It happens to everyone… it’s the BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) of The Elder Scrolls… the dreaded crash to desktop or CTD. Frustrating as all get out.

To help prevent them, try the following.

First and foremost download the Morrowind Frame-Rate Optimizer. It’s available in a lot of places but you can also find it here:

http://morrowind.nm.ru/Morrowind%20FPS%20Optimizer/

Use one of the many tweak guides available… there are several, but one of the best can be found here:

http://www.tweaktown.com/document.php?dTyp...e=guide&dId=316

Other suggestions:

Update your video card drivers.

Keep your hard drive cleaned and defragmented. Run Scandisk every so often.

Eliminate unnecessary programs at startup by shutting them down from your taskbar, or using MSCONFIG and disabling them.

Using the options menu in Morrowind (hit “Escape” during game play, or select “Options” from the splash-screen when starting Morrowind), make some or all of the following adjustments:

Under the Video Tab

Turn “Off” Real Time Shadows
Adjust your View Distance to around 75%.
Set the games resolution to match that of your desktop (if that doesn’t work, try dropping your games resolution down a notch. Playing Morrowind at 600x800 is not my idea of the ideal situation, but each step down in resolution represents a major workload taken off your video card’s memory and GPU).

Under the Audio Tab

If you have a decent sound card, use “Hardware Accelerated” instead of “Software Mode”.

If you’ve tried all of these suggestions and nothing seems to help, it might be time to consider a new video card or a new computer. What better reason is there than a better Morrowind experience, right?

Game on!

~ Baphomet

THANK YOU BAPH!! hopefully now there wont be as many posts about CTDs

I think that's all we can hope for, eh?

And the post is my pleasure.

lol well ive seen people somehow ignore the pinned posts a few times

Just thought I'd mention that if you have problems with game "lockups" that still allow you to give a three-fingered salute successfully, but not much else, it may be because of Dr. Watson. For those that don't know, the sole purpose of this program is to activate itself whenever a program crashes and rub it in your face. If you try to delete it, Windows replaces it with TWO Dr. Watsons. If you try to hack it in two with a hex editor, Windows rebuilds it. Then Windows makes it better, stronger, and faster. It has the technology, believe me. It wasn't called Windows NEW TECHNOLOGY 5.0 because it was a cool name.

Er... Anyways... To disable Dr. Watson, all you have to do is delete the registry key HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AeDebug. For those that don't know how to do this, you need to open a "Run..." dialogue box and type "Regedit." Then press run. The application that runs is similar to that old-timey double-paned explorer. Click the "+" icon next to the words "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE" in the left panel, and a few folder icons should show up, along with several "+" symbols. Click the "+" symbol next to "Software," and scroll down to "Microsoft." Click the "+" icon by that, and then "Windows NT" and "CurrentVersion" in that exact order as they show up. Left-Click on the folder icon next to "Aedebug," then right-click that same icon and choose "Delete" on the menu that comes up. Why left-click it first? Well, you DO want watch that little semi-viral program as it dies, don't you?

Right... And if you ever want to enable the program again, just run Dr. Watson from the system32 directory with the -i option. For all of you non-comprending-persons out there, that means to open the "Run..." dialogue box once more and type "Drwtsn32 -i" at the prompt. Then press run.

Now this is more or less facts;
If you save alot, it wont CTD, but if you forget to save, BANG, CTD right away.

LoL. I usually end up in this situation. OOOPS.... Been playing for 2 hours and havnt saved. Better save then... *Crash* Totally hate it. Works the same for the CS... Still, havent had a crash in six months now

I really think this topic will help pepole, and also get rid of many similar posts. Thanks!

something ive been noticing recently, moving items 2 ur inventory with the inventory displayed (clicking and dropping them into ur inventory instead of using space) will cause a CTD. also picking up books using space (opening them, clicking take, opening them, etc) in rapid succession causes CTDs. very irritating <_<

I usualy get ctd`s when i quik save,i qiuksave and right after it has finished saving it crashes.....

Heya new member here (Switch referred me no wonder since he is a Mod eh?) got some SERIOUS problems with CTD's tried that Tweaking guide by Baphomet , tried making my computer run more on speed and such and cutting down on graphics (yuck) No help I can get into the game and within 10-40 secs it CTD's or just reboots my system and I have tried with that FPS improver still no good.. When I install it on my brothers and my dads computer it runs without a fuss but on mine? Crashes all the time and I am beginning to get frustated
and I defragged my harddrive just the night before...

here is my Specs and I have added my Ini file so you (hopefully) can tell me what I should do to play Morrowind!!



OS: WinXP Pro (Danish)
Video Card: GeForce4Ti PALITDAYTONA
RAM 512 SD Ram PC133
Motherboard: Soltek SL75KAV 1200 MHz
Soundcard: Soundblaster Live! Player 5.1
Harddrive 1: IBM-DTLA-305020
Harddrive 2: Maxtor 4R080J0
CD-ROM: PIONEER DVD-ROM DVD-104

and I got all the newest drivers...

So any advice? or do I just need to buy the same motherboard/CPU as my dad?

