1.61 crashing on Inspiron 8600

[gadams]

Howdy all. I am very sad: Civ no longer works on my computer. After updating to v1.61, Civ crashes about 20 minutes into the game. There doesn't seem to be a graphics overload factor, as this happens on new games and saved, larger games.

So, I ran a scandisk, thinking it may be a hard drive problem. It came back with some errors that it fixed and all seemed well. Still no dice from Civ. PS: I restored the recovery partition image from Dell, which made my computer fairly happy overall. Scandisk is still returning the same errors though and Civ still crashes. Interestingly, Civ is the ONLY application which gives me problems.

I'm kinda at wits end. Dell tells me that there is nothing wrong with my HDD, I have updated every driver under the sun, and I still can't play. Sadness.

Any thoughts? I'll post the scandisk error and crashcode later today, when I get home.

My system: Inspiron 8600, Centrino 1.4 GHz, 1GB RAM, Radeon 9600 Mobility w/ 128MB RAM, WinXP Home

Thanks!

 

[gadams]

I've been doing a bunch of reading in the forums today. I'll try the Omega Drivers this evening and post the results.

 

[gadams]

Seemingly the Omega drivers did the trick. I just played for about an hour with no problem. Yay! FWIW, this is the chkdsk error I'm getting:
Cleaning up minor inconsistencies on the drive.
Cleaning up 48 unused index entries from index $SII of file 0x9.
Cleaning up 48 unused index entries from index $SDH of file 0x9.
Cleaning up 48 unused security descriptors.

I presume my HDD is going, which I'll take up with Dell.