Windows 11 freezing and crashing games on older machines

[bejamartins]

I've installed Windows 11 in dual boot in a few machines now. For some reason, it freezes and crashes games on most of them. I can fined no relevant log on why.

The machines I see these crashes are:
- i7 960, GTX 1080Ti, 10GB DDR3;

- Core 2 Duo E8400, GTX 750Ti, 8GB DDR3,
- HP ProBook 450 G3;

- Athlon x4 870k, GTX970, 8GB DDR3

 

Almost every game I test crashes, but I've installed Final Fantasy X Remastered and Sonic Adventure 2 in all of them to have common games to test.

Does anyone have any idea what could cause this. Is there a Windows 11 feature known to cause this and if so can it be disabled? I googled around but don't seem to find anything relevant. If not, any ideas where to look?

[GuiltySpark_]

Why are you intent on running 11 on such old machines in the first place? It seems like you know exactly what you need to do.

[bejamartins]

55 minutes ago, rickeo said:

Why are you intent on running 11 on such old machines in the first place? It seems like you know exactly what you need to do.

Why not?

[GuiltySpark_]

19 minutes ago, bejamartins said:

Why not?

I think you're experiencing "why not" right now.

[bejamartins]

21 minutes ago, rickeo said:

I think you're experiencing "why not" right now.

Souldn't I even ever attempt to make things work then? One would thought that tinkering would be accepted in a tech forum like this.

[GoodBytes]

Your system, like mine (Core i7 930, 6GB of RAM, GeForce 680, SSD), is completely unsupported by Microsoft when it runs Windows 11, and all hardware manufactures (beside your GPU, in your case). We get what we get. Simple as that. Data loss, crashing, BSOD, failing to update, and all that good stuff, by installing Windows 11, we agree that, well, we are willing to live with it. 

 

In my case, my PC is not used for work or anything valuable. I also have a fairly strong backup solution for a home system, I think.

In fact, it runs Windows 11 Insider Builds - Dev channel. My setup allows quick recovery from failure. Yes, I had to do re-installs with Windows 11 on it due to failures on this particular system. Other system experience no issues, and been smooth experience since. 

 

My work PC still runs on Windows 10. It will eventually be upgraded to Windows 11, but work system can't experience any down time, for me. So it follows a the polar opposite policy of my non-work PC

 

Windows 10 is supported until end of 2025, I would recommend to stay there. Also, the Core i7 900 series has horrible VBS performance.

So if you use WSL or WSA, well, VBS is forced enabled, no way to disable it and get those running, and performance tanks. Maybe your 6-core CPU won't be as bad as my quad core and might still be OK, but form me, it really falls down, a lot more than reviewers were showing with modern support systems. I can still game, but the experience is notably less responsive when using the system.

 

[bejamartins]

55 minutes ago, GoodBytes said:

Your system, like mine (Core i7 930, 6GB of RAM, GeForce 680, SSD), is completely unsupported by Microsoft when it runs Windows 11, and all hardware manufactures (beside your GPU, in your case). We get what we get. Simple as that. Data loss, crashing, BSOD, failing to update, and all that good stuff, by installing Windows 11, we agree that, well, we are willing to live with it. 

 

In my case, my PC is not used for work or anything valuable. I also have a fairly strong backup solution for a home system, I think.

In fact, it runs Windows 11 Insider Builds - Dev channel. My setup allows quick recovery from failure. Yes, I had to do re-installs with Windows 11 on it due to failures on this particular system. Other system experience no issues, and been smooth experience since. 

 

My work PC still runs on Windows 10. It will eventually be upgraded to Windows 11, but work system can't experience any down time, for me. So it follows a the polar opposite policy of my non-work PC

 

Windows 10 is supported until end of 2025, I would recommend to stay there. Also, the Core i7 900 series has horrible VBS performance.

So if you use WSL or WSA, well, VBS is forced enabled, no way to disable it and get those running, and performance tanks. Maybe your 6-core CPU won't be as bad as my quad core and might still be OK, but form me, it really falls down, a lot more than reviewers were showing with modern support systems. I can still game, but the experience is notably less responsive when using the system.

 

Like I said in my first post, I have my machines dual boot with Windows 11 and 10. I didn't went head first into 11, I'm keeping 10 in another disk for compatibility. I'm only trying to make it work where I can. I so far didn't experience any other slowdown or crash in other scenarios outside games. It's just games that freeze and crash. Also one thing I noticed, games seem to more stable if I run them in windowed mode.

 

VBS says "not enabled" in System Information in my machines, btw.

 

I read on another forum meanwhile that someone had similar symptoms and bypassed them by going to NVidea panel and changing the lockscreen executable to be run with integrated graphics. In my case, I think only the E8400 has integrated graphics (aside the laptop that doesn't have a dedicated GPU). I gonna test it tomorrow and see if it does anything.