diablo 2 freeze in Win98

[paganboy]

when i try to start the game. all drivers are updated, and i tried switching from 3d to 2d. dl'd the patch too. no luck. when i go to load, either through shortcut or autorun cd, win98 totally freezes up and after a minute or so imy screen goes blank or i get the blue screen of death. of course, blizzard's website is useless for any info. it's not the disk (which is original), because (go figure this one) the game somehow worked fine on my old computers, an HP and a Gateway of all things. someone help please.

[wilsontc]

i had a similar problem.
d2 kept freezing for me because i didn't have enough free space - though i doubt thats you problem (i have a 1.97 c:!!!)

[wedor]

Is this the only game/program you have trouble with?

[paganboy]

I just finished this build, so this is the first game I installed. Everything else is working fine. I read something about DII not workign with RAID boards but I dl'd the patch that was supposed to fix it, so I don't think its that. I'm wondering if its my Acer CD-ROM drive.

[wedor]

Seems unlikely, the game would prompt you for the CD if it couldn't see it. I have a 4 drive RAID and play D2 almost daily, I don't remember needing a patch. D2 is very hard on a system and if it has any weaknesses they will show up under D2. Do you get a message on the blue screen?

[highrisemech]

If you don't have a good video card this will cause your game to freeze up.I'm not surprised that the game ran well on the Gateway since most Gateway"s come with a Nvidia video card.This is not a pitch for Gateway just a fact.
I had the same problem recently. the game was freezing up. I thought what is up?
I had 512 mgs of ram a 500 mgz Slot A AMD Processor and 20 gig on a Tyan trinity s2380 Motherboard. But when I changed from an ATI 8 Mb video card to a 32MB Nvidia TNT. This solved the problem.

[paganboy]

Originally posted by highrisemech If you don't have a good video card this will cause your game to freeze up.

Thanks,
Take a look at my sig specs. There's no reason why it shouldn't run on my card.

[paganboy]

Originally posted by wedor Do you get a message on the blue screen?

Just that Windows is waiting for a response from the program or the program cannot close.

[highrisemech]

Try another version of your video card driver. Mine would freeze runnning the TV card then when I went to an earlier version driver this solved that problem.

[wedor]

Have you looked at the Blizzard support pages regarding this?

[paganboy]

yes. but it wasn't any help. i'm gonna try tech support but i don't hold much faith in that either.

[wedor]

So you tried re-installing and all the other stuff already?

[paganboy]

yeah. several times. i'm about to join the diablo haters' club

[wedor]

So you also tried running your CPU at stock speed? and setting the BIOS at defaults?

[paganboy]

did that too.

[wedor]

Have you tried other games? when I had RAM problems they would only show up using D2 or Shogun, everything else seemed fine. Some programs just stress components more than others. Have you run a RAM tester on it? When I installed D2 on my current system I did not use the traditional method, I just copied the D2 folder to my system and created shortcuts in the start menu. If you still have the old computers you may want to take a drive out, put it in the new system, then copy the folder over. I do have one Win2K system that refuses to start D2, it installs fine, just never starts the game when you click on the exe. Considering it is the only one I am not ready to join the Diablo haters club myself, your problem seems more system related than game related.