Loading screen, and that's all...

[giddyup523]

I have searched the forums for an answer to my problem and I'm not sure if I have found it yet so I'm trying a new post. I have installed Civ IV and all that happens is I get the first loading screen that says loading in about 6 languages and it stays on that for about 3-5 minutes and then I get an error message. The exact same thing happened when I tried to load Civ III. I have a 6-month old Dell Inspiron 6000 1.7 Ghz, 1 Gig RAM, ATI Mobility X300 64 MB. I have been told that I need to update my driver and of course I couldn't use the ATI update because they do not support Dell and Dell hasn't updated the driver in a year. I did use a program from driverheaven.net that allowed to to update my driver to Catalyst 6.5 and I still have the problem. I installed the game on my father's desktop and it works fine. The loading screen that I get stuck on is on his screen for about 1 second before the game starts to actually load. I wonder if the problem is with the driver or something else because with Civ III not working on my computer, the driver on my computer is definately new enough to handle it. Both games get stuck on the small screen that says loading. I have tried uninstalling and re-installing to no luck. Is there anything else I could be doing?

[Petek]

If you haven't installed any patches, then you need to install v1.61. It may be found here. If that doesn't fix your problem, please post again.

[giddyup523]

I should have mentioned this in the previous post but I have installed the newest patch and I still have the problem.

[Petek]

See this post by Kloreep, whose copy of Civ 4 runs fine. He has a system similar to yours and is using a video driver "dated 12/3/2004 with a version number of 6.14.10.6483." Is that any help?

[giddyup523]

I tried downloading the driver and I still didn't get Civ IV to work, then a couple days ago, it worked. Since then I have still had the loading screen problem but if I went to msconfig and disabled all and restarted then typed in %temp% and deleted the files in that folder I would get Civ IV to run (I got that troubleshooting tip from calling Take 2). Now, all of a sudden I cannot get into the game again no matter what I do. I have not changed anything from when I could get in but the loading screen is still always there.

[Kloreep]

Strange... I do indeed have almost the same laptop as you (minus some of the processing power and RAM) and CIV is still running fine for me.

I have no idea what the problem might be, but some info might be good... you said the loading screen had messages in other languages. Any idea which ones? And what error message do you get? (Or is it just a general crash to desktop?)

What was Take 2 telling you to disable? There are multiple tabs for multiple settings in msconfig. Did they say what might be causing the problem? (I'd guess not, this is tech support...)