Not sure whether to post this here or in the Surveyor/Operations section.
I'm running Trainz for development on a Dell Inspiron 1520 laptop. The spec checks out okay on the TRS self test (1.6Ghz Core 2 CPU, 8600 Nvidia graphics and 2Gb of RAM). TRS (006, TC3 and 09 running under Admin rights in Vista).
However I'm encountering more and more grey/black screen crashes of the programme regardless of version, often after only a few minutes work. You get the little spinning mouse icon as if it's trying to autosave, then the screen goes grey and what's left of the programme hangs. Sometimes I can Ctrl-Alt-Del out of it with Task Manager but more often than not I need to do a forced reboot. This results in the laptop display defaulting to the resolution in which Trainz was being run, 1024 x 768 rather than the native resolution of 1200 x 800. Open GL or Direct X makes no difference, the crash still occurs.
I've tried upgrading my video drivers though according to the Dell website I'm already running the latest version, though these are some way behind the Nvidia own reference drivers. However it is not recommended by either Dell or Nvidia to use other than the laptop specific drivers, so I'm stuck on that one.
The problem occurs entirely at random, it can be after spline work, painitng textures or placing 3D models.
The official answer is probably that laptops aren't supported but I've been running and developing in TRS on portables for some years now. However the problem is getting progressively worse and almost to the point where it's not going to be viable to continue developing.
I've not experienced any problem running the Rail Simulator/Railworks world editor on the same laptop.
So it's either something in TRS (all versions) that doesn't like my laptop or v.v. A search on the forums hasn't yielded much information whether anyone else has encountered this problem, but if you have I would appreciate knowing how - or even if - you got out of it.
I'm running Trainz for development on a Dell Inspiron 1520 laptop. The spec checks out okay on the TRS self test (1.6Ghz Core 2 CPU, 8600 Nvidia graphics and 2Gb of RAM). TRS (006, TC3 and 09 running under Admin rights in Vista).
However I'm encountering more and more grey/black screen crashes of the programme regardless of version, often after only a few minutes work. You get the little spinning mouse icon as if it's trying to autosave, then the screen goes grey and what's left of the programme hangs. Sometimes I can Ctrl-Alt-Del out of it with Task Manager but more often than not I need to do a forced reboot. This results in the laptop display defaulting to the resolution in which Trainz was being run, 1024 x 768 rather than the native resolution of 1200 x 800. Open GL or Direct X makes no difference, the crash still occurs.
I've tried upgrading my video drivers though according to the Dell website I'm already running the latest version, though these are some way behind the Nvidia own reference drivers. However it is not recommended by either Dell or Nvidia to use other than the laptop specific drivers, so I'm stuck on that one.
The problem occurs entirely at random, it can be after spline work, painitng textures or placing 3D models.
The official answer is probably that laptops aren't supported but I've been running and developing in TRS on portables for some years now. However the problem is getting progressively worse and almost to the point where it's not going to be viable to continue developing.
I've not experienced any problem running the Rail Simulator/Railworks world editor on the same laptop.
So it's either something in TRS (all versions) that doesn't like my laptop or v.v. A search on the forums hasn't yielded much information whether anyone else has encountered this problem, but if you have I would appreciate knowing how - or even if - you got out of it.