Playonline + Vista

Hi all, I assume this topic has been discussed before but I could not find a thread on it.

I play FFXI on my laptop on vista. On my desktop, I had no problems with XP, but vista is a complete S*^t Head.

I can be in a PT, in Dynamis, Einherjar, Limbus, etc. and all of a sudden "Playonline has encountered a problem and needs to shutdown"

Some days I go all day without a problem but some, I get the error message as soon as I log back in. I don't know what to do besides get rid of vista but it is really getting on my nerves.

Does anyone else have this problem? Any ideas on what to do?

Thanks!

No idea, but Vista is a lot less stable for FFXI for some reason. It works fine for me on my pc, and fine on my laptop, but windower on my laptop crashes as soon as it goes to full screen mode every time.

O and let me add, I did download the "compatibility" version of playonline from the website

here's the problem. laptops aren't made for gaming. it's not vista. i get sick and tired of people blaming vista for their computer problems. guess who's fault it is >>> you're computers hardware or whoever's imperfect software you are using. quit blaming the OS for your problems!
blazza: the windower is made by a third party. most likely some single 25year old dude. tada! problem found. it says on the windowers website that you may have problems on vista. and it's not vista's fault FYI like i've said to hundreds of other people. the windower does NOT have a vista and vista64 version, thus it is not going to work 100% on vista.
OP: being that your computer for playing FF is a laptop, i'm guessing it is not alienware or dell XPS $2000 computers, so there is your problem. laptops are NOT meant to play games. i play on a laptop at the moment and occasionally FF will crash due to display driver problems (graphics issue). and, lovely SE has made one of the crappiest responses for this issue; game crash. again, not vista.
to the rest of the world: quit blaming vista for your computer problems. it's either you or the software you are using. try looking for vista compatibility on the box next time. vista is the most stable operating system for PC i've ever used.

But... but... but... third party programs are always right! :O

Dude, I know a lot of people that have had issues running FFXI on Vista on pc as well, if you're just gonna tell us we're stupid for trying to play FFXI on a laptop, then why reply?

Also, -respect points for suggesting dell are good.

the fact that you think dell is different from any other computer shows your knowledge of computers. software, software, software. that is what makes a computer manufacturer. you know what every computer in this world is made up of? the same stuff>>> motherboard (usually ASUS), memory (kingston, or some tai company), processor (intel/AMD), graphics (intel,AMD,NVidia), Power supply (some cheap thing that the manufacturer slaps their name on)...

i've installed FF on many vista computers without issue. 95% of computer problems are user related.

I havent had a singel problem with FFXI on my Vista64 ever.
It's probably a hardware issue, where something dont mix up properly x)

Dells are just generally known for the lack of quality of software/hardware they use in their mainline computers. Other companies tend to use "better quality" but if you really want the best kind of computer, make it yourself, or have a friend do it. It's cheaper, and the customizability allows you to make sure that you have the best equipment, and thus less problems.

I am currently on an HP with Vista, and I have problems with the "Playonline has stopped working" error message every time I'm near or around Bastok Markets Residential Area (RIGHT outside the MH, so I generally have to detour around it), Beaucedine Glacier during ice weather (WITH the weather effects turned off), and--this could be just my internet, but it was always a "POL has stopped working" error message, my sending/receiving numbers were perfectly fine--my very first Dynamis-San d'Oria experience was interrupted eight times with error messages.

It gets annoying, but I deal with it. Just like how I deal with dialup. :O

quality has a lot to do with it, but the hardware in a computer is all the same stuff that you would buy to build it yourself. you know what quality gets you in a computer nowadays? techsupport, and a pretty shell that doesn't feel cheap. why do you think macs are so expensive? i can tell you it ain't because of their specs...
you get what you pay for people. pay $500 for a laptop, and you'll get a $500 worth of crappy gaming experience. pay $1000 or more and you may notice your experience may change a little, but so does your battery life.

edit: i don't deal with computer manufacturers software. if i just so happen to get a computer off the shelf, i'd wipe it out with a blank copy of Vista

i play on a brand spanking new HP laptop and i have to turn FF down to the lowest settings graphically. why? cuz i only spend $700 on it...

and yes, every computer manufacturer will charge an arm and a leg for their top computers. a dell XPS has normal stuff in it that you could build for half price yes. but so does alienware and the HP Blackbird. that's a money maker for them >>> people that aren't in the know and just have money to waste.

