Instead of reinventing the wheel, I will post the progression of the tests I've done and the problem below from another forum
Sorry about the mess beforehand, but I tried to delete the unrelated posts.
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Over the past month I've done several tests with my memory, reading that many of the crashes might be due to faulty memory. I've tested all my sticks with software, and after passing I decided to test them indiviually. I have one 512MB, and two 256.
I tried the 512 for over a week, and experienced zero crashes compared to constant crashes, at least once an hour, with all the sticks installed.
I then tried a combination with the 512 and another 256 for over a week, and then switched the 256 for the remaining 256 for over a week. All the tests resulted in zero crashes and not one wow.exe error or similar corrupted file errors as I and other people have been having.
Today I decided to put the entire 1G+ to the test again, which resulted in a totally distorted login page.
After reading over many other players experiences, I can only conclude one of two things happening here:
Theory 1:
The third memory slot on my board is faulty.
This could be true because I have had problems with Windows Movie Maker while I have had 1G+ installed.
Theory 2:
WoW has problems handling systems with 1G+ of RAM.
This could support several other people's guesses as well.
I would like to also note that my system is completely up-to-date with all the latest drivers for all my hardware and software. I have severly cleaned out any possible viruses, spyware, etc. The hardrive is error free and optimized and defragmented. I have also re-installed WoW several times and ran the file checker program supplied by Blizzard. The only time I experience problems is with 1G+ of RAM.
I'm sure my findings are rather subjective and cannot be related to everyone's system and reasons for their in-game crashes, but it might help a few and at least give Blizzard any example of what problems the game might be experiencing with different PC configuartions etc.
My system specs are as follows:
Athlon XP 1800+
1G RAM (1 512, 2 256)
GeForce 3 Ti-200
ASUS A7N266-C Motherboard
nForce Sound
Windows XP Platform
Cable Broadband provided by Cox
WoW Installed on a seperate drive than windows, 80G Western Digital 7200
I hope this helps
this man may be on to something. Perhaps Blizzard should look at it. I recently added some additional RAM to my home desktop system pushing it to the 1GB mark. Shortly thereafter I began experiencing constant crashes, to the point where sometimes I couldn't even go more than a couple of feet. I thought at first this might have been a sign of my Hard Drive going bad. Boy do I feel I was wrong now. I have reformatted (great, thanks!) I ran scan disk, check disk, and even defragg'd my drives. Uninstalled and Reinstalled. I kept getting all sorts of problems with the "tome" files. I have the collectors edition so I was using the DVD, I tried the CD's and couldn't get passed the 2nd one ever, and sometimes not even past the first one. So after reading some RAM issues I said why not experiment, what do I have to lose? Well I put the original RAM that came with my system back in, bringing me down to 512MB, and it insalled perfectly on the first try!!! Now I've got 2 sticks of 512MB sitting here on my desk, I know the game ran fine with 1 stick of 512, and 1 of 256, but not 2 sticks of 512...something isn't right and Blizzard needs to address this issue!
No one else knows anything about this?
Perhaps someone out there knows about memory settings, how the memory interacts with the CPU, possible BIOS settings, cache setting in XP, duel memory, anything that might not be setup correctly?
Are you guys running duel channles on the ram? The problem could be there. Is your computer dusty AT ALL on the inside? Sometimes a good cleaning can fix things of this nature. If you smoke or some one in your house smokes it can make a computer very dirty on teh inside. I use those caned air things to clean my rigs once a week. I'm soldering in Afghanistan where it is very dusty and dirty so I HAVE to keep my rig clean. Uh another possibility could be heat , but it's not really sounding like it. Never hurts to check though. Also it could be the ram speed. Some systems have a hard time dealing with all the info that WoW asks for at the same time. Let me know how it goes.
Alright, I am somewhat computer literate, but lets go over a few parts to to make sure we're checking the right thing
1. Duel channel? Now how can I check this? I went into the BIOS and could not find the option. Is there a way to access it through XP?
2. My computer is a bit dusty, but not to much. I'll have to get a compressed air can to really clean it out though.
3. No one smokes, so no problem there.
4. What RAM speeds would you think could have a problem? I mean, its a Athlon XP board by ASUS, so its only a generation or so behind.
Dual channle ram is useually color coded. I.E. you will have 4 slots. 2 slots will be red and 2 will be blue (just an example can be any color). It's like makeing it one stick of ram instead of 2. Like a raid mother board.
It depends on what your ram speed is clocked at. I.E. 133mhz ect. If it's at say 166mhz try 133mhz. It's best to look it up on the net first as always I'm not an expert. I would suggest looking at your mother boards manufactuer first.
I have heard of other people haveing this problem with your mother board. I think it ended up being dirt , heat , and maybe speed on a couple. Your mother board seems to have problems with WoW. I'm a fanboy of AMD so ya know =p.
Or WoW has a problem with my botherboard :P
So, how can I check the speed of the memory? Or do you mean that the memory is inherently too fast? I have the memory installed that was designed for the board originally.
As for cleaning out the system, I'll have to wait on that, but I will try it out and give an update.
I don't think it has anything to do with how many sticks of ram are installed, because like I said above, I had 2 in most of the time, and it worked flawlessly for over 3 weeks.
