FFXI Consistently Crashing

I have been playing FFXI for about 6 months now, and as long as I've been playing, I've struggled with random crashes. Any time I am in any scenario with a higher number of enemies (Lilith HTBF, Dynamis D, pulling waves), I am almost certainly going to be staring at my home screen within 5 minutes. Has anyone else had an issue with this and found a solution? My computer should be more than strong enough for the game, yet it fails every time. I am not using any unusual Windower addons, plus I have seen crashes in vanilla ffxi regardless.

For context, the crashes cause my game to freeze momentarily, then the screen goes black for a moment, and then I have a white screen. At this point, the only way to close the game is through my task manager. The whole time, I can hear my fan working overtime.

As far as solutions go, I have tried:
-updating my graphics driver
-turning all graphics to their minimum levels
-downloading DGVoodoo (plug&play, not sure if I need to do more than that)
-downloading windower sandbox plugin

Please let me know what y'all think! I'd love to pull more than 3 mobs without crashing!

Edit: for those asking, I use a Lenovo laptop, Yoga 7I. I only have this issue with FFXI, never with any other games!

Laptop, desktop?

Drivers can cause these kinds of crashes, if you've tried others it's less likely to be this but still possible.

Broken or outradated addon.

Some program starting in the background, for instance another game launcher checking for updates or a virus checker

Dat file problem, tried re-installing?

Are you using any mods.

May be something you have already done but under the graphics options you said everything is on a minimum but double check the shadows. I had very regular disconnects until I turned shadows off and since then I have had no issues

Are you having odd crashes with anything else?

At least one other person I know in-game, and myself, started seeing more and more frequent crashes from FFXI, and it ended up being defective CPUs (both Ryzen, which AMD replaced under warranty - it's apparently not that uncommon for 3000 series).

I know for me, it was worse with specific applications, one of which was FFXI. I'd tried different older GPU drivers, different DirectX proxies, turning off plugins/etc, tried Ashita over Windower, none of it fixed it. Also had tried/tested a number of things for the computer in general.

Laptop, Lenovo Yoga 7i

I don't use many addons, plus I have crashes on vanilla, so I don't think it's an addon issue.
A friend had me turn off all notifications through user account settings, not sure how else to stop programs starting in background.
Re-installing the whole game? Oof, not opposed to it, but hoping to not have to do that.
No mods, just a few addons from Windower (gearswap and such).

Nope! Exclusively FFXI, I've never had a problem running games like Elden Ring, Skyrim, Fallout, etc.

I'd start with a check files in POL before re-installing. It sounds like a dat causing issues, since you don't have problems in other games? Doesn't explain the fan noise, I guess.

I'm not great with computers... how would I go about checking/fixing a dat causing issues?

In Playonline, before signing in, just hit the "Check Files" button, Change the dropdown to Final Fantasy XI, then hit "Check Files" again.

It'll check for any corrupted files.

Thanks!
Unfortunately, no corrupted files were found! Back to the drawing board...

Same problem.

Sometimes, there are some crashes that occur.
Game freezes and then the window of FFXI doesn't respond. I still hear of the sound of the game. Fans of my computer start being noisy. I need to crash Windower and reconnect. Sometimes it happens many times consecutively.
And sometimes it doesn't happen during many days.

This can happen any time : during an event, or when I'm afk in a town, or in my Mog House.

Can't find where is the problem.

This only occurs in FFXI.


I updated my drivers. Nothing changed.

I deleted Windower and re-installed it.

The problem disappeared during 1 month and then came back.

This may help


https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/threads/58750

If you don't configure DGVoodoo properly, it really isn't going to help. There was a tutorial by Logical(?) on youtube that configing it was part of.

Other things are:
turn off effects, weather, other people's effects
Lower models displayed
Adjust the clipping plane in

Anything that will cause your computer to display less is probably going to help you, if the problem is that when things get crowded.