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Hey all, my friend's family got a new dell about 7 months back, and i think about 3 months ago it stopped playing certain games, notably shogun 2 total war. Rome tw and battle for middle earth 2 wont run either. From what I can tell Shogun starts but gets stuck on the loading screen and never leaves. Rome never plays at all, the CD is recognized, but it doesn't run. I believe bfme2 does the same thing Rome does, but I didn't get a chance to test it. I tried to download new drivers for him, except they failed to install, either from nvidia's website, or from window's downloader. The device manager told me the Gt 530 he has didnt have any drivers on it, and wasnt working properly. Thats all i really had time to do, thoughts?
his specks that i remember are as follows:
Dell
core i7 2600
Nvidia gt 530
Windows 7 64
8 gigs ram
something like a 1.5tb hard drive....not sure on that one

bump, anyone able to help?

why dont go for factory reset and check things out then

killadark wrote:

why dont go for factory reset and check things out then

That's always my solution, but nobody likes to do that unless it's a last resort.

Well, other than trying to find drivers on Dell's website (if for some reason Dell PCs require custom GPU drivers), it's either a bad Windows requiring a reset or a failed/failing GPU, I fear. There will probably be warranty stickers all over it and if so, swapping GPUs for a test is out of the question. If a reset or a new driver doesn't fix the problem, they should take it back to Dell for warranty repairs.

If it was 3 months ago, you probably can't even ask them if they remember what they installed, when they noticed the change.
At this point, I'd save any important data, and do a fresh install. Then after getting it working again, I'd threaten under pain of death, to not install anything else!

Dells have a 1 year warranty at least. My XP 8300 has like an on-site full parts replacement thing. It also didn't have any stickers sealing the case, too.

Why hasn't he taken advantage of the Dell support? Hell, they even have remote control stuff where they can go in and try to fix stuff. And at the very least, if it's a hardware failure, he should get that going so he can get it fixed under warranty for free.

Off topic...what a lopsided rig. An i7-2600 paired with a measley GT530? Awful.

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uninstall the video driver and restart in safe mode, then try installing the latest driver for the gfx card, that would be my first step and if it installs then it's a software issue.

will try that first, should it fail ill probably tell him to take it back, difficulty is, Im not sure he will, since to all appearances the machine is working fine, and just wont play 2 or 3 games

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Have you tried reinstalling the actual games? Seems odd that these two start then freeze, while other games assumedly play just fine. You could also try reinstalling the DirectX Runtime Library...thats a long shot, but who knows.

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Never hurts to just uninstall all the video drivers, then turn the machine off and remove and reseat the video card.

Also make sure that perhaps its not the internal 2600 video thats playing, not sure if it has it, but it may and if it does it could be the one thats running and not the nvidia.


http://ark.intel.com/products/52213

Yes it does have the internal gpu, the very bad 2000 as well:(

Moved topic to General Hardware.