SS corrupting my graphics driver

[Kataphractos]

Ok, this is getting old.

I have the abomination OS that is Windows 8.1, and recently, whenever MTW2 crashes to desktop so hard that it requires a hard restart (or even sometimes on a normal restart after recently playing the game), my comp's graphics driver stops working and I have to delete/reinstall it. Not just restarting in safe mode to do it, but I have to actually do a system restore before I can even get the machine to restart in safe mode. This has happened a few times now over the last week, and all of the incidents happened after I played SS. This doesn't happen with any other games/applications, so it has to be something with SS just not liking something about Windows 8 (or the OS being the biggest pile of garbage in the history of OS's). Or it could be that my SS installation is corrupted somehow, but I'm not sure how that could've happened since I play early campaign with more or less default settings and no other submods. I've also run my anti-virus scans a couple times in the offchance it's some malware that's doing it, but all scans come up clean.

So yeah, I've no idea why this is happening, other than the game's starting to show it's age when used on new systems or something. If anyone's got advice or a fix, I'd love to hear it.

[teks]

are you running the game in fullscreen windowed mode? Try using regular fullscreen instead. it might help.

[Kataphractos]

Yes, I'm running the game in fullscreen mode and this is still happening (I'm not even sure how to get to windowed).

[DeathtoEgo]

what kind of antivirus/malware protection do you use? Did you try rolling back the graphics driver to the previous one see if it helps.

[Kataphractos]

Yep, definitely fullscreen, as there's a loading bar.

Hm, guess I hadn't considered the heat. But then again this is the only game that has issues that require a forced restart, regardless if heat is causing it or not. When playing WoW the keyboard gets uncomfortably hot (almost too hot to keep fingers resting on keys), but that game has never crashed or froze the computer (forgot to mention it's a laptop, so not sure if that'd make a difference). On top of that, I have the rear of the laptop resting on a book to increase airflow to the underside where the cooling vents are.

[Kataphractos]

Malwarebytes and Spybot. And I tried rolling back to a previous driver version as well but it still happened.

[teks]

The mod runs the game in 'fullscreen windowed' by default as far as I know. The easiest way to be sure is to alt-tab out of the game, and alt-tab back in. If there isn't a loading screen, that means your game is windowed. You should also be able to tell just right in the graphics settings which is also where you change it. Just go ahead and flip it to fullscreen mode if it isn't already.

Other things, maybe heat?
Not all games strain the computer in the same way. Medieval 2 might be placing too much on your processor compared to other games you play, or vice versa. Heat is a major cause of forced restarts with games and is also super easy to fix. First, make sure your not overclocking, if you are there is a good chance it isn't stable. After checking that just open your PC and give it some canned air.

[teks]

Ah, laptop.

My advice was more tailored to a desktop. Having heat issues with a specific game is common though. A lot of people had problems with a game called planetside because it was CPU heavy, which is where I picked up on that problem.

Maybe post your laptop, and/or the graphics card. See if anyone else had problems like this specific to the laptop.

[Kataphractos]

Graphics card is an Nvidia GeForce 745M. Laptop...trying to find specs for it, but Microsoft went out of their way to make Windows 8 as user-unfriendly as possible, so it'll take some time to find.

[teks]

It should be on a sticker on the bottom.