Your laptop will still be a relatively weak machine, at least for what PA demands. Your GPU is on par with most laptop GPUs, but your processor is a rather mediocre dual-core. For comparison, I'm running a Q8200 quadcore, a GTS 450 and 8 GB RAM. The specifics may not be of much help, but long story short, I've got a sub-average system and am playing PA on "low" settings. And all of my components are an order of magnitude more powerful than your system.
Might shed some light on what's causing the crash. Detail what the game is doing when things go wrong. Mostly I'm just curious myself.
Well, it doesn't hurt. Loading looks slow, but otherwise fine up to the point of the crash, where it just blanks out. Seems to me like the graphics side of things is not an issue. I've seen myself though the game doesn't deal with memory issues very well, so that might well be the problem. And this is not a very graceful crash, which is always a problem anyway. Hopefully someone with more intimate knowledge of the loading process will take a look. Oh, and seeing as the game never got to upload the crash dump (which it's supposed to do on its own), that's another thing you could post here. Directions in Shwyx's signature a few posts above.
What does it mean by "time stamp", because I cant seem to find it EDIT: I realized what he meant but its nowhere to be found.
Using the Explorer view option "Detailed", look for the "Date modified" column. Or you can right click > Properties on each .dmp file, see which one belongs with the log file. Now that I think about it, there is a chance it didn't even get to write a dump file I guess. Was nothing about it in the log file at all. But check if there is one. I don't know how that stuff works.
I checked and couldn't find anything and I looked hard (there were only like 10 .dmp files haha). Maybe I'll get lucky and someone with better knowledge will land on this thread and help me out... *cough* uber *cough* just kidding
I'm not sure. I just give some common advices. - Upgrade your graphic card driver. - Install Microsoft Visual C++ 2012, if you don't have that already. - Install Microsoft XNA Framework 4 (I'm not sure if the game needs this program) That's all I can say now :\
Did all of that, nothing worked. I tried PA again and waited a bit longer before ctrl alt deleting. Heres the new log... Oh and great news! I popped open my laptop which has a SUPER convenient hatch that just...pops off...and it looks like I actually have ONE 4 gig stick of RAM instead of 2 2 gig sticks! That means all I need is another 4 gig stick because I still have one open port! Woo!
Can you leave task manager open while it loads (might need to set game to windowed mode) and see how much RAM it is using? To try and confirm that RAM actually is the problem. EDIT: I've run the game on my old laptop, Intel 2.4 GHz dual core, 4GB RAM and Mobility Radeon HD 3670. That graphics card is about half the speed of yours, with a slower and much older CPU. The only difference is my laptop can utilize a full 4GB of RAM, whereas yours seems to have allocated some somewhere else. It won't be pretty even with 8 GB of RAM, but it should at least work.
How exactly do I view the RAM usage? I know the DISK column shoots up whenever I launch PA but how do I see its specific usage?
Under the Processes tab (I'm assuming windows 8 has one, I use 7) you should see a list of processes, including pa.exe (the main PA process) and its usage or alternately, you should have a performance tab of some kind showing overall usage.
From what you've posted I think upping the ram to 8gb will help allot. Your ram is so low because it's allocating a chunk of it to the integrated GPU on that A4.... Problem is PA's UI uses a load as well so I can see why it's so contained. Upping your memory to 8gb will have 2 benefits: 1 it should give you enough memory to *load PA into the ram avoiding using disk caching* (note that is dependent on keeping to small ish maps). Also, it should allow your memory to run in 'dual channel' mode (provided you get a module that matches the original) which effectively will double your memory performance (which will really help graphics performance across the board). Crucial memory is a good place to go to get approved memory modules for laptops (although I often use their system to find what I need, then get the memory from somewhere cheaper)...
