Armagetron client keeps crashing

[BOOSH]

My laptop broke and I bought a new computer and my armagetron client randomly crashes every 10-20 minutes.

What I'm running:
Armagetron 2.8.3_rc2 (I've tried older and more recent clients though)
Vista 64
AMD Phenom II X4 945
ATI Radeon 4870 1GB
Foxconn A7DA-S 3.0 Mobo
4GB RAM
32GB SSD <-- Installed Armagetron on this one. Not sure if a SSD would cause problems?
1TB HD
650W Xigmatec Power Supply

After turning off my music and playing I noticed the fan on my video card goes insane. It seems Armagetron takes up 100% of my graphics card usage. Looking around in the wiki it sounds like this might have something to do with vsync. Unfortunately I do not have any options I could find in regards to enabling vsync. I don't know if this is related to the crashes or not.

I'm new to windows so I'm not sure where any sort of crash log would be stored or if it would be helpful, but I'd be more than happy to post it if someone can point me to the right path.

Any ideas?

[Z-Man]

The SSD shouldn't be a problem. From the point of view of applications (and even the OS to some degree), they look exactly like regular hard disks.

After turning off my music and playing I noticed the fan on my video card goes insane. It seems Armagetron takes up 100% of my graphics card usage. Looking around in the wiki it sounds like this might have something to do with vsync.

Yep, you can stress out your whole system quite a lot if you have vsync disabled. To check whether you have, look at the FPS display in the upper right corner (if it's not there, go to the menu System Setup/Display Settings/Preferences, there's an option to turn it on there). If it's larger that your monitor refresh rate (probably 60), then you have vsync disabled, and enabling it in your video card settings can take a lot of stress off (Sorry, can't help there; I don't have an ATI card under Windows).

But you should definitely check out version 0.2.8.2.1 and see if that crashes, too. We did some changes on the way from there to upcoming 0.2.8.3 that may be troublesome, and I want to be absolutely sure they're not.

[BOOSH]

ATI released a video drive update on Sept 9 that I hadn't installed yet. I just assumed I had the most recent one. That appears to have fixed it .

[BOOSH]

OK, so I have a new problem. Armagetron doesn't detect the correct keys for my keyboard. This is my keyboard http://www.rosewill.com/products/s_1002 ... Detail.htm . For example, I can't open terminal. The tilde key doesn't do anything. It works in other stuff, like right now `, and in winword.exe. Also, the brackets and backslash come out weird. For example, ] is actually [ in Arma. And \ is ]. Any ideas? I can't get cool colors without the console .

Armagetron is the only program I've had this problem with so far. The only thing that is weird about my keyboard is that the \ key is below the enter key instead of above it. It has one of those overly large enter (return) buttons that is old school.

[Z-Man]

Dunno. Possibly, SDL (which is responsible for delivering correct characters for keypresses) uses internal keyboard layout translation tables and just doesn't have your model coded in, as it's non-standard. Nothing we can do there. You may have success toying around with the Windows keyboard layout settings, but don't ask me what to do. For the console key, you can just rebind it (in System Settings/Misc Stuff/Global Keyboard Configuration).