Civ 4 Constant Crashing

[civ4dreamon]

I'm having a lot of issues with Civ 4 lately. I have a Dell XPS (Pentium 4 processor, 3.4Ghz, and 2MB RAM), Win XP (SP3), with an nvidia 8800 GTS card. The nvidia drivers are up to date (258.96) and both Civ 4 and Beyond the Sword are patched (to 1.74 and 3.19, respectively). I have the latest DirectX 9.0c installed. I've played Civ 4 with and without BTS for literally hundreds of hours with no issues. Recently, I get constant crashing on both Civ 4 (vanilla) and BTS. Usually, the text starts looking garbled and blocky first. I can still get get screenshots at that point, so a few are attached. Then more of the graphics degrade and Civ 4 crashes. Sometimes it just crashes and I have to end the program from the task manager. At other times I get a BSOD and it blames NV4_DISP.DLL for the crash. On an nvidia forum someone suggested a Video Card Stress Test, to see if the card was failing. It ran for 90 mins with no issues. Oddly though, after running that, it was stable for many hours of play, and several weeks. When it started again, I ran the stress test again, and it's okay again. Anyone have ideas for a more permanent solution?

 

[The_J]

What did you use to stress your card? Furmark/3Dmark?

 

[civ4dreamon]

Free Stone 1.0.0.3

 

[The_J]

That doesn't seem to be up to date, you'll maybe want to try Furmark, should be more challenging for your card.

And you maybe should open your computer and look in it for a) the dirt: Are the fans dirty? If yes, clean them b) are the fans running? Might be a loose contact, so that the graphic card fan can turn of randomly.