Help! - Random Freezes not going away...

[Insuable]

Hey everyone,

I would much appreciate help from anywhere I can get it.... My computer freezes quite a bit during civ3, seemingly at random. Sometimes it won't do it for hours, other times it will do it within seconds of restarting the game. I have taken the following steps:

1) Updated Windows
2) Updated Video Driver
3) Updated Audio Driver
4) Defraged hard drive
5) used msconfig to disable all start programs (nothing else running in background)
6) 1.21f patch

One thing I havn't tried to do is mess with reference drivers, but I may have to...

My system is the following:

Compaq Presario 600mhz Athlon
256mb RAM
Soundblaster 128 PCI
16mb Voodoo3 (AGP 1x I think)
Plenty of Hard Drive space
DVD and CDRW

I just formatted the hard drive and reinstalled the manufacture's software, so there is very little "junk" on the computer. I can't really think of much else to do.. am I doomed?

Joe

PS I forgot to add I do not have any mods at all installed, just the factory version with the 1.21 patch

 

[Insuable]

Oh and one other random thing:

When i first installed the patch, the units colors would all flash!! I thought it was part of the updated game. They would literally flash back and forth from either a deep blue or red to whatever the nation's color was. I was beginning to wonder why in the world they changed that in the patch (even though it looked kinda neat it was REALLY annoying). Also, the lines denoting each nation's border were black, not in the appropriate color. Wierd huh? Hasn't happened since...

Joe

 

[damunzy]

Your computer sounds haunted!! Sorry, nothing of use to add, just that you have a really strange problem. Have you tried to contact infogrames tech support?

 

[Insuable]

My next step is tech support.... oh and I also just updated the monitor driver to so it isn't the plug and play driver... still no help...

Joe

 

[Xiahou-Dun]

I have about the samething in my computer..and didn't have the freeze problem with the v1.17f patch. I just now loaded the v1.21f patch and have a problem about ten minutes into the game. The screen locks (It will leave a bar/line across the screen) and the music will start skipping. Ctrl,Alt,Del will not shut it down...meaning I have to reboot with the switch.

Try the old patch and see if you still have problems.

 

[Insuable]

About half the time the whole thing just locks up w/out the music skipping and such - ctr/alt/del doesn't work. The other half of the time it locks up when I'm moving the mouse aound, and I do get the music skipping, etc... I thought it might be the music itself so I turned it off but that hasn't seemed to help much...

Let me know if you come up with anything else...

Joe