This game seems to be causing my computer to turn off. It's happened twice since I tried to play the game. I couldn't find a patch that addressed this problem. Has anyone else had this happen?

It may be a heating issue, you can try lowering the in-game video settings. You'll find them under Sttings, Advanced (after you start the game).

Thanks Inland, I think you're right, it probably is a heating problem. I had a problem with the fan running all the time, but was able to clean out the vents and got out a bunch of lint. The laptop runs better, except for with this game. I did what you said and turned down the settings but it didn't help. The second the game starts up the fans go into overdrive. I don't get it. I've never had a game do that.

Have you tried updating your video driver?

No, I haven't done that, but I will. Sheesh I should've though of that. Thanks!

If this is a laptop (I'm not sure) and... it's an nVidia graphics processor, there are alternatives to the OEM supplied drivers.

Let us know - I can point you to them.

Hi Inland,
I am currently living a nightmare with Gateway. After speaking with tech support and them running a couple of diagnostics, my laptop is now rendered useless. It won't boot now, not even with the boot partition on the hard drive or from the boot disks. Now I have to pay someone to retrieve my data, Gateway won't do that for me. And I have to ship it to TX for service at my cost one way. Hopefully the problem will be under warranty. They broke it and I have to pay for it!

Oh, sorry for the rant...yes I updated the driver and it helped a little. I have the nvidia 8800m gts. I read somewhere that running hot is a known issue with that card. But Gateway said the video card won't overheat. So I don't know what to think , except that I'm sure I will never buy another Gateway!

What model is this laptop?

It is a P-173 XL

What the tech did was have me take out the battery and unplug the a/c. Then she had me hold the power button down for 30 seconds. Then plug in the a/c and power up. It came to a screen with two options, f2 or f10. We did f2 to enter the bios. Then she had me push f10 and enter and the computer went to a black screen with the words "missing operating system_" . I couldn't do anything with it from that point on.

It sounds like your diagnostics partition may be missing or corrupt. If you repeat those instructions without using the F10, are you able to get back to your regular Windows?

+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+

I just found a review of the P-173-XL ***here***.

It says

RAID 0 is a terrible choice. Using it means that if either hard drive goes bad, you lose all the data on both drives. So if one of the drives developed a problem in an area that was storing data for the diagnostic partition, you'd get a problem like the one you encountered -- and it probably wouldn't show up until you tried to boot into the partition.

So it may be that one of your hard drives is failing and developing bad sectors, or it may be that the problem always existed and you never encountered it before because you never tried to access the diagnostics partition before.

As long as you can get the laptop to boot into your Windows partition instead of your diagnostics partition, you may be able to get back into Windows. This won't fix the whole problem, but it should allow you to get your data off the computer.

No, I tried it a couple times and it keeps going to "operating system missing" . Odd, because my operating system was fine before the tech took me through those steps. I really wish she had told me to back up my files and then call her back. Now it looks like it could cost me hundreds to recovery the data. If that's the case, I'll probably just forget it and lose it all.

And the other thing that irks me is that when I was shopping for a laptop I chose Gateway because they had US based support. Well now it's in India. So much for US based support. I really had a hard time understanding the tech, she would'nt let me speak to a supervisor, and she wouldn't explain to me what she did and why my operating system went missing. Horrible support!

"SIGH"

I added to my previous post, though I don't know if the information will help.

It's too bad they went to India support. That's kind of a "bait and switch" since the US support was the reason you bought the computer.

It's possible Spin-Rite can repair the hard drives enough for you to get your data back yourself. Their FAQ says it works with RAID 0.
http://www.grc.com/sr/faq.htm

It's $89.00
http://www.grc.com/cs/prepurch.htm
but that's still less than most places would charge you for data recovery. Apparently Best Buy uses Spin-Rite and often charges over $200.

I have an extended warranty on the laptop so I assume they'll replace the hard drive if it's bad. And it seems that I had problems from the start. I couldn't get it to go into dskchk and I was getting all kinds of errors and suggested I run dskchk. I wanted to send it back but they told me it would be a 25% restocking fee...yikes! So I did a system recovery and got everything working. Then I never had another problem til it started overheating.

That's a bummer to know about the RAID 0. Thanks for finding that for me. I ended up taking it in to a shop in town and they said they would do a diagnostic and data recovery for 130 bucks. That's not too bad I guess. If it turns out that they can fix it for not a whole lot of moola I'm just going to do that and skip Gateway all together and chalk it up as a learning experience. Actually Gateway is now owned by Acer so I would be sending the laptop to Acer in TX.

Thanks for your help and info!