SE is supposedly making a new MMO. hopefully it'll work flawlessly with vista ;)
and i second that comment about everyone being able to make their own computers. it's not hard. all of what? 15 parts?
anywho... sorry about my ranting... dun mean to offend people. (i just get tired of hearing "vista is the bane of my existence" talk)

Hmm..I play on a Dell laptop that uses Vista. To play FFXI I actually had to downgrade my graphics card because it wouldn't show full forms while playing and the colors were constantly changing. Its weird though, you guys say you crash every now and a again, yet in the 8+ months playing I have yet to crash. I don't know what to tell you other then your laptop might suck. :\

Hello guys, i bought 2 months ago an HP Laptop with Vista OS and i have to say FFXI work well with it. Downloaded the compatibility pack from PlayOnline official website and had no problems to install and run, maybe the problem you have its about your laptop specs or config.
By the way i have to say... im getting some problems with Fraps run on vista ;; xD.

Take Care , have a nice play!

OK, so here are the specs on my laptop. (This isnt EXACTLY what the specs are because I know nothing about computers and stuff)

I have an HP laptop, like 8 months old.
I spent about 1k on it
It has a turion 64 processor
Nvidia graphics card (Prob not the best, but the guy who sold it to me at best buy said he had no problem playing WoW on it and the whole pitch for this laptop was it is good for gaming)

That's where I would smack my face.

The little brother of my Husband who used to work on Best Buy once said to me; "We have to do anything to sell a laptop that is priced around $900.00 or more with lies like; ("I own that same computer and I don't have any problems with playing --- game")." The thing is that WOW doesn't have the same high graphics as FFXI suggest. Yeah, it is a 4 year old game that haven't been updated on the graphics much due to most of the players in FFXI that are Japanese use a Playstation 2 and, if they upgrade the graphics to match the capacity of a Xbox, PS3 or even a graphic Card that are now been sold, they would loose PS2 players, even though they could stop been lazy and make a different patch for every console they had released.

Now going back to topic. . .

I have a HP Pavilion dv4- 1220us
ATI Radeon HD 3200 Graphic Card <- Which I want to change.
And when it comes to running FFXI normally, it runs really good but, when I use Windower (The normal one), I don't get to FFXI since it crashes. If I use Windower Lite it runs smoothly and from time to time it freezes and I have to go once again and restart the program. I must point out that mostly Windower doesn't run via Vista due to some applications that don't run well on Vista because they haven't updated the data.

Hello: I'm new to the forums and reading through it I found this topic that I have seen endless times all around the web.
I agree with Zigg, Windows Vista is the most stable OS I've seen from Microsoft. Yes including XP. You guys have to think that for a relatively new OS Vista beats the crap out of any other OS out there, even Linux. You might say XP is better and more stable. But think how many SPs and updates it had over the years. Yes now it is a very good OS but remember when it came out?, it sucked but over the years and countless updates it work better. Give Vista a chance, like I said it's new and like anything new it has flaws.
Now to the FFXI issue. I ran it on 2 computers a XP and Vista systems. My vista system came with a crappy integrated graphics card. It sucked but after getting a NVIDIA 9600 GT OC card it runs flawlessly on it. I've seen people with problems runnning it on laptops but again ZIGG is right unless you own an Alienware or DELL in the 3K range, you won't get anything out of them unless you tweek them and upgrade your hardware. They weren't made for gaming, they are just commodities for people on the go, that's what their intended use is.
Look online, there are many tweeking sites that give you advise on how to get your system to perform better. Mochang, if somebody at best buy told you your laptop was good for gaming they lied to you, unless you play solitaire a lot. A bit of advise, before you buy anything from them go online research what you are looking for and then go buy it and when the Best Buy sale guy tries to give you advise about it tell him to shut up.
Cheers.

By the time SE's new MMO is out, then the new Windows 7 or w/e will be here and then we will have compatibility problems there. It always seems to be something, and I don't care what anyone says....I'll take XP over Vista any day. I have had enough trouble fighting with Vista getting certain programs to run compatibly with it and I know more than the average person does about software. I'm not saying Vista isn't stable, it just doesn't do what I want it to compared to the former OS.

