My problem

[Wahee]

OK...

When I'm playing, my computer will spontaneously freeze up, the screen turns black, and the game either crashes or recovers. When it crashes, windows tells me that it has stopped responding, searches for a solution, and finds none. When it doesn't crash, I get the message "Display Driver igfx stopped responding and has successfully recovered". This seems common enough, and I read Lemon's thing for fixes, but I didn't understand most of it. Civ4 BtS has worked in the past. Everything's up to date. A lot of the time, people offering help ask for dxdiag results, which should be included.

 

[Lemon Merchant]

Well, since you read the guide...

First off, I would go to the HP website (if this is a laptop) and try to find a newer graphics driver. Secondly, it might be that the graphics chip or the CPU is over heating. Have you blown the dust out of it lately?

Intel internal graphics chips/cards are notoriously crummy. If it's a desktop PC, it might be an idea to buy an actual graphics card. Even a low end Radeon or Nvidia card can play the game just fine.

Sorry I can't be more specific, but it's hard to tell with HP model numbers which is a desktop, and which is a laptop.

EDIT: I just checked again, and it's a laptop. You're at the mercy of HP and their driver system.

 

[Furiey]

I have intel X3100 graphics onboard my laptop. I get the occasional flicker mainly in the advisor screens but nothing that actually stops play. My graphics driver is slightly more recent than yours (v7.15.00.10.1608 dated 2 Dec 2008 - I've not found a later one, got this on windows update) and from memory it did reduce the flicker from what I had with the previous driver. I didn't have the problems you are reporting however.

 

[Wahee]

I found something (rather hidden away) on the Intel site which seems to have resolved the issue. Thanks for the help!