EQ crashes during certain events

http://www.privatepaste.com/69de1d53b6

This is what I'm experiencing. I have an Asus G73JW series laptop. I've killed most every worthless service running on windows home premium. I've installed ISBoxer using the "quick set up guide" and have also read through one of the threads that dealt with the i7 core Intel processors. I have 6 toons that I'm trying to run. FPS stays rather high honestly. In ISBoxer I have my cpu broke up as such: toon1 = 1,2 toon 2 = 3,4 toon 3 = 5,6 toon 4 = 7,8 toon 5 = 1,3 toon 6 = 5,7. You'll see that in the set up that I've provided.

Things run fine initially. I typically have one char that doesn't want to load for some reason, so I have to kill that process via the task manager and use InnerSpace to restart that one profile to get him to log in. It's always Imma *shrug*.

Once I get that running, things are fine while i'm in one zone. As soon as I zone, all but two of the eq clients crash. I have to click "ok" on the error messages that show up. Twice now I've had it come up where I've had to actually send in an error log to Lavish because the client crashed.

This is my first time playing EQ in a long time. About 2 years ago now. I'm using SoF client that I purchased through Steam.

All my video drivers are up to date. I have 8GB of ram and well over 500GB of storage left.

Any guidance that you may have would be much appreciated. I'm thinking that it's going to be something in game that I'll have to tweak really. Thanks so much for all that you do and know that I really appreciate all of you.

ATMGeek

[Alge]

In my experience 8GB of RAM is the absolute minimum to run EQx6 even with everything set to minimum and using the old character models. I can do it on my desktop but I need to monitor free memory and zoning typically reduces that. I've put EQ on the backburner until I get around to upgrading my RAM. It could be something else but I'd suggest monitoring your free memory.

Alge

http://www.privatepaste.com/69de1d53b6

This is what I'm experiencing. I have an Asus G73JW series laptop. I've killed most every worthless service running on windows home premium. I've installed ISBoxer using the "quick set up guide" and have also read through one of the threads that dealt with the i7 core Intel processors. I have 6 toons that I'm trying to run. FPS stays rather high honestly. In ISBoxer I have my cpu broke up as such: toon1 = 1,2 toon 2 = 3,4 toon 3 = 5,6 toon 4 = 7,8 toon 5 = 1,3 toon 6 = 5,7. You'll see that in the set up that I've provided.

I seem to recall a post about a certain game not working if it is split across physical cores. First, I'd try removing the CPU affinity altogether. Second, try putting Toon 5 on 3,4 and Toon 6 on 5,6.

In my experience 8GB of RAM is the absolute minimum to run EQx6 even with everything set to minimum and using the old character models. I can do it on my desktop but I need to monitor free memory and zoning typically reduces that. I've put EQ on the backburner until I get around to upgrading my RAM. It could be something else but I'd suggest monitoring your free memory.

Alge

Unfortunately, 8GB is the max that my laptop takes. I suppose that I don't quite understand how 8GB of ram would be needed to run 6 toons though. I will monitor my free memory though.

In the past (desktop pc), had 4 GB running 10 toons...so I would hope you could see why I would be a little sceptic as to that statement. I truly do appreciate the idea though.

I seem to recall a post about a certain game not working if it is split across physical cores. First, I'd try removing the CPU affinity altogether. Second, try putting Toon 5 on 3,4 and Toon 6 on 5,6.

I will try that out tonight tanker. You know, I was wondering that as well though about the CPU affinity.

I had read through a thread where lax had answered a guys question in regards to something similar only he was using 5 toons.

The way i7 cores work is 1,3,5,7 are physical (real) cores and 2,4,6,8 are logical (fake) cores. My understanding is that for optimal performance, each fake core should be paired up with its corresponding physical core. And you should never assign only a fake core.

