03-08-2002 22:42									#1
	game suddenly shutting down Suffering from ads?

I've been having a problem with Civ3 where the game will suddenly shut itself down, for no apparent reason. Sometimes it happens when it hangsup on the music or sound effects, sometimes during AI turns, sometimes no reason at all. This happened when I upgraded to the 1.21 patch. I went back to 1.17, and the problem stopped. I've upgraded to 1.29, and it's started happening again, albeit only a couple of times. I'm running win xp, with 128 mb ram and 1.1 ghz speed, so I wouldn't think that's a problem. Can anyone tell me what changed between these versions that could cause that, and if there is any work around. I'm going to turn off music, just use sound effects, and see if that works. Thanks.

	04-08-2002 00:58									#2
	Support Apolyton buy from Amazon

If its always sound that causes it you need to update your sound drivers. Lots of things could be the cause but its not a bug in the game as it should run fine on XP IF its installed correctly, none of the files are corrupted, the CD is clean, and you have your drivers up to date. Assuming no hardware problems that is. One cheap memory chip can make a PC a BSOD machine.

Try updating your sound drivers and make sure you have XP up to date in general by clicking on the update shortcut in the start menu. If that doesn't do it then try doing what you should always do when you ask for help with a PC.

Give you specs. Hard to help you if you don't tell the helpers what you have. You gave some but it was rather sparce. You CPU speed means little. Your RAM is enough but XP runs better with 256 and Civ III is memory hog.

Mother board
CPU brand as well as speed
RAM you did this one
Operating System yes you got that one also
VIDEO CARD - major source of problems
Sound Card - you did mention sound as a possible trigger so why didn't say what the sound device is?

Anything else you can think of the might help pin things down. Such as what programs you have running besides Civ. 128 megs of RAM makes for a shortage if you try running a lot of stuff in the background but it should only slow things down rather than cause crashes with XP.