Erratic Game Play and Crashes w RON

[corton]

I've had periodic trouble with the Rise of Nations Game. Play will freeze and restart several time and eventially the computer will crash. Error message is: "The device driver got stuch in an infinite loop...the problem seems to be caused by the following file nv4_disp"

Also ***STOP:0X000000EA (0X85A75020, 0X86899D40, 0XF78DACB4, 0X00000001)

Followed by a physical memory dump. Microsoft Online help suggests updating the drivers, which didn't help. The work around suggests eliminating graphic acceleration, which does not allow the game to play at all. Technical phone support from Microsoft was also ineffective and very time consuming.

My system is a Dell 8200
CPU: Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.4 GHz
RAM: 1 GB
Motherboard: Don't know?
Graphics Card: NVIDEA GeForce 4 Ti 4600
Graphics Card Driver: NVIDEA 10/29/04 version 6.6.9.3
Sound Card: SB Live! Wave Device
Microsoft Service pack 2

This is a great game, but this problem is making it impossible to play. Anybody else have this problem? Any suggestions would be appreciated?

[corton]

Boy, starting a new thread is a great idea...80 views and 0 replies in only a month!

I think my problem is video card over heating. I cleaned some dust out of the inside of the case--including off the fan on the video card and the game ran longer before crashing. Any comments? I'll check back in a month or two.

[Hangnaround]

I wish I could figure out my problem. I was able to play RON - T&P without too much problem. The worst I would get is an infrequent lock up every couple of weeks. After the latest set of MS patches the game locked up every hour or so. I removed the game from the machine and reloaded it without a positive effect - in fact it now freezes on the main menu without me doing anything. I can't even check for the update.

Any advice would be appreciated.

[corton]

I'm no expert, but if the game worked for awhile before you began to notice problems, and if the problems seemed to occur after about five minutes or so, check for dust inside the case. I blew a large amount of dust off the fan and heat sink on the video card a few weeks ago and have experienced no problems since.

Mind you this was after many many hours of diagonostic help with technicians who had me installing drivers and practically every conceivable software fix in the book.

Good luck.