Civ4 causes display driver crash

[Generality]

Argh. I know this solution exists somewhere, but I can't find it.

I installed Civ4 Gold and it worked fine for a few hours, then the graphics quality suddenly plummeted and desktop gave me a warning: "display driver igfx stopped responding and has recovered." However, graphics continued to be terrible, even for other games, until I performed a system restore. I've reinstalled the game to suffer the same effect.

This bugs me because I used to play Civ4 through Gametap and it worked fine.

Dxdiag result follows, but to sum up I have an Inspiron 1525 system running Vista 32bit, with an Intel 965 Express chipset.

 

[ori]

just to warn you: your graphics card is below minimum specs (it comes with a grand total of 0 bytes of onboard memory) which can cause troubles since the shared memory it uses is both slower and takes away resources from other programs.
Dell has a slightly newer version of the graphics driver:
http://support.dell.com/support/dow...NS_PNT_PM_1525&hidos=WLH&hidlang=en&TabIndex=

try that (its the intel one).

 

[Generality]

Hmph. I went to Dell and it said there were no drivers for my service tag.

Will it help if I set the graphics quality in the game to medium? It doesn't affect the appearance much, but it does speed it up.

 

[ori]

it is possible - try it also in the civilizationIV.ini there are some graphics settings - mostly
guimanagedtextures and everything wtih bik or bink in its name - you can play around with it a bit...