Ive had some problems with the gold edition. When I first installed it the videos were choppy and would freeze up my pc, so I disabled the videos. That did not solve the problem I can play the game for about 30 minutes then my pc totally freezes up, I can't even CTRL+ALT+DELETE out it. I am forced to manually power down the machine.
I tried downloading the patches but they claim the game cannot be found. What gives?
my pc stats are
2 ghz duo core2
1G ram
GeForce Go 7200

Gold is patched to date so there are not patches to install. Could you post your dxdiag results?

:beer: Welcome to Civfanatics :beer: ;)

thanks, but what are dxdiag results? So I can get them to you.

click start -> click run -> type dxdiag -> hit enter -> in the box that pops up wait until it is finished loading (takes some minutes) and click on save reults. Post this txt file as an attachment here (click go advanced in the reply box and then on manage attachments)...

Is this it?

yes. and there is an updated driver for your graphics card available on the HP website - try installing this. Also on an unrelated note: your Audio driver gives some errors as well and there seems to be an update available as well :)

Make sure that this is indeed your Laptop version there are lots of different dv2000 choices on HP's website and I just took the most likely (http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/softwareList?os=228&lc=en&cc=us&dlc=en&product=1817074&lang=en#)

Well, I installed both drivers, and it still freezed up. Any other suggestions?
I appear to have meet and exceeded the recommended system requirements, this game is like my old ford probe, running fine, smooth, for awhile then BAM! your stranded on the side of the road.

just to make sure it is something graphics related:
ingame click advanced, then options and set movie qualitz and graphics qualitz to low. Then exit the game and open the civilizationIV.ini and set all items with bik or bink in their name to their opposite (from 0 to 1 or vice versa) and do the same for no intro movie - this will make the graphics verz ugly but test whether it still freezes...

a little research shows that my graphics card only has 65g of RAM, and the game requires over twice that. Thanks for the help ori.
So much for HP's upgraded graphics card,:) I guess I need to shop around for a good laptop card.