I'm tempted to offer a truly bizarre suggestion since it appears that your system is plenty enough machine to run MW. I know this might sound odd... but here goes.

Un-install that Soundblaster audio card. That's right... use the Add/Remove Hardware icon in "My Computer" and un-install that bad boy. Then pull it out, reboot and fire up MW.

I know, I know... what does a sound card have to do with it... try it. If it doesn't help, just plug the card back in. Reinstalling with WinXP should be a piece of cake, and I will grant you FULL Flaming Rights.

if it works then it works and if it doesn't... then it doesn't *keeps flaming right nonetheless *



EDIT: It didn't work :cry: weird thing is my dad hasn't updated his drivers :blink:

Well, it was a stretch, I know, and the only reason I suggested it is that I've had problems with MY SBLive soundcard crashing my system, and I've heard the same from a couple other people as well. I swear once I pulled mine, my whole system got more stable. I'm now running on-board sound, but I don't mind... it was a good trade.

As for your problem, I'm not sure what to tell you. That's a real stumper.

((thinking))

A couple questions: Is your dad's and/or brother's system running SD RAM (133) as well?

Have you tried shutting down all your "backround" applications that Windows loads at startup?

I'm rapidly running out of ideas here...

My brother are playing it on a Laptop
Can it be that its because I use Tweak-XP and the Video card tweak? and the CPU tweak? And ever since I heard that about programs in the background I close them all (even MSN so I can't ask Switch for help )

My dads comps specs are:
Motherboard: Soltek SL-75DRV5
Processor: AMD Athlon XP 2200+
Ram: PQI 512 mb pc2700 DDR-ram
Harddrives: Seagate Barracuda IV Fluid 80 gb 7200 rpm
Ibm/Hitachi 60 gb 7200 rpm
Soundcard: Creative Sound Blaster Live m/SPDIF
Videocard: Inno 3D Geforce 4 MX 440

got no Idea about my brothers laptop through

Okay, honestly, I'm stumped.

The ONLY other thing I can come up with to try, would be set your game resolution low, put all your options down to the minumum (no acceleration on your sound, reduce the AI, view distance, etc), shut off the sound, etc. In short, do everything you can to minimize the processing load on your machine. See if THAT helps, if it does, I would say that it indicates that something, somewhere - hardware-wise - is being stressed to the point of crashing your game.

Got to the same conclusion myself since I have discovered that as long as I stand 100% still the game doesn't crash, gotta run my Virus scanner and Ad-Aware and see what else that can take so many resources with no shadows (as in how many shadows an object can have and such) I could run the game for about 1 min before crash (where I jumped around, runned and hacked)

EDIT: Game STILL crashes :blink: :blink:

Im my case it helped to turn music down completely as the game tended to CTD when I was attacked, when changing area or any situation which causes music to change.
Now it still crashes when my poor mage is smacked too hard, so hard that the whole game passes out! :blink:
Seriously, I don't know why this happens, maybe it's when health drops too far below zero or, again, some sound related problem (the smacking sound and my PC's whimpering).
Anyway turning off music helped avoiding some CTDs. Hope that helps.

Alberto

actually I was able to play after I

Formattet my drives
Installed the latest firmware
Installed Windows


now it "only" crashes after a 5 hours of playtime

i dont think anyone has mentioned this, but after experimenting on my friends computer, always put the draw distance 90% full at the most, or it will crash at 100% full, dont know why though, but it went from crashing every 5 minutes to never crashing at all, so it must work.

Nope, I have the viewdistance at 300% and I rarely encounter any CTDs. Must be a nifty little "feature" specific to your friend's computer.

300%, christ!, you must be able to see the edge of the map before it loads past it...

As long as the cell isn't loaded already, that happens quite often. However, I also have 768Mb of RAM...

Im surprised no one ever mentioned running morrowind in a window, dont ask me why but it stoped CTD's and All out lock-ups on my freinds comp;

Specs:
950mhz Duran
512MB PC100
ATI Radeion 7200
Creative SB PCI 512

Could you tell us maybe how to run it in windowed mode then? (It's been discussed but I don't think anyone's revealed how).

EDIT: Well, I just looked at the thread, and Faust says to put in a -w at the end of the line in the shortcut... does that work? Then Marxist says something about an option button? I can't seem to find one.

The option for it is access by clicking options on the splash screen it should be right under the resolution drop down box, be warned however if your game resolution is not set lower your desktop resolution the game window will be forced off screen and generaly make playing difficult at best. I can only really recomend windowed mode for testing mods or otherwise multitasking, I only use windowmode as a last ditch attempt to get morrowind to run correctly on a system.

Greetings everyone,

I've had a good few problems meself.
Spec:
2.6Ghz P4
1028mb of Ram (DDR400 DIMMs)
120gb hard drive
Windows XP pro

Whenever I get a ctd, it tells me I have a problem with a device. I reckon it's jsut my onboard graphics (rated as a 64mb card mind) acting up. The most up-to-date drivers availible for it came out last April, and I'm waiting for 256mb cards to come down in price.

A few things that worked for me:
Looking at the floor whenever I save. Sometimes when saving causes a ctd, I can load it up, but the thumbnail will look like a corrupted picture (eg a C64 loading screen ). These can usually be rescued.