It might have something to do when the system goes over a certain amount of RAM, since I have read people having problems with 768MB, even though I do not.
Perhaps this is something that cane be changed in Windows XP and might not have anything to do with WoW? Perhaps this has something to do with particular motherboards?
It would be nice to at least get some feedback on a solution to this. Maybe someone at Blizzard has some "free" time, or any computer geek out there (geek used in a positive sense
) and could check this out by changing cache settings etc, anything that could possibly alter the way the memory interacts with programs.
What if I changed the memory to asychronous to allow it to run at required speeds instead of keeping it in sync with the processor at a common stable speed?
I think that's how it works
So, I've been doing a lot of resreach and reading many of the previous post on this issue recently to see if I can find any sure way to solve this problem.
First off I would like to clarify for anyone thta this is the "132 error" stickied above and that despite the recent Blizzard rep post, Blizzard did announce they are continuing to look into the problem.
I would also like to add that I was in closed beta from day one and I did experience crashing there as well. I figured that these crashes were the result of the beta testing itself, but the crashes I expereince now with over 1G happen much more frequently. Today I tested the game twice and in less than five minutes of just standing in Ogrimmar, the game crashed.
Couldn't someone do some kind of test on a "clean and perfect" system to see what could be causing these problems?
I've read people believing it to be a hardware problem or a software problem. Faulty memory or faulty motherboard. Incorrect configurations, etc etc etc. Reading over everything, I don't think its any of these and looking above I do think that there might still be one reason:
Overheating. Overheating caused by the increase in the memory size? Is this possible? Will this create extra voltage? Could dust contribute to this heat if so?
Is there anyone out there that could confirm that going from 768MB to 1G would produce enough extra heat neat the CPU, on the board, anything, that could cause the wow.exe file to crash?
So, more updates and possible insight into the situation.
I went down to the computer dtore today and bought myself two cans of 10z compressed air. When I got home I thoroughly cleaned, as best I could, my PC inside and out with the air and a vacuum. I unplugged all the exterior and most of the interior parts, inlcuding the memory, and sucked and blew out all the dust. I ran the air through the slots as well along with sucking them out with the tube on my vacuum.
Boy was there a lot of dust!
I then ran the game. . . for over 2 hours no crashes at all! This opposed to the game crashing within the first 5-10 mins. So I began to derive a theory based on the many other posts I read.
Many people seem to be having the crash error after installing a new memory stick. It does not matter whether the upgrade was from 512 to 768, 768 to 1G, etc, what remains constant it seems is they had a certain number of sticks installed, and when the installed an additional amount, problems began to surface.
Now, if the dust hypothesis works, it would make sense that over the time when they first built or bought their computer, dust collected inside the system, some got into the remaing empty memory banks, and when they/we installed the additional memory, the dust in the slot interfered with performance.
This would explain why when I used different combinations of all three of my sticks in two slots, I never experienced problems, but when I used all three, problems came about. Perhaps because that third slot remained dirty?
Before I draw any definite conclusions however, recently tonight my game did crash twice with the wow.exem the 132 error. However, this also occured after I uninstalled Norton SystemWorks, installed ZoneAlarm and AVG AntiVirus, and took off selective startup in Windows XP.
It could be that the software changes are causing the problem now, but I will need a few days to do more tests to confirm this.
Yet, there might be hope that we're drawing to a solution! At least in some cases
I would also like to note that I had been experiencing rather high latency tonight. . .
After extensive tesing I've come to the following conclusion:
-Somthing is wrong with my motherboard.
I used the Prim95 program to test the stability of my system with 1G and it crashed consistently. I went over my motherboard manual several times, I tried lower processor clock speeds, switching from synchronous to asynchronous, lowering the voltage to the memory, and adjusting other settings, nothing worked.
My CPU is usually around 39 degrees celsius and Motherboard around 28, so I know it is not because of overheating. Since the memory scans with the recommended memory tester by Microsoft, provided by Blizzard, did not pick up anything, I tried MemTest32. After scanning for several hours, repeating the test, the program found numerous memory errors.
I then decided to try and find which dimm contained the flaws. Over the past three days I have conducted extensive tests of each the dimms in isolation, in pair combinations, and in different slots. Since all of them past the extensive tests, I thought maybe it was just the third slot on the motherboard. However, even with that slot filled, it still passed testing. Only when ALL 3 are installed are there stability problems.
I discussed the situation with a friend and the best we could come up with is that for some reason the Motherboard will not read the higher installed memory correctly. Why? Who knows. . . leaving the power box on during a card installation, static electricity, bad wiring off the product line.
But this looks like an unsolvable problem, without a replacement, to me. At least in this case and perhaps in othet cases. It is just the risk you take building your own system, so hopefully some others will humbly admit this and stop harassing Blizzard if the already mentioned tests did not prove successful.
As for me, 768MB is more than enough for this system and I'll most likely sell my extra 256MB. I also got a new 3.3G P4 Laptop that I'll start using soon anyway and its specs are way better than my current system.
I just hope my 1 1/2 month of testing will help solve some riddle out there
hardware
prices 
