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Anyone got a solution to the World of Warcraft alt-tabbing bug?

post #1 of 15
8/13/05 at 1:49am
Thread Starter 
So, randomly, when I alt-tab World of Warcraft, the screen will go blue or black with "static" across the screen. It's clearly a software crash as I can shut down the system with keys, or even standby and out of standby fixes the screen corruption. It did this on my other XPS Gen. 2 as well. Anyone got any ideas why it does this?

I've tried 77.76 drivers and am now using Dell's 77.72 (or whatever the latest ones from them are).

Anyone got any advances/advice they want to share on the matter?
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post #2 of 15
8/13/05 at 1:51am
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post #3 of 15
8/13/05 at 1:56am
Thread Starter 
That's so helpful. Any reasonable responses?
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post #4 of 15
8/13/05 at 3:15am
I have the XPS and WoW installed too but I have never had any problems with alt-tabbing in-game (in the last 7 days since I got the system and I have been playing it daily for hours). I have only 512MB though in case that matters (gonna upgrade soon). Would this be a RAM issue (do you have the same problem with stock RAM)?

And I haven't reformatted my HD from stock (yet). Don't think this maters though.
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post #5 of 15
8/13/05 at 3:18am
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by DDR
I have the XPS and WoW installed too but I have never had any problems with alt-tabbing in-game (in the last 7 days since I got the system and I have been playing it daily for hours). I have only 512MB though in case that matters (gonna upgrade soon). Would this be a RAM issue (do you have the same problem with stock RAM)?

And I haven't reformatted my HD from stock (yet). Don't think this maters though.
It's not an obvious problem, being that I can alt-tab 20 times in a row and it works fine. In fact, it's only done it twice in the last 10 days, and today it did it the first time I alt-tabbed. There really is no rhyme or reason to it!
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post #6 of 15
8/13/05 at 9:47am
Yeah I get that error every once in a while, My screen just freaks out. IF I hibernate or standby and come back it gets rid of it.



One problem I do have though in WoW is that sometimes when I'm playing my mouse can keep moving but my cursor never follows where my mouse is really going. And when I exit to windows my cursor pointer just sits in a spot, but when I move my mouse I can click on different things but the cursor just sits in one spot.

If I hibernate or reboot it goes away.
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post #7 of 15
8/13/05 at 9:49am
Quote:
Originally Posted by clayton006
Yeah I get that error every once in a while, My screen just freaks out. IF I hibernate or standby and come back it gets rid of it.



One problem I do have though in WoW is that sometimes when I'm playing my mouse can keep moving but my cursor never follows where my mouse is really going. And when I exit to windows my cursor pointer just sits in a spot, but when I move my mouse I can click on different things but the cursor just sits in one spot.

If I hibernate or reboot it goes away.
There are two mouse options in WoW, software and hardware. Switch to the other one and see if that fixes the problem.
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post #8 of 15
8/13/05 at 5:34pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by WilliamG
It's not an obvious problem, being that I can alt-tab 20 times in a row and it works fine. In fact, it's only done it twice in the last 10 days, and today it did it the first time I alt-tabbed. There really is no rhyme or reason to it!
I see. I certainly haven't alt-tabbed so many times; I just haven't seen it myself yet. Just curious (somewhat off topic), what video driver are you guys using for WoW? I am using the latest driver from Dell. I heard that 77.72 fixes a video problem, so maybe I should update mine (?!)
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post #9 of 15
8/13/05 at 5:58pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by DDR
I see. I certainly haven't alt-tabbed so many times; I just haven't seen it myself yet. Just curious (somewhat off topic), what video driver are you guys using for WoW? I am using the latest driver from Dell. I heard that 77.72 fixes a video problem, so maybe I should update mine (?!)
I'm using 77.24, the latest Dell version. I did use 77.76 but it had the same problem. I switched back to the Dell 77.24 to see if that would fix it, but alas...
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post #10 of 15
8/13/05 at 7:59pm
I had that problem, too. My fix? 80.40's. All the previous drivers caused that issue, the 80.40's not only yield the best performance, best stability, but it fixes that bug.
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post #11 of 15
8/13/05 at 8:43pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Imidazole
I had that problem, too. My fix? 80.40's. All the previous drivers caused that issue, the 80.40's not only yield the best performance, best stability, but it fixes that bug.
That's good to hear. I just installed them! Just before installing them, exiting WoW yielded a nasty crash.

PAGE FAULT IN NON PAGED AREA.

The culprit? NV4disp.dll.

GAH!

Hopefully 80.40 will fix it! Here's testing!

Thanks.
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post #12 of 15
8/13/05 at 8:50pm
Thread Starter 
Wow. You've got to be kidding, right?

I loaded up World of Warcraft, and clearly, in Stormwind, the textures are HORRIBLE. The paving-stones look so.....digitized now and are so aliased. Yuck. Clearly 80.40 might be stable, but boy is the image quality compromised.

Have gone to 77.77 now (had tried 77.76 and Dell's 77.24).

Image quality is back to normal now. We'll see how they go.
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post #13 of 15
8/17/05 at 2:36am
Thread Starter 
OK the 77.77s crashed on me when alt-tabbing today playing WoW. A quick standby and back out always fixes it. Is there any version of the drivers that actually work 100% with WoW? This is driving me nuts!!
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post #14 of 15
8/17/05 at 2:33pm

Same

I have seen the same problem with the alt-tab screen static that can only be fixed by a reboot. Most depressing crash? about to engage onxyia and I alt tab to chk something on a web page and crashed....died as the warder popped, he aggro'd the raid but they were able to kill him and keep going and combat rez me when i came back online.

I'm using the latest Dell drivers.

I've also only noticed it happening in the last two weeks. My guess is a recent "hotfix" is the culprit, becuase i had NEVER seen it before, and I alt-tab all the time.

I'm not very inclined to test out different drivers either, makes me nervous.

My solution so far is to run in "Windowed" mode so I can see my other windows from the desktop. I have not had any crashes yet from doing this......
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post #15 of 15
8/17/05 at 2:44pm
Have you tried playing WoW in windowed mode?? My Gen 2 is on the UPS truck for delivery today, so I haven't seen the alt-tab problem on it, but since WoW lets you play windowed but expanded to full screen, maybe that will help with the problem you're having?

I play WoW in window mode at 1600x900 on all of the PC's I play on, it looks fine on my Dell 20" widescreen LCD at home, and on the 19" CRT's here at work. Hopefully it will look just as good on the Gen 2 but I won't know until the thing gets here.

Ricowan
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