PLEASE HELP
At times this game (Civ IV) will run well for up to several hours, with only infrequent stutters. Then it will glitch and stutter several times during a single turn. The black screen of death can hit me in as little as 3-5 minutes of play time (the computer having only been on for 5-10 minutes total). Less frequently my graphics will shift to a "sephia/"rust" tone (everything has a yellowish/brown/bronze tone; and difficult to differentiate).
I've shut down all of the background programs I can (Microsoft will not let me shutdown "Windows Messenger-Not Signed In" {I've never used it, but can not remove it from the background}) I Have loaded the 1.61 patch...
AMD Athlon 64 3400+ 2.2 Ghz (1600 Mhz FSB 512 KB L2 Cache)
200 GB (159 GB available)
1024 MB DDR SDRAM
nVIDIA GeForce 6100 video card (drivers updated July 9th 2006; as were all other drivers)
Windows XP Home
I am set to medium video quality (in all) in the game settings
patch 1.61 loaded around July 2nd 2006 (I got the game in late May)
My disks are the ones with the "wrong" one labled as the play disk, but that was easy enough to figure out (I just switched disks when the first one did not work, and lo and behold!)
btw I have had not noticed any issues with my sound, infact one of the things that tells me that the game is still running on occasion is that the music is still playing, and often if that happens the game will come back from black screen, however, it is still locked up and will not respond.
I have been lurking around trying to get fixes for some two weeks. I have printed out and will try to set the .ini to 40; other than that I have no mods other than the 1.61 patch. The dang patch seems to have made things WORSE!
PLEASE HELP!
How do I attach my DxDiag? I saw some others did.