX Features' are enabled. Run the DirectDraw and Direct3D tests and see if they pass.

Again, make sure that all possible programs and processes have been closed down before attempting to play CM. If you still get an error make note of it again and maybe it can be narrowed down. It's possible that the ATI video driver is having problems, but I don't know enough about the Mobility series to make a judgement on that.

[ January 21, 2003, 12:42 PM: Message edited by: Schrullenhaft ]

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Not sure that it helps but I am running great on a Inspiron 8200 with almost the same specs as you except for the 64MB nvidia card.

Maybe you can return the 4150 and get a 8200?

That was one of the reasons that I went with the Dell was the return policy.

Good luck,

Bobo

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i just bought a Dell 2650 today - mostly for my wife to work on, but also to play CM on - one of the things i made sure of was that it was one of our notebooks that offers Nvidia chipsets rather than ATI

are you inside 30 days of purchasing the notebook? if so you can return and purchase either the 8200 (which currently has an option for the nividia geforce 440 go chipset) or the 2650 (which currently offers a 16mb or 32mb Nvidia geforce2 go chipset)

btw, this is not to say that Schrullenhaft will not be able to help diagnose and solve the problem - but it is a fall back option ;)

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