After over a week CIV3 still crashes my computer

[Sylock]

I've been with the technical support people from the beginning but they still don't know what is going on. My computer was a heavy hitter 9 months ago. No other software bombs out or crashes my computer _except_ CIV3. Other titles I play/use all have 3-D acceleration (some examples are Asheron's Call, Dark Ages of Camalot) yet don't crash my computer. In order to play 10 rounds I have to hard-reboot my computer 5-10 times. That is pathetic.

I'm very frustrated that CIV3 doesn't have an official message board (and this one took over a week to get an account on). Here are my hardware specs, which one doesn't CIV3 support?

Asus A7V motherboard
AMD Athlon 900
MSI GeForce 2 Pro
Soundblaster PCI-128

The game is unworkable as it is for me.

[Auslander]

What's your OS?

[Orlando]

I had a problem with the game very similar to yours. Civ3 was crashing every five minutes. My setup is similar to yours, except my video card is an Elsa Gladiac (Geforce 2).

When I went and got the latest video drivers from Elsa's site, Civ3 ran smoothly and has not crashed since.

So, that would be my suggestion, to go to your card maker's website and obtain the latest drivers.

[francium]

I've noticed a serious bug in Civ3 too. It leaks memory after some time. I've seen it leaking more than 700MB of memory and my Windows swapped like hell. I was forced to close it from taskmgr.

But well I'm so lucky that I'm using XP, it has never ever crashed my machine. Every time I spot it leaking memory I can manage to force-close it and continue with the autosave.

[Sylock]

My OS is Windows ME.

I do have the latest drivers both from nVidia and MCI (the graphics card manufacturer).

Could be a memory leak. I have 512 MB or RAM though so it should happen within 1/2 second from dropping me into the game.

Thanks for the help/suggestions. Anything else you can think of?

[Auslander]

Originally posted by Sylock
My OS is Windows ME.

That explains it. I wouldn't set my dog up on WinME. Windows ME has more memory loss than Bill Clinton testifying at a Grand Jury.

I used WinME daily on my machine at work. Leaving Outlook open, want to know if I get new mail, for more than a two hours would cause the entire OS to hang. I know I read somewhere that WinME has a known unpatched memory leak.

[francium]

Well every 16-bit Windows descendents have that problem. And don't forget you have only 100% of 'resources' (which is actually fixed within 2.5MB RAM) to be LEAKED

[francium]

But I do observe a serious memory leak bug in Civ III, it eats my memory up quickly when it happens (at a rate of some 50MB/min, I can see the graph running up rapidly in taskmgr). It happens when the game is up for a long time, say , about 6 hours or so.