I think I stuffed my game...

Awesomepantsman

After long months of sitting on my desktop collecting virtual dust, I decided to replay Sam & Max 106: Bright Side of the Moon. I opened it and quickly realised something was wrong. It was running in windowed mode (which was fine) but it was widescreen! It was probably running at 480x720 or similar. I checked the fullscreen box, then suddenly, the monitor turned black and didn't recover. I randomly clicked everywhere until I was about to give up all hope. Ctrl+Alt+Delete. I started up Task Manager but, because the game was still running, the screen was black. To quit I had to Ctrl+Alt+Delete again and log off. Now, I try starting any of the other Season One games, but I recieve the following error message:

SamandMax104.exe has stopped working...
[Loading Bar]
Windows is looking for a solution to the problem.

I end up reinstalling the series and... everything's back to normal. But still... what happened?

Rather Dashing

The "has stopped working" bar is EXTREMELY generic. It basically happens when your program crashed for some reason or another. Generally, the problem is fixed by starting up the program again, in my experience.

Trica

Sometimes the game data just corrupts for no real reason, when it sits installed in the computer for a long time. This has happened to me on many games, many many times. Re-installing always helps in this situation, as it did in this case.

As Rather Dashing said, that error message is the most common type, and can mean about anything, so it's hard to determine the exact cause of the problem.

Glad the game is working again, though!

Quanta

Trica wrote: »

Sometimes the game data just corrupts for no real reason, when it sits installed in the computer for a long time.

This sounds like fragmentation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragmentation_(computer) to me.

You avoid this by defragmenting regulary (once a week or two or so).

A good and fast program for this is Auslogics Disk Defrag. I use it myself. It's gratis and you can get it here: http://www.auslogics.com/en/software/disk-defrag/download

jmm

Was this problem on a PC running Vista?

Trica

Quanta wrote: »

This sounds like fragmentation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragmentation_(computer) to me.

You avoid this by defragmenting regulary (once a week or two or so).

A good and fast program for this is Auslogics Disk Defrag. I use it myself. It's gratis and you can get it here: http://www.auslogics.com/en/software/disk-defrag/download

Ah, might be that then. I don't know too much about computers, all I know that this file corruptment has happened to me once in a while.

Thanks for the links!

Mwyann

Files don't get fragmented when they are in the disk. They don't move, unless you run a defragmentation but then it gets... well... defragmented so no need to move it again.
(BTW, JKdefrag is a good one too).

If you already had some corrupment on your disk, I would suggest you to make a full disk scan (with surface analysis) and why not buy a new disk. You can lose important data, so make backups ! What's more important, $60 for a disk or your documents ?

http://www.howtodothings.com/computers-internet/how-to-fix-disk-surface-errors

Trica

Nah, It's still happened to me only few times with games, and re-installing has always helped me to get them work again.

I don't really believe it's common problem enough for me to spend a $60 for a whole new drive, at least yet. I personally believe it might have also been the causes of viruses. I had terrible virus protection earlier, which caused tons of problems on my computer. Granted, with better protection I haven't had them anymore.

I will do the scan when I have the time, though. Thanks.