F1 2010 F1 2010 No Sound & Crash issue.

[Indi60]

Hey. This is what happened and is happening. I had the game since I was on windows vista and it was working perfectly well, now I'm on XP and strange things began happening. When I start the game, it seems pretty normal, all the sounds are in place while the intro's on, but then game starts to load and there is completely NO SOUND from this point, in My F1 audio options I can't choose audio drivers, don't know if this has something to do with it. And more importantly - game crashes when you try to run any of the race - whether it's time trial, grand prix or season mode, game's loading for 10 seconds or so and crashes right on the loading screen - I get application errors every time I run a race. Any ideas on this? Thanks in advance.

P.S. I'm not using my integrated audio card as I've got another one, but it doesn't seem to be a trouble in any other games.

P.P.S. I tried reinstalling the game, reinstalling GFWL, nothing helped.

By the way, here's my quick system information:

NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT (512 MB)
Q9400 @ 2.66GHZ CPU
3.50 GB of RAM
External sound analog Fireface 400
Old internal sound card Realtek HD Audio
Hard Drives: SAMSUNG HD502IJ (465 GB, IDE); ST31500341AS (1397 GB, IDE)

Hope you guys come up with something here, as codemasters forum didn't have any suggestions. Thanks.

 

[Craig Whitmore]

Difficult to diagnose i'm afraid. I had this issue on Win 7 x64, one of my ram sticks was faulty, soon as I replaced, it was fine. Turned out that MS memory checker is just rubbish, I used memscope which identified the problem within minutes.

Have you disabled your internal soundcard in the bios? I have had issues with this when I've accidentally left it on, some games are ok with both enabled, some aren't.

You might want to think about getting windows 7, it's so much better and much better than Vista.

 

[Indi60]

Thanks for your reply. I'm not quite sure if it is disabled, and I'm not sure where do I check it. Also, I'm using microphone as an input on my old sound card, so wouldn't disabling it be a problem considering this case?

I would've carried on with Vista or changed to Win7 if it was possible, but unfortunately it's not, as one of my family members is using this PC for commercial needs and the work he's on doesn't allow to do so, so I'm stuck with XP.

Thanks again for your time.

 

[Craig Whitmore]

The sound card might be the issue.

Do you have make and model of your motherboard, I can look it up for you. It's in an option something like "onboard devices" or something, I can't remember off hand. I'll have a look see on mine when I get chance and update you.

If you do a reset, your mobo info should be displayed there. You can press 'pause' and 'space' to continue boot up. You might need to press tab or something to show the info if it's not automatically shown by default, such as on a dell pc.

You probably shouldn't be using 2 sound cards, this will be causing resource conflicts, particularly in XP and you really do need to know what you're doing to setup 2 sound cards correctly so that applications & windows doesn't get confused.

 

[Indi60]

You see, the other sound card (I don't really know if you call it a sound card or analog, or something) is external, and whereas it has unique plugs, I can't use entirely one card on this case. And yes, I know it can cause conflicts, but I was able to tackle those just well until this issue popped up, so I'm not sure what I could do.

Also, don't you find it strange that sound disappears from a certain point and not from the very beginning? I think, if the sound cards were having a conflict, it wouldn't even beep a sound at all, would it?

Edit: Plus, I tried enabling the old sound card completely to check if the sound runs well, but it's at the same level as it is with both of them enabled.

 

[Craig Whitmore]

When I had both mine running, there was no beeps, things just didn't seem to work quite right till I disabled the onboard sound, i'm pretty sure that F1 didn't work till it was resolved. Not entirely sure I know how to help you with the sound.

You could try just using the Realtek card instead of the external one, ie unplug the external or something when you want to play F1, not ideal and could cause windows to uninstall it, I would expect that you'd have to unplug the card and do a restart before you play it.

Ideally, you could make your pc dual boot and put vista on another partition or drive. This isn't such a difficult option, but is time consuming and potentially dangerous (ie lose work data = bad). Get a 2nd hard drive plugged in and install vista on it, although you really have to be careful, as you don't want to install over an existing drive that has work data on. In windows you can set the boot options to auto select the xp boot and time out after 5s or something so your other family member doesn't notice. Hd's are relatively cheap and will give you a gaming option. You can then disable the external sound card in vista and it should work just fine.

The 2nd boot drive is the option I would choose, as I have done exactly this in the past with a work laptop, although I had to know exactly what I was doing so it didn't go wrong and lose work data. I have made this mistake in the past and lost all of my music, about 100gb's worth, not a mistake that I would choose to make again.

I would suggest that if you've never made a dual boot machine before, don't attempt it on a pc that you can't risk losing stuff on.

 

[Indi60]

Your ideas are very reasonable and I really appreciate your efforts trying to help me, but before going to major changes, I'd like to find out if the sound cards are entirely faulty. What concerns me is this application crash at every load screen of any race. Let's say the reason of lost sound is the sound cards. But how could they possibly be connected with this crashing factor? I just can't understand. It looks for me that one thing causes each other, I mean, sound going off causes the game crash. That is pretty unexplainable. I don't think the game files could be any wrong. I also tried running the game on safe mode, unticking all the startup programs on msconfig, nothing helped, the same sequence goes on - intro is fine, loading screen has no sound, game starts without any sound, once you run any race it just simply crashes on the loading screen. So this is what I'm not sure of.

 

[Craig Whitmore]

Have you tried unplugging the external sound card, doing a reset and trying the game using just the realtek onboard, that should tell you if it's a sound card issue, although, you might have to disable the drivers in the device manager and re-enable them after the test to be sure.

 

[Indi60]

Just did that. Disabled any likes of it on devmgmt.msc and unplugged it, restarted the computer and was completely on the old sound card, but the error remains the same. Completely the same.

 

[Craig Whitmore]

Last piece of advice I can give is update all drivers or try a reinstall perhaps, I don't know anything else that will help i'm afraid. Sorry I can't be of more assistance.

 

[Indi60]

Yeah, I guess I'll have to check all the drivers... Thanks for your help. If any ideas come into your head, be sure to tell me. As well as others, if you had a similar issue, please tell me how to fix it.

 

[Craig Whitmore]

Give memscope a try and test your ram. You can download it here

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Tweak/Memory-Tweak/Memscope.shtml

You burn it to a cd and boot from it, it will test your ram. I know for certain that F1 will crash with faulty ram.

 

[Indi60]

Hi again. I renewed my drivers as well as checked if my ram is faulty, none of these seemed to be the reason. I'm starting to think that game files are somehow corrupted, I'll try and get the other ones in near future. Anyway, you can still write me with suggestions and I'll make sure to get them tested. Thank you very much again.

 

[Craig Whitmore]

If it's on steam, you can validate the files, although i'm not sure how reliable this is as it says it checks the game cache, which may not be the entire game.

Steam->view game library->right click F1 2010->Properties->Local files->Verify integrity of game cache.

 

[Indi60]

Tried all of this kind of stuff. I'm going to get an illegal copy of it in a few days to check if it works, maybe that'll help.