MGS2 causing hardware failures :-\

Eye

ok first off, not sure wether to post this in the games section or here in tech so will try tech first and failing that will try again in the games section.

ok here goes, got metal gear solid 2 : substance the other day, installed it onto both my main machine and my laptop, all things were fine for the first day or so as i went through the VR training missions, but started playing through the main story line game and i'm getting some very odd problems.

ok might as well start off with the worst (that being the laptop) when playing the game it seems to randomly crash when either loading a new section of the level/loading the codec screen/during the fmv scenes. when the laptop crashes i get 2 or 3 things happening, sometimes i can ctrl+alt+del and quit the program like that, more often than not i can't do a damn thing bar hit the power to switch it off, but lately i've gotten a few new errors coming up if i leave it for a min or so. (laptop spec below)
windows system error : Windows has detected and recovered from a device failure, backup your data.... yada yada yada and also
Possible device failure : Driver for the display was unable to complete a drawing operation, update driver ... yada yada yada
i've done a little looking around and in the windows event viewer when the game crashes there are error entry's about the display driver getting stuck in an infinite loop.
From this i would possibly start to suspect the graphics card or drivers but as i also get similar errors from my main machine i don't think it is down to hardware, or at least would be very surprised if it was as the two machine run very different hardware. (spec for main machine also below)

My Main machine also crashes with similar results but it does'nt seem to be the gfx card, there is nothing really in the even viewer about a major problem/crash but it locks up in a similar manor to the laptop.

I've been searching to net to see if there is any bugs or patches relating to the game but have found nothing so far, anyone else have any problems with this game on the pc, or has anyone got any ideas what it might be or what i can try do to fix it?

Any and all info/hlp is greatly appreciated as it's annoying the hell outta me coz i can't play for more than 5 mins without this killing the computer.
Thanks in advance.... Eye.

Laptop Spec:
Fujitsu Siemens Amilo D 8820
P4 2.66Ghz
512Mb DDR Ram
40Gb HDD
Ati Mobility Radeon 9000 64Mb Gfx card
Win XP Home sp1

Main machine spec:
Abit KG7-Raid
Athlon XP 1600+ @1.4Ghz
1Gb pc3200 DDR Ram
GeForce 3 TI 500 Gfx card
4 Hdd's 2 with Os's both XP Pro

joePC

Yeah it sounds like the problem is the game.

1. Install the latest drivers fro your graphics cards.

2.Install all the patchs released from the game developers, you can find them on their site.

Download it Here

Impurity

it's definitly not your machines with specs like that, might actually be the cd scratched/not installing properally too

as joePC said, get the latest graphics cards drivers and patches for the game

Eye

cheers for the help guys, the patch did'nt do anything to help on the laptop, but i do have that sorted now.

could'nt find any updated drivers for my ati card, ati referred me back to manufacturer i.e. siemens and the driver they had was older than what came wiht the laptop. anyway went and did a little searching and tried to find a more up to date driver, found 2 that were well up to date over what i'm using but were for a del laptop and a compaq i think, anyway, long story short i tried installing both, neither worked and only made it worse by not loading the game at all saying insufficient video memory.

I then remembered that i had previously tried updating the ati driver with another update not from siemens a few months back and it would'nt really accept it so had gone back to the original, at this stage i decided to wipe anything resembling ati software/drivers and pop back in the original siemens disk to reload.

having done that i'm now back up and running pretty smooth now, no crashing at least so the minor glitches in the graphics lick flickers and stuff i can live with but will mess about with detail settings and hopefully find somethign that works

once i can play it on 1 machine i don't mind i'll be happy
just a shame i can't get it running on my main machine, i can't update the geforce drivers any higher than what i'm using coz if i do it'll disable my dvd decoder card coz nvidia started adding stuff from 41.09, i think, that they say will conflict with my card.... and it does :-\