On the Best Buy thing, ya, I used to work at a similar place, and salespeople will tell you whatever the hell you wanna hear when it comes to computers. I worked with quite a few "less then scrupulous" salesmen; there'd be manufacturer contests for selling most HPs, Gateways, Toshiba, etc, so obviously they would do whatever they had to do to move the most units and get their $100 gift card. It was actually a little funny, they'd pick a laptop, and all of a sudden that laptop was the best laptop on earth and could do everything, solve global warming, take care of the kids, solve the economic crisis...until next week when it was crap and the other laptop could do all those things...

Anyways, like Ewyon said, clean your laptop up, delete all the extranneous crap off of it (all the trial versions of office and ***that all new laptops come with). A great program I like to use to help me clean ***up is called CCleaner...it's totally free and cleans your cookies, registry, has a much faster add/remove programs, and most awesomely, a startup config tool, that allows you to stop all those unnecessary programs from running on boot that every new PC comes with.

If in doubt, post here anything that you see that you're not sure about, a bunch of us here are pretty computer literate so we can tell you if something needs to be running or not.

"vista is the most stable operating system for PC i've ever used."

No it isn't, currently Linux is the most stable OS avaialable in several of its flavours followed by XP I am afraid.

BTW Microsloth A+ accredited.

To the OP:

i had the same problem and i figured it out: update all your drivers. Especially your videocard.

if you have a video card that can't run ffxi properly then ur just SOL really . . .

i have a ATI Radeon H3450 and it's been giving me issues until the most recent update.

Vista does suck also =T

Oh and for you PC ppl who lag a lot in very populated areas like in front of AH and stuff, try going to FFXI config and "Enable MIP Mapping." that's the only thing i was able to do to make myself lag a bit less =*(

In all honesty, I was a big Vista hater ever since it launched...so many Vista systems would go belly up mere days after I would put them out on demo, it was sluggish as hell, Microsoft seemed to move things around just for the sake of moving them, etc.

But having used Vista for about a month now, I have to admit it's not that bad. Memory intensive, sure...and for someone that's been using XP for so long (since launch pretty much) it can be a pain in the *** to get used to it. But I've found, for one example, it's a lot more stable when things crash or become unresponsive then XP was...many times, in my experience with XP, when one program stopped responding things would often cascade and get "quirky" to the point where a reboot was required. Not so much with Vista.

It's a memory hog, to be sure. I know the manufacturer's pretty much had their hands tied when it came to what OS the were offering on their hardware, but Vista doesn't lend itself well to laptops, especially lower and lower-mid range Laptops...which is what most people buy; for every $2000 laptop we would sell, we sold 10 $600 laptops. People really need to look at the hardware they're attempting to run it on before they complain about how much it sucks. XP ran like complete dogshit on a minimum spec'ed PC too, ya know. It isn't a Vista only phenomenon. On my quad core build Vista runs great...

All I can say is try it, not on a demo computer in a store that has no updates at all and has been pretty much plugged in and forgotten, but on an actual end user computer, with decent specs, that has been setup and configured properly. I've used every Windows OS since Windows 3.1, and let me tell you, Vista is nothing compared to the utter piece of ***that ME was. You want to see a truly broken OS, check that out.

Thanks for the advice guys. Yea I tried researching computers before I bought this 1. However, like I said, I am HELP I AM TRAPPED IN 2006 PLEASE SEND A TIME MACHINE when it comes to computers.

I will try the CCleaner thing and see if that helps. I also did something someone said where doing read/write ability to the folder would help. I would play on my desktop, but I would just need to buy a wireless thingy for it since it is too far from the router.

Any tip/trick you have for eliminating unnecessary stuff helps.

Also, if there is a certain version of, say windower, that helps to run the game better (***always pops up and closes my game in full screen) I would appreciate it.