If a save causes a ctd, I generally have to restart. ctds cause my desktop to go into 640x480 with 4bit colour , but after I restart, I can load the game fine. The "corrupted" saved game works, but I always make sure to try and save over it before I move at all. If the save process completes sucessfully, I try a quicksave. If that works ok, then I got find a bed and rest for an hour. This creates an autosave file. If I know for sure that fullsave and quicksave will cause a ctd, then autosave will generally work. It can also get a PC used to the notion of saving.

Is that tweak you suggested compatable with XP? Any files patches and download sugggestions are most welcome

Just printed out the guides and downloaded the optmizer on a floppy, so I`ll try this all out when I get my computer back. Thanks for the info.

Sorry, i didn't spot this thread before i posted my thread...

[FONT=Geneva]ok. this will probably label me an idiot but here goes. i can get MW:bloodmoon installed til about 92 percent wen, on both my dvd burner and dvd player disc drives get datacab2 redundancy error. anyways her's the specs along with the files the warning says are missing

Icon file "Icons\s\Tx_S_Smmn_Wolf.dds" not found.

Icon file "Icons\s\Tx_S_Smmn_Bear.dds" not found.

Icon file "Icons\s\Tx_S_Smmn_Bonewolf.dds" not found.

the computer specs are kinda lengthy so their just added in at the link thingamacrackadoodle at the bottom

Antaru: You're new here so I'll let you off but please don't hijack threads. Read the rules I suggest you make a new thread about your problem here in Tech Support.

My Webpagewell, i retrospect yeah this does belong in the bloodmoon section but hey it is technical support and it does continuously crash the game. i ran into the same problem now with tribunal. anyways if one of the moderators could move this post i'd appreciate im just a lazy sluff when im tryin to figure out whats wrong with this godforsaken machine

do you hear all the audio stuff ok when the starts up and during opening credits before game starts to and such? because i had a similar problem with the game crashing really quickly or sometimes even before attempting to load. i also have an XP system. since i knew i ought to be hearing some kind of sound at some point throughout this process, i opened Device Manager to find what i could find. here's the weird part... same as you, i had all the audio, video, multimedia, etc. drivers installed and up to date and nothing in Dev. Man indicated anything wrong with any of those; however, 2 big yellow questions marks (in other words two devices missing their driver files) next to SM BUS controller and Mass Storage Device. so, since i already know that uninstalling either of them is pointless because Windows ALWAYS 'finds new hardware' and tries reinstall them at system start-up everytime - and everytime, can't find the driver files... i decided to not unistall but disable them from this harware profile. and poof! game works... well sort-of. at this very moment i'm stuck at the character appearance/stats screen and i'm here to see if i it's 'cause i don't know what keyboard controls to use or because it's actually stuck.
anyway... point is, take a look into your Device Manager and check to make sure that there aren't ANY devices with big yellow question marks next to them amd if there are, try double clicking them and selecting the Disable Device option on the properties sheet. even if the device seems totally unrelated to anything the game needs to run on, if it's installed but not working due to missing files, it could be tying up your systems resources, I/O's, IRQ's, or some other system settings thing that your media control devices rely upon to operate correctly.
make sense?

anyway, don't know if that's any kind of help to anyone other than me as errorswith games are almost always unique to each machine/system, but maybe it'll get in the direction you need to go to stumble upon the solution? who knows...

Something similar...My computer has an MSI motherboard, and for some reason Winblows kept dumping the sound driver for the onboard card. For whatever reason, this prevented the game from running the startup MP3s, which is bad . I think I might have disabled the device...haven't seen that in a while.

Anyway, I recently got Ares, and have been running it in the background. Also, I am running Folding@Home. Does anyone know if either of these majorly increase crash rate?

Also, if I leave the game running (paused) for a long time, it freezes, and killing it with Task Manager STILL has the computer running slow. If it's running even longer (12 hours, probably) I get a video card error...anyone seen that?

Sorry for double-posting...

I've recently gone back to Morrowind. Although it runs quite well, I do frequently get CTDs if I'm equipping or using an item. Having read through this topic, and the relevant pages of the linked Tweak Guide, I didn't notice any mention of a way to prevent these. Given that it's been a couple years, is there, perhaps, a way to prevent these now?

Thread necromancy! Oh wait we're adding some useful information to the thread, so that doesn't count.

There is always Timeslip's Exe Optimizer. It optimizes... Exe files. You can use it on any exe, but not everything can be patched. The Oblivion Construction Set can be patched, but you should not do that because it messes up the havok sim. When you try to activate it the CS will crash.

Anyway, the description:


That's it. You can find it on Timeslip's site right here.

Thanks. Will try, and if it seems to work, I'll edit/reply here.

Have tried this, and it seems to work. I don't actually know if it DOES work though...and I don't know of any way to benchmark random errors.

I would suggest that others try this, and see if it appears to help.

The problem is that Morrowind CTD's didn't happen that often for me in the first place, so I don't know. And since Timeslip is hosting it on his own site there is no comments section in which you can see comments... I'll check whether I can find a thread.