With 5 WoW instances on my i7, here is what I set mine to:
Slot 1: 1,2
Slot 2: 3,4
Slot 3: 5,6
Slot 4: 7,8
Slot 5: 5,7 (this one is assigned 2 physical cores)

This has served me well and is what I recommend to other i7 users. Enjoy

Thanks for the help guys. I'm going to try your advise tonight and hopefully things will be better.

ATMGeek

Okay, I've taken off the assigning cores. So for all six of my toons I'm using all "8" cores. Now I've had two of my clients stop running while I'm in PoK and I cannot get them back. I have to exit out of all of my toons and restart Inner Space before I can reopen my character set.

I'm at a loss here really. Any more insight would be greatly appreciated. I thank the people that have already posed suggestions, unfortunately it was to no avail.

Brand new laptop. Windows 7 Home Premium. Asus G73JW laptop. 8GB of ram. 1.73Ghz quad core processor. Nvidia GTX 460M 1.5GB graphics card. I've killed most all the worthless services and have streamlined windows. I have 38 services running. Thanks for all that you guys do

[Ualaa]

Is the game stable, when running 4 or 5 characters?

Just curious if it is a hardware limitation.
Or something in the configuration doesn't like something else.

That will at least give an idea on where to look for a solution.

[lax]

My wife and I both use G73JH laptops, which are the same as your G83JW but with ATI 5870 video as opposed to the NVIDIA 460M. I've had to open both of them up to replace the thermal compound between the heatsink and the GPU, within a few months of getting them. Also had various problems up until installing Windows 7 SP1 and some of the newer video drivers, but your experience with the video drivers will of course be different than mine. GPU thermal issue probably isn't much different, they get assembled in the same way.

Anyway, I'm familiar with the laptop model for what that's worth.

Okay, I've taken off the assigning cores. So for all six of my toons I'm using all "8" cores. Now I've had two of my clients stop running while I'm in PoK and I cannot get them back. I have to exit out of all of my toons and restart Inner Space before I can reopen my character set.

Why do you have to exit out of all your toons and restart Inner Space, can you elaborate on that? You shouldn't need to exit out of any toons, or restart Inner Space to reopen your Character Set. By design, you should be able to just kill the frozen ones and reopen your Character Set. From your description it sounds like something is preventing you from doing that, but you didn't mention what.

Why do you have to exit out of all your toons and restart Inner Space, can you elaborate on that? You shouldn't need to exit out of any toons, or restart Inner Space to reopen your Character Set. By design, you should be able to just kill the frozen ones and reopen your Character Set. From your description it sounds like something is preventing you from doing that, but you didn't mention what.

After you stated that, I completely understood what you meant. Here is what happens on a step by step process. I'll still try to keep it brief.

Okay, I'll get things running. All of my toons will come up initially except one. That seems to happen consistently. When I say that one toon doesn't come up, I mean I'm able to completely log in (toons are logged into EQ and standing in POK) except for one. It seems to hang on the EQ load AFTER I click "Enter World". I'll kill that instance and restart it using IS just fine. Then that toon logs in just fine. I take that as just a hiccup of sorts since I'm logging in 6 toons at once. So I'm saying "internet" on that one...not hardware or software.

Okay, all of my toons are logged in and standing in the Plane of Knowledge. I group them all up and can run around in that world all day...no issues. AS SOON AS I zone into ANY other world, I lose two of my toons. I stand corrected on the IS not restarting my toons lax. I believe that to be an error between the keyboard and the chair...if you get my drift. (i.e. I wasn't killing the process that other time) So I cannot recreate that.

Still, I cannot seem to keep 6 up and running without losing them when someone dies or zones. Everything works just fine otherwise.

Is the game stable, when running 4 or 5 characters?

Just curious if it is a hardware limitation.
Or something in the configuration doesn't like something else.

That will at least give an idea on where to look for a solution.

Yes, everything runs fine with 4 or 5 characters as well. I still have the same zoning issues though. Again, everything runs smooth in whatever zone I have them all in at some time, but once I zone them out of there I lose one or two of them.