~Mochang

I never get the hate for Dells... this is my second Dell laptop and both have been beyond amazing for me (first one's graphics card wasn't even usable for this game by a long shot, and yet still played it for 2 years, only reason I got rid of it was because I needed a stronger card for autocad and solidworks)

To the OP, I have a dell laptop with vista and play ffxi... on a 1680x1050 resolution perfectly fine. I have yet to encounter a single crashing problem with the game... in fact at all (and I tend to abuse my computer, I've been the fool who's playing in besieged while modeling in solidworks, with paintshop pro on as well as other programs (like media player, which I find to be rather memory intensive compared to other music players), and still have yet to have a problem... although I admit it was definitely laggy *whistle*)

Anyways, back to the OP... regardless if you are using built-in windower or the unofficial windower, if your going to be playing on vista and playing the game via windower you have 2 choices. Disable UAC right away, or leave UAC on (my preferance, because you never know if you stupidly clicked something and started running some BS program or anything... specially for those who're a little less computer literate, little extra saftey doesn't hurt) <--- if you decide to leave UAC on, you will need to disable the black screen that pops up. Thats what causes FFXI to crash whenever UAC pops up... once thats disabled, you can have it pop up "Are you sure?" "Are you really sure?" "Run this?" and ffxi'll continue to run like a charm -- I'm going to assume this is what is happening to you

(Just read "***always pops up and closes my game in full screen", close aim, close msn, close any other chat programs while playing fullscreen... there shouldn't really be any programs running behind it since your fullscreen you cant DO anything else. Once everythings closed, the only thing that'll occasionally interfere is your antivirus... and just keep that on, it happens 1x a week or 1x a month depending on your settings, you can change the setting to a time you don't think you'll be playing and problem should be "solved"... windows update might happen as well, but thats another thing you can change the timing of, or to manual *shrug*)

http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/2141/vista_disable_secure_desktop_promp_elevation/ <-- that should have instructions as to how to shut off the black screen for UAC... I know when I did it, it was a year and a half ago, shortly after vista came out and I had to go into the registry to change it... can't find those exact instructions now but I'm pretty sure this is the exact same thing...

as for keeping your computer clean... CCleaner is wonderful, definitely try using that on a regular basis (I'm lazy so more like 1x eveyr 3 months for me, but should be monthly or bimonthly really XD... especially depending on types of sites you go to), adaware is a good spyware/adware cleaner as well, free as well, so can get that in addition. housecall.trendmicro.com also has a nice free-webbased scanner... good for an outside source to clean your comp; then of course you should have some sort of antivirus software on your comp in the first place (I had macafree and lagged like hell found it to be quite shitty... norton was decent enough for me, right now using my schools business version of trendmicro though *shrug* anything is better than nothing though)

Personally speaking about the windower... I use the unofficial and deleted all addins and stuff. I don't agree with them to the least, but the windower lets me run the game practically lag free (and full resolution, etc... if I try going back to fullscreen it keeps crashing, so hafta change settings before I can XD, not that I wanna :P)-- haven't tried ffxi's windower since it came out, so maybe its decent enough these days *shrug*

As for vista... I actually really like it... visually speaking, its pretty nice looking... does take a bit getting used to, seeing how they changed some of the filing systems, and theres popups asking for everything, but once you get used to it, its pretty nice and clean *shrug*

Bah, forgot to mention that... even w/ it running xp compatability though, the UAC will mess it up whenever it pops up, which was all what I was talking about above that XD

For antivirus, I go with AVG Free, because, well...it's free, and it does it's job. I used to be a Norton fanboy, but trust me, Norton will eat your computer alive with all the resources it uses (had to disable it when I played FFXI cuz it would kill me. Also, use Firefox for your web browser, and pick up the add ons Noscript and Adblock Plus...this will block a lot of crap from getting to your PC in the first place. Spybot S&D is another good spyware removal program to have, which is also totally free.

I use Smart Defrag for defragging, runs much quicker then bogus built in windows defrag utilities, and, you guessed it....totally free. I like free stuff ^^

Anyways, good luck!

Dumb-*** alert.

Blame your laptop and not vista? Laptops are not made for gaming? Blaming the user or the software?

First you blame the hardware (Laptop) then you say it's the user or the software (Vista is software)...you are just running your mouth.

A computer is a machine. It will run software. It will utilize hardware AND software to perform specific tasks.

People like this guy are what spreads bad, and false information.

Stop assuming everyone who creates 3rd party software is some socially inept person or persons.



You need to learn to read as well. The post you commented on was about HIS experience with Vista. Nowhere did he ever say it was the most stable OS out there, he said it was the most stable that HE had used.

You all need to take a step back, breath, and stop spouting off crap at the mouth.