Crashing on exit and 100% cpu usage

MedicalElephant

Chieftain
Joined
Apr 9, 2012
Messages
10
Me and my girlfriend have played civ4 for years over our lan network. After a year without playing we started a game and have both had the game crash on exit every time. My PC is the better of the two (obviously) and sometimes recovers. The other thing that happens is when it does crash the resource moniter shows 100 % cpu usage. Her pc is much worse and completely locks due to the strain on the cpu.

Is this happening to anyone else? Did something change? I'm going to check for virus's to hopefully rule that out.
 
Does the game play fine while playing? If so, then this sounds like an issue that is annoying but mostly irrelevant. Just Ctrl-alt-del to quit to avoid the cpu spike.

If the game is slow while playing, remove any resource intensive mods if applicable, and try again. If not applicable, try a smaller map/lower graphics settings.
 
On my system it runs fine, but as you say I have to alt-ctrl-del every time I close the game.

On her system though the game does run rather badly, un-smooth screen scrolling and it does appear to be using a lot of cpu most of the time while the game is running.

I upgraded the mobo a couple of months ago and am starting to suspect hardware issues. The cpu (AMD Athlon II x4 640) is plenty good enough for civ4, but for some reason it doesn't like it.
 
How old is the PC? As it uses a Quad-core processor (and therefore likely 2-3+ years old), I suspect its a combination of old hardware components (they are made to work for 4 years at best, just to keep you coming back to buy another one), along with disk fragmentation & other goodies (orphan files, viruses/trojans/worms/adware/malware/etc) floating around the memory which locks up more and more of your RAM over time.

How much RAM does your gf's PC have? That might be another limitation as well. Graphics card? (Integrated graphics cards are not designed for gaming, if you are happening to use one).

And as Traius pointed out, if you're playing with resource intensive mods/maps (i.e. anything larger than the default huge), you might want to ease up on that too.

Can't really provide you with more than conjecture at this point, since you only gave us information on your processor (that we have to extrapolate and guesstimate the other specs of your machine....)
 
Well its a 3 year old home built pc with a recently upgraded mobo and new HDD with new OS install (win 7)

System specs:

mobo: gigabyte 970A-DS3P
Ram: 4GB(2x2GB) DDR3 Rendition/Crucial (probably 3 years old)
Gfx card: Radeon HD5700 series

Civ4 ran fine on all map sizes with high graphics settings before the mobo change(no mods).

Admittedly there has been an issue with "hardware reserved" RAM, where its reserving 2GB of RAM for no apparent reason. I've tried swapping the RAM sticks around in all combinations and tried everything I can in BIOS settings but to no avail. I'm currently waiting delivery of new RAM as it could probably do with more anyway. Failing that I may try a new cpu.
 
You may want to get a new graphics card while you're at it, as its probably the cause of any of your in-game lag.
 
That video card should be more than fine for Civ IV, although it never hurts to upgrade it if the machine can handle it.

Your RAM is fine too for the game. Civ IV was notorious as a memory hog that was not able to optimally use more than 2MB Ram.

One key issue is 32bit vs. 64bit capable machine and OS. 64bit remedied some of the crash issues like the MAF error, although the game is going to lag after so long on even the best machines and specs.

I'm curious yall use any mods. Use of certain mods can problematic. Crashing on exit could be related to some odd like bad installs. Only time I've had that issue was with a certain mod not handling the in-game Music.

Again, your machine is more than fine less any hardware/software issues you may be experiencing. On her machine, make sure you lower some of the graphical options.

And really, stay away from larger maps and super intensive mods like C2C.

Lastly, as mentioned, the game is going to get laggy after a certain amount of time on any machine..usually about an hour. Just get in the habit of saving/exiting every hour or so, or once you start feeling that lag hit. There's nothing that can be done about really (but still the game should not crash on exit, so I don't know what to tell you there)
 
Lymond, the odd thing is that her system was running the game fine before the mobo was changed.

No mods at all just standard BtS.

Well, I've installed the new RAM on hers and the game does run much smoother. However it still crashes on exit. To be specific, when you try to exit to desktop the game freezes and when you open task manager the cpu is at 100% use. Weirder still, this only seems to happen when playing over our LAN network. I tested a single player game on a large map for a good 100 turns, ran fine and exited without a problem. At least the game is playable now.

As a side note, when I re-ran the windows index thing the cpu went down from near 7 to 4.9 so I'm suspecting it may have a problem.
 
Try exiting to main menu, then exit game. Does it still crash? My previous computer sometimes would crash while doing a complete exit. Exiting to main menu first, I never had a problem.
 
Sorry, I don't really have an answer for issues regarding LAN Networks. From what your saying, the issue seems to be tied to playing over the LAN. Only thing I can think of is to make sure the drivers for all your network stuff is up-to-date. Otherwise, you might query folks over in the MP forum to see if they've run into similar issues.

If you are running OS that is Vista+ make sure set the BTS executable to "run as administrator" under Properties>Compatibility. The Security stuff on the newer Windows OS can cause the possibility of certain files not being read.
 
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