Hello,

I recently got a new laptop and I'm faced with a decision regarding my graphics card. The machine is a dual-core AMD Turion X2 1.80GHz processor, 2GB RAM, 150GB hard disk, and a Radeon X1250 256MB graphics card. The machine came pre-loaded with Vista Home Premium which, being in the IT business, I was immediately skeptical of but I thought "hey what's the harm in giving it a try?"

So I loaded up the machine, patched the OS, and then installed Civ. Everything seemed to work fine until in the middle of a game, the laptop completely died and could no longer load the OS, claiming "The file is missing or corrupt" (doesn't mention WHICH file, just that it's corrupt). At this point, I figured "Screw it I'll just downgrade to XP Pro cause I know that will work".

I now have XP Pro SP2 on the machine, fully patched, but now I cannot install the drivers for the graphics card. The disk that came with the machine only has Vista drivers and even when I go to the ATI site and explicitly download the "Windows XP Pro 32 Bit" driver for this exact model it still returns an error that the driver is not supported on my OS, which leads me to believe my only option is to run Vista on this machine. (Thanks Dell!!!)

Anyways, my apologies for the long post, just wanted to give enough detail to understand the problem. My question is two-fold;

A) Is there anything special I need to do to Civ (outside of regular patches) to make it work well on Vista?

OR

B) I know this is not the correct forum for this but, has anyone encountered this problem with this graphics card? Is there anyway I can make this work on XP?

Thanks in advance, I really like this machine and I don't mind using Vista if I have to, I just would really like to avoid the OS-corrupting mid game crashes.....

Install the recent Directx from MS's site. It should include all the 9.0c files this game needs.
B) Some hardware does not have XP support now. Notebooks can be pretty limited; I remember many that we could not put Win2K on to save our lives back when that came out. That said, your error message is a bit surprising if you've cleared all vestiges of Vista from that computer.
C) Did you get a Vista DVD from Dell? Be careful if you didn't and your installation files are on a hidden partition; don't burn any bridges.

Turns out it's neither Civ nor Vista that's causing the problem. I ran a some more diagnostics and was able to find an integrity error in one of the memory modules. I'm guessing it must be in one of the higher memory addresses which would explain why, since XP uses alot less memory than Vista, I never crashed on XP.

Thanks anyways....