Bad Graphics Issue when playing SC4 Today

[joshriddle 29]

First of all, it is a Windows XP SP3, 2.2 GHz Intel Pentinum 4, 990 MB RAM, it has 2 GB Virtual Memory space, an Intel Extreme Graphics 2. Laptop.

Today I had the strangest problem. I can't say word for word what happened, but I'll try my best. I was placing a SAM Starter tile and then the game locked up. Then it kicked me out and I got this popup message saying something about how my graphics driver had an error and couldn't display the graphics right, and it told me to reboot my computer. I just clicked it off, to reboot and everything started looking horrible. First it changed the Windows XP theme to one of the classic themes, colors could barely display, and not to mention the machine was running so slow you couldn't do barely anything. I had to use the power button to shut the thing off because the shut down command wouldn't work.

So I used it, it came back on and it runs fine. Would anyone happen to know what caused this to happen? I would have posted a picture but Windows erases anything on the clipboard before it reboots (I should have opened it in Paint before I rebooted )

Thanks in advance.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Several things might have happened.

Did you brush a traffic enabled building with your SAM piece?  If you, it should have done a CTD.

Your battery was low, or somehow switched off?

You don't have enough virtual memory and got a memory refusal?

You did something that stompted very hard on the windows kernel, and the boot recovery couldn't handled it, so you had to do a cold boot.  With windows, warm boots some times fail because the BIOS set-up has been scragged in memory.

You really should lose that pile of MS-bugs.

Today, I was running compilations of wine (three hours) while recording a log for it, and playing SC4 all on my tiny litle box.  Of course I do have over 6GB of swap, but I don't think it used much of it.  At one point I had a test-compile of wine in one desktop and was running a program under control of a different wine environment on another.  Having four desktops is slightly wonderful, and if I need any more, they are there for the asking.

[joshriddle 29]

I found out looking at MMC's Event Viewer (which I find useless most of the time) saying my graphics driver got into yet another infinate loop. Which usually that sparks a BSOD, so unless there is something very wrong and bad, the computer is spouting a bunch of nonsense at me.

The battery is shot, so it has to stay plugged in all the time, so it would have been impossible for it to come unplugged.