I recently installed the official 3.17 BTS patch, and solver's unofficial patch. Since then, I can't go 10 turns without the whole computer crashing hard. Sometimes it happens trying to pull up the tech tree, but sometimes it's as simple as moving a worker into the next square. I don't have any problem starting right back up again after the last autosave, so uploading a save game won't even help. It crashes so hard (to black screen), that the power button won't even turn off the computer. The fans go off, but the power light stays on until I physically pull the plug out of the back of the computer. I tried a search for "3.17 crash", but I saw nothing of this magnitude. At first I thought it might have been the mod, but I tried with straight vanilla BTS, and a variety of graphics and sound settings. It's almost acting like it could be a dying 7600 video card, but the temp looks good before the crash, and no other application does this, even other games. I found an updated directX, but that didn't seem to solve anything.

As suggested in the original post (general BTS forum), I tested my ram. No errors.

Any ideas?? Help muchly appreciated!

LM

Open the event manager after you reboot, and see if there is a log of an error.

If you have Windows XP:
Click Start, and then click Control Panel. Click Performance and Maintenance, then click Administrative Tools, and then double-click Computer Management.

If you have Vista:
Open Event Viewer by clicking the Start button, clicking Control Panel, clicking System and Maintenance, clicking Administrative Tools, and then double-clicking Event Viewer.. .

(You may know how to do this, but I am also posting these instructions for others who may read this thread)


If it is your graphics card - the obvious thing to try would be to see if you can swap in another card and see if the problem persists. You have a Geforce 7600, so I am assuming you added the card yourself? If you don't have another card you could plug in, you could try removing the 7600 and running the game off the integrated graphics on your mobo. Assuming the game even plays, you could at least isolate your issue as related/not related to the GPU.

There are no errors in the system logs. I checked all 4 logs (XP). There is a record of the standard boot-up, but nothing before for hours or days, depending on the log.

I don't have another video card I can swap out. The motherboard video won't run BTS.

I did go to NVidia's website and find an updated driver since my last post. I waited a couple hours to download the 86meg driver over a wireless connection, even though it didn't look like it added anything for my older card. Still no good, same problem.

*sigh* I miss my game!

LM

Maybe the BTS crash logs would give some info then. First you will need to enable crash logging.

Go into your configuration file (I think is something like BeyondtheSword.ini or BTS.ini). This file should be in the My documents/My Games/Firaxis/BeyondtheSword folder - or something similar.

You will open that .ini file in wordpad or some other txt editor and scroll down to the section on error logging. Enable all the features that have something to do with crash or error logs. Then after BTS crashes again, take a look at the crash log.

I am not sure where BTS will save the crash log, so you may have to poke around. Or maybe someone else will post on this thread who knows ;)

I am not sure how helpful this will be, but it is worth looking into.