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CivIV problems

The CatThe Cat Registered User, ClubPA regular
edited October 2007 in Help / Advice Forum
Ok, so a while back I installed CivIV on my crappy acer 3620 and played away with no problems for ages on the lowest graphics settings. All was well and it kept me sane during the three months i didn't have home internet. less of a while back, i uninstalled it in order to play some other games. Upon recently re-installing, it no longer runs well, for no reason I can figure. It starts out fine, but as I play it gets slower and choppier until the mouse starts to flicker. It stays pretty much frozen for a few minutes before snapping out of it and acting fine for a while. This cycle continues. The game never actually crashes as such, it just becomes unplayable for like 2 minutes out of every ten. Anyone got any idea what the hell this is? I've deleted all the shit off the hard drive, I've defragged, I've cleaned the registry, I've fooled with the memory-hogging settings in CivIV's ini file, and nothing's done a damn thing. i r so confused...

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The Cat on

Posts

  • theSquidtheSquid Sydney, AustraliaRegistered User regular
    edited October 2007
    Quick question: Updated to latest version? I think the original had numerous memory leaks.

    theSquid on
  • bsjezzbsjezz Registered User regular
    edited October 2007
    did you install a new expansion? pretty much the same thing happened to my copy after i installed warlords, even though i switched back to playing through the normal cd / .exe. i figured warlords was the issue. otherwise, did you get a new patch when you did the re-install? patch might have upped the memory usage to be compatible with the expansions or something.

    p.s. isabella rocks

    bsjezz on
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  • The CatThe Cat Registered User, ClubPA regular
    edited October 2007
    no expansions, it was originally patched to 1.52, reinstalled and patched to 1.61 after this started to see if it would help. nope :(

    The Cat on
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  • theSquidtheSquid Sydney, AustraliaRegistered User regular
    edited October 2007
    Are you sure it's Civ4 taking up all the resources? Can you bring up the Task Manager mid-game and see if it's something else? I know at some point my anti-virus decided it would scan my computer EVERY TIME it booted up.

    theSquid on
  • The CatThe Cat Registered User, ClubPA regular
    edited October 2007
    Yeah, I've checked everything. Nothing out of the ordinary, and I can't do things like run other programs at the same time because I already know I don't have the system resources. It just seems to be using a shitload more memory than it used to.

    The Cat on
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  • FellhandFellhand Registered User regular
    edited October 2007
    What is your virtual memory set at and did you do an adware/spyware scan?

    Fellhand on
  • The CatThe Cat Registered User, ClubPA regular
    edited October 2007
    VM's at about a gig, and I scan regularly. I even tried downing the display settings to 16 bit just now and nothing changed...

    The Cat on
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  • FellhandFellhand Registered User regular
    edited October 2007
    Hm. You're using an Acer Aspire 3620 right? Like 1.8Ghz, 512mb, and XP?

    I would try to uninstall the game, do a system restore to a date that it did work, and then reinstall.

    Fellhand on
  • The CatThe Cat Registered User, ClubPA regular
    edited October 2007
    Yeah, think I might be stuck with that. I've never done one before though. I'm going to lose some stuff, right?

    The Cat on
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  • FellhandFellhand Registered User regular
    edited October 2007
    The Cat wrote: »
    Yeah, think I might be stuck with that. I've never done one before though. I'm going to lose some stuff, right?

    It only restores your system files to an earlier date (I think). It doesn't affect items like My Documents and such (I know). I wouldn't go back too far, just to a point where you knew it was working.

    Fellhand on
  • LucidLucid Registered User regular
    edited October 2007
    At what point in your games do you usually have problems? Also, what size of world do you use?

    If you're using the larger world settings, and have quite a few comp opponents, the game gets really laggy(to almost frozen) in later parts of the game.

    Sounds like it is more likely something else though.

    Lucid on
  • dispatch.odispatch.o Registered User regular
    edited October 2007
    Well, I think with CivIV you could do a cd-less install or a full install, right?

    Whichever one you did, do the other and try again. I know that some drives had problem with one of the Civ games, and that disabling the cd-audio was the way to "fix" it. Though I do think it was remedied entirely in a later patch.

    dispatch.o on
  • The CatThe Cat Registered User, ClubPA regular
    edited October 2007
    Yeah, I looked at system restore, and none of the points I have go back further than a couple on months, which really isn't far enough to make it worth it. I finally switched off freeramXPpro and realised that that was basically the only thing stopping the program from breaking entirely - the periodic hangs are when it does its ram-freeing thing.

    The problem is right from the start, even in the small world sizes (I've never been able to play through on any map larger than whichever one has 5 civs - 'small'?). Just seems like the RAM isn't being managed properly, and there's no dang reason for it, it was fine before raaar >_< Oh, and it is a CD-less install, damn if I'm leaving the cd in the drive constantly, that's no good in a laptop.

    The Cat on
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