Q: Im playing Medieval II: Total War. I have experienced the following problems:
1) The fan will be a really loud whirring sound, the game will skip, and sometimes it will freeze and not just disabled or turned off without me doing anything.
2) Sometimes, but not as often, the game will just switched off without warning or other symptoms. The screen just goes black and I need the laptop to turn again.
Yes, its a laptop, and its an IBM Thinkpad R52. I am using Microsoft XP Professional, 1 GB RAM, 64 MB Video RAM, 80GB hard drive, and a CD-RW/DVD-RW drive. I would consider myself a bit below average in computer skills, so youll have me.
I s excuse is reading different posts in different places and found that most of the time, it is a power problem or a dust problem. I took apart the laptop (I was not sure what I did) and saw a small amount of dust around the fan. I used compressed air to get rid of, and unscrewed the screws, so everything was fine with taking the apart.
The thing that makes me wonder so much is that after I blew the dust off and turn it back on, found I was there a patch for the game, so I downloaded that. It still froze when I tried to play again, but next time after that it worked fine. I played for about 2 hours and it never froze. I was able to play without interruption another 6 times or so, but then went right back to freezing again after about 10 minutes from play.
What I can so do not freeze? If it is a nutritional problem, what should I do? Any help would be greatly appreciated. This is a fun game and I hate not able to play it. Thanks so much.
Best Answer: Fallout 3 is a pretty intense game for any laptop, especially a laptop that only has an 8200m GPU. My guess is that the game is putting too heavy of a load on your laptop and is causing components to overheat and the laptop shuts down to keep itself from frying.
Re:Laptop shutting down during CPU/GPU stress is almost always a safety mechanism kicking in to protect from overheating. I had a crappy laptop that would do this, and the solution was to open up the case and make sure the heatsink/fan assembly was properly mated to the CPU using some good Artic Silver heatsink compound. That fixed the problem.
Re:It appears that the fan has worked!
It amazes me that it was an overheating problem all along.
Thanks for all the help!
Re:I have a brand new Alienware M5550 laptop that does the same thing…until I put a laptop cooler under it. Run, don't walk, and get the cooler…
Probably wouldn't hurt to get some canned air or use the vacuum to remove some dust from the fan and air intake.
Re:For what it's worth, I played the game with the laptop propped up on some books, leaving it about 2 inches off the surface. I began playing normal as usual, then about 5 minutes into uninterrupted play, it began skipping again, however, this time, it skipped for about 10 minutes until it finally froze the computer screen. Normally it skips for 15 seconds and then shuts off completely or freezes. So I don't know if that made a difference or if it was just a coincidence. I'm going to try playing tomorrow morning and see if it improves any. Maybe I will get a cooling fan.
Still, any other advice or suggestions from anybody are appreciated!
Re:It is on a cheap wooden desk from Office Depot. I will raise it up to see if that changes anything. Thanks for the advice so far!
Re:I really doubt that the case. Your laptop SHOULD NOT be shutting down during game play.. The game would skip, that's understandable, and it may even run very slow, but to actually shut down the laptop… is your laptop sitting on top of a wooden desk? Raise it up to create airflow under it and see if it makes a difference.
Re:I actually may have answered my own question… this is the video card in my laptop right now:
64MB ATI Radeon X300 (it's a school issued laptop, which is probably why it's not really good).
The box says the minimum requirements are:
128MB Hardware Accelerated video card with Shader 1 support and the latest drivers. Must be 100% DirectX 9.0c compatible. Nvidia GeForce 4 Ti 4400 or the ATI Radeon 9600 SE is recommended.
So is that 100% the reason for my problem? If it is, is there anything I can do for my laptop in order to play the game or will I just have to buy something better? Does anybody have any advice on specs for a cheap PC that is decent for games? 
Re:Seems to me like a heat problem. You probably have a bad or underpowered heatsink/fan assembly in that laptop. You can try warranty repair if you still have it. That component is usally around $300 out of warranty plus any labor… An alternative for me (My toshiba was out of warranty when it was doing exact same thing) was getting powered cooling pad that goes under the laptop with fans that would cool it from underneath, that helped in my case maintaining the temperature.
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