SWTOR crashing my computer
For the last couple of weeks, SWTOR has been crashing out my entire computer at seemingly random points as I've not been able to lock down a particular action in the game that causes it. I've tried updating and rolling back graphic drivers (nVidia GeForce GT 545), reinstalling and setting exceptions in my anti-virus (Avira), dropping graphical settings to minimum and fully reinstalling the game following a guide to 'install properly on Windows 10'. None of these have solved the problem and it seems restricted to just SWTOR as no other game, even graphically intense with lots of in-game physics, cause any issue.
When this first started, I thought it may be a HDD issue as the system crash was a blue screen for 'unexpected_storage_exception', but that wouldn't always come up when the game crashed (and didn't under any other circumstance). Most of the time the system crashed without giving any errors within about 30 minutes (though the time wasn't consistent), though I noticed the graphics card fan wasn't running as highly as it usually does while playing SWTOR (it's the only game I have which does that. Even games like DiRT Rally and Beam NG.Drive don't cause the fan to run high, but this could be down to poor optimization), so I rolled the graphics card drivers back and this allowed the game to run for nearly 2 hours before crashing (again inconsistent). I'm currently back to crashing within 30 minutes as I attempted to delete all graphics drivers that could be present on my system in case they were trying to override each other and now I'm on the latest nVidia driver.
I'm currently stuck without any idea as to what's really causing the issue. I don't believe it's overheating as I've been manually putting the graphics card fan to maximum yet the game still crashes and I'm not convinced its the HDD, even though I've noticed the game sometimes starts to fail to load objects before the crash happens, but again is restricted to just SWTOR.
My computer spec, an Alienware X51, is:
Intel Core i5-2320 processor 64 bit
Windows 10
8gb RAM
nVidia GeForce GT 545 graphics card
1tb HDD
Well, found out what the problem was and it's a fairly silly and obvious one. I've got an Alienware X51, a small form factor machine and when the game started crashing my computer the first thing I did was hover the dust from inside the computer. Problem is I didn't go far enough as I literally just popped the side off, hovered and put it back on again.
This time I pulled out all the removable plates and compartments and found the GFX card heat sink was pretty well stuffed with dust. With the GFX card next to the hard drive, it's heat would transfer over and start causing it to struggle to load before the system crashed and then struggled to restart, so needed to be left off for a few minutes. It's obvious now, but initially it didn't make much sense, especially when it was only SWTOR 'causing/triggering' the crashes (though I put this mostly down to the Hero Engine).
So yes, if you have crashing issues potentially centered on SWTOR, make sure your computer's clear of dust first.
