Bejeweled 3 keeps crashing!

[DeadPoolX]

Bejeweled 3 crashes when playing and then turns my monitors off. Once that happens, I can't do anything. Nothing responds until I turn my computer off and then turn it back on. I can't ALT CTRL DEL or ALT F4 or even go to standby.

The weirdest thing is that happens randomly. One day I could play for 2 hours and the next 5 minutes before crashing. Today I tried playing and it crashed while still in the menu screen!

I'm playing in windowed mode with most settings turned off. I thought maybe full screen mode might have caused some problems, but nothing has helped so far.

All of this is ridiculous since I can play much more demanding games (like Mass Effect 2, Fallout 3, Left 4 Dead 2, Batman Arkham Asylum, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, the Dragon Age 2 demo, etc) without any problems whatsoever. In fact, I can play those games with all graphics settings turned up to their highest (although I had to turn down the distance detail in Fallout 3, but that didn't affect the game much).

I've done a virus scan, malware scan, tried turning off my virus scanner during gameplay, done a memory scan with MemTest, cleaned up my registry with CCleaner and defragged my hard drive. I also have very few services running in the background, generally 30.

My PC specs:
P4 3.6 GHz /HT
2 GB RAM
ATI Radeon 3870 HD (512 MB RAM)
SoundBlaster 2 ZS
250 GB HDD
Dual-Monitor setup (19" screens at 1280x1024)

I know my system is old, but I've played all the games I listed up above perfectly. Considering my PC's age, I should have trouble with those games and not Bejeweled 3.

For the record, I emailed PopCap and they requested my DX Diag info, which I gave them. I haven't heard from them since then.

[karogyoker]

Is your PC on after the crash? I mean, are the fans, HDD-s, etc. working?
I had a similar problem, but the difference was that my whole PC powered off instantly. I had to power it on.

My power supply was my problem. It was 300W and the capacitors got old (6-7 years), and when I played any other game what required a lot of power, my PC shut down.

I think it's not your case.
Try disable hardware acceleration in the graphics menu.

[DeadPoolX]

Yeah, my PC stays on (fans, HD, etc) but it's completely non-responsive and the monitors go black, as if I turned my computer off and left the monitors on. It's very weird.

Oddly enough, the same thing happens with Borderlands. Hard to find any connection between Bejeweled 3 and Borderlands... other than they're computer games. :D

Anyway... I'll try turning off hardware acceleration. A friend also suggested updating my audio drivers. That sounds weird, but he said he had trouble running some games and the audio drivers were the culprit. Can't hurt try!

Thanks for the idea. I probably wouldn't have thought of disabling hardware acceleration. Hopefully it works! :)

[karogyoker]

Is it OK now without hardware acceleration?

[danlock]

It'll be great if it works without the hardware video acceleration! :D

I think updating your video drivers (and DirectX, if necessary) is still an excellent idea. If you don't have the newest video drivers and update to the newest, you might notice performance improvements in your other games, too!

[DeadPoolX]

It seems to work when hardware acceleration is turned off. I still need to test it some more, but so far it seems like Karogyoker's suggestion is the solution.

The downside to this is that everything looks like crap. The online version (on PopCap's website) looks better; hell, the first Bejeweled looks better!

Just so you guys know, I contacted PopCap and they gave me a non-Steam version to use. Unfortunately, I faced the EXACT SAME problems I did with the Steam version.