I think this may be related to the NVIDIA problems civ 4 seems to have had a lot of. I experienced some crashing on my previous laptop, which had an ATI chipset of some sorts. On my new laptop (Dell M1330 running vista, NVIDIA M840 GS graphics), suddendly Civ4 BTS just goes to black. Sound shuts off, and I can do nothing except force-shutdown my computer. Obviously this is pretty infuriating. I don't know if this is specific to BTS, as I havn't tried Civ4 on this computer without it. Will try this now, but does anyone know anything about this bug?

Similar situation with me. Only with the game, my computer just shuts down as if I disconnected the power to it. Doesn't happen with other programs.

I'm having the same problem. I thought it must be something to do with the graphics driver so I switched from 156.69 to a 163.75 from laptopvideo2go. No luck....

The only thing I've found other than that are people saying they've had overheating problems with certain games and motherboard revision combos. The graphics chip is on the board apparently. I seem to have one of the potentially troublesome motherboards, maybe you do too? You can find the motherboard version under the first memory SODIMM. I have A01, from the posts I've seen A04 is the latest. Of course all of this might be irrelevant. My next move is to head back to XP, I'll let you know if that fixes things.

This is way too much effort to get a game working...

Here's the link for the motherboard issue.

http://www.dellcommunity.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=Tech_Talk_XPS_Laptop&thread.id=558&view=by_date_ascending&page=7

~ Dude's ~

You've been "dell'd"

lol!

I don't think this is a motherboard issue, I don't have any other problems with the laptop. Windows tells me Civilization 4 is incompatible with Vista, surely this should be on someone's list of things to fix over at Firaxis?

Do all of you have Dell m1330s and experience these problems? I'm thinking of buying one, but I won't if it's incompatible with Civ4.