The game also crashes for me too from time to time, especially when I'm alt-tabbing(When tabbing back the screen turns black and when I open the task manage SC2 seems to not be responding). It also happened to crash in a couple other occasions, like the end of the loading of a campaign mission and before starting the load process on another campaign mission. Attached a dxdiag summary too, though I'm not 100% sure that's what you're asking for. Cheers!
With any new issue, I would want a DxDiag report attached. It tells quiet a bit of information about your system and saves me from having to ask it anyway (because I almost always need it). First off, I would be running Windows 7 64-bit instead of 32-bit. Even though you may have firmly addressed 4GB of ram (3GB system, 1 GB or so for video), there might be some misc address space being missed. You don't even need to pay for the upgrade, just use the 64-bit disc with your current product key. The simplest thing to try would be to make sure your ATI drivers are installed properly. Read this guide of mine to installing them correctly. No, it is not as simple as running the EXE and installing over your older drivers. Might also try flashing your BIOS. I found quiet a bit of similar situations from people running Gigabyte motherboards and your video card with a quick Google search, but they had problems alt+tabbing in different games. You can get your newest BIOS here. Use the same Gigabyte link, but select "Drivers" then "Windows 7 32-bit" and you can get all kinds of newer drivers for your motherboard, namely your Realtek Network card, Realtek Soundcard, AMD Chipset (Which doesn't even look like its installed). Who knows what wacky things your sound card might be doing with drivers from 01/2009 This crashing only occurs when alt+tabbing, right? Get the thing to crash and post the crash report here, zipped and attached to a post. It might provide clues.. if all the other ideas didn't work.
I did both of the things you suggested(special thanks for the driver update guide! I tried to update my driver last night and just ran the EXE) and it now seems to alt-tab way better(faster, less time lost when alt-tabbing etc, so I guess that fixed my alt-tab problem! 1000 thanks, mate, for taking all this time to do all this lookup for me! For the past few minutes I've been alt-tabbing from various points in the game and the improvement is extreme, so I'm sure it fixed my problem! Thanks again, man, that was some superb help from your part!
*thumbs up* Awesome. Yeah, nVidia drivers are easy to install, but ATI's need all that effort just to stay stable.
Hmmm... Btw for some reason it seems that the game started doing it's dirty tricks when alt-tabbing again after having it dramatically improved at start. No idea why, I might have done something crappy to my pc without knowing(asside of basic stuff I'm quite anti-pro when it comes to PCs cause I never really bothered to spend time with them asside from gaming >.<) What's happening is this: When I alt-tab it's alt-tabbing normally. Then when I try to come back to the game the screen is frozen black and alt-tabbing again won't work and I have to alt+ctrl+del and shut it down via the task manager. Sometimes the game's registered as not responding while others not, it's not always the same. Dunno what else to do. I updated all kinds of drivers from chipset etc(everything that I found at least) so I wonder if I did some other mistake of the type of the one I did by simply reinstalling the graphics card drivers on top of the old version. For updating my bios I used Gigabyte's @Bios programm. Yesterday I also encountered a FPS drop for some reason which forced me to reduce the graphics to normal. Thought i'd add all info I could think of here... Cheers! PS: Including a new dxdiag just in case
Try opening your Cataylist Control Center, and disabling Cataylist AI. See if that helps at all. So you tried the BIOS again, and Gigabytes utility wouldn't flash it? I am unsure how you would check the version on that too, but the newest release is available here (2.08). It should have an option to update via the internet too.. Use alt+printscreen and take a screenshot of the error it gives. Upload it somewhere like tinypic.com if its too large to attach to a post.
I really hate to post in this thread yet again The game now alt-tabs with blinding speed(no more laggy alt-tabs like before that felt like the PC was unwilling to tab to desktop) but while I can sometimes tab back in the game there's a lot of the usual crash thingie(game gets stuck/black screen and I have to task-manager-shut it down...)... Any other ideas on this?
Is StarCraft 2 giving you an kind of crash report? I know you might hate the idea, but try playing the game in Windowed mode. I'm just wondering if you have some other app running that is messing with StarCraft 2.. I've never had issues alt tabbing, but I haven't had any hands on ATI hardware in awhile either. Can you list some of the apps you are running when you tab out of StarCraft 2?
No, no crash report. In fact if I give it some time on the task manager it sometimes stops being marked as "not responding" but still when I tab back in all I get is a black screen of nothingness(it's like the blue screen of death for atheists). Is there some way I can copy the whole list of the programms that are running at my PC at the time this happens and post it on the official forums and see if they can confirm that? Windowed mode has the chance that you can misclick on the big red button you're not supposed to press while scrolling the map and giving orders(and if you do it on another game it's fine, you didn't lose much, but losing on a ladder because of that would greatly suck). Restarting my PC and coming back to this
Update: For some reason I checked CCC again and after having disabled Catalyst AI it was enabled again, so I turned it off. Then tried playing. So far all my alt-tabs have been successful, though I do notice that tabbing back in sometimes takes it's time(I get a black screen, wait for 10 seconds or so and then I'm back in the game). Could this progress again into the previous problem? If I only gotta lose just 10 seconds for tabbing back in I'm very happy with it, lol. Any ideas why CCC reset the AI back on? Cheers!
10 seconds sounds normal for alt+tabbing into StarCraft 2. I somehow doubt that will become an issue again, unless you update to newer drivers and have to disable Cataylist.
I read on the gamespot forums that there is an overheating problem that sometimes causes alt-tabbing issues, because of excessive framerates in the game and read that if you add these 2 lines in your documents/starcraft ii/variables.txt it'll fix up. I did, but bnet was down so didn't get to test it, but here's the fix the way I read about it: Documents/Starcraft II/Variables.txt Add these 2 lines in there: frameratecapglue=30 frameratecap=60 I didn't test it and don't know if it fixes anything but will do now and report tonite after testing. hope it helps
Tried it once, but seems like it didn't work... Downloaded the latest drivers after it(10.9 catalyst) but didn't try yet. Going away for a couple of weeks, so won't update. Not many ppl seem to have it anyway
