Standard ATI card problems

[Alternator]

I've searched through the forum and seen that my problem is very common, but none of the solutions have worked, so I'm opening a topic.

While playing Civ4, my game will randomly crash--the monitor begins showing the message it displays when the computer is off, game sound continues playing, and roughly a 50-50 chance of either the computer restarting or just remaining like that until I reboot. I can reload the game and resume playing, and it does not crash again at the same point, so I don't think it's a memory issue. There is no excess heat being blown out of the computer, and adding a fan blowing into the tower didn't help, so I tend to rule out overheating.

I've tried playing it in both windowed and full screen mode, with similar results both ways. I've updated my drivers to the latest available, with no change. Does anyone have an idea what may work?

I'm running BTS 3.13.

 

[ori]

Is there an error message or blue screen displayed when it restarts?
You windows is not updated, try that.
While I doubt it is an issue: update the game as well

 

[Lemon Merchant]

The new ATI Catalyst drivers are out. It's version 9.5 and has some fixes apparently, though mostly for Vista. It may help.

They are located here:

http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx

They seem to run fine for me. (Vista 64 bit. YMMV.)

Like Ori said, make sure your updates are up to date and your drivers as well. And it's a good idea to patch BTS to 3.17, just don't do it in-game. Download the patch from CFC.

Good luck.

 

[Alternator]

Updated to BtS 3.17, ran Windows Update, problem persists.

 

[ori]

did you update your graphics drivers?
is there an error message?
did you look in the windows event manager for an error message?

 

[Alternator]

I updated the drivers, but since the game causes Windows to crash entirely, I don't know how to get any error messages out of it.

 

[ori]

look here:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/helpandsupport/learnmore/russel_02may13.mspx

 

[Alternator]

I made the change so that instead of an auto-reload, it would display the error message, and have managed to cause the game to crash several times now. Each time, the monitor did its "pretend the tower has no power" routine, preventing me from copying any information from the error log. It did not, however, restart, so I'm guessing the error log did show up.

 

[Lemon Merchant]

What is your memory voltage set to? And could you post the make/model number of the memory, please?