Annoying crash during campaign

[Caspian237]

Hello I've been experiencing game crash and computer lock up during my Empire total War campaigns. Usually this happens on the actual campaign map but has occasionally occured during battles. Suddenly the picture freezes and the sound stops except for a high pitched tone through the speakers. A complete restart of the computer is then required.

I have considered that this may be overheating or some other hardware overload but I have experimented with all the settings (sound and graphic) from the lowest to the highest and it seems to make no difference at all. In fact the crashes seem to make no sense at all. For instance sometimes I open up the diplomacy or government screen and BAM, there you go.

The other odd thing is that this doesn't start happening until well into to campaign. Recently it started doing it during my British campaign. It became a pest so I reinstalled the game and started a fresh campaign. Everything was going fine but after about 50 campaign turns it started happening again out of the blue, despite the fact that I had been playing the game quite happily on my full screen resolution at utra settings for many hours (over several days of course.)

Does this pattern seem familiar to anyone and have you managed to get around it? As you can see from my computer components, it is hardly a new power machine but it certainly shouldn't be experiencing hardware problems on the lower settings.

Thanks

PSU - Athlon X2 4800
RAM- 3Gb DDR
GPU- ATI HD 4670 1Gb
Monitor Native Res 1920 x 1050
Windows XP

[irishron]

Have you tried MadBoris' Out of Memory Workaround stickied at the top of this forum?

[Caspian237]

No I haven't tried that yet. Does the problem I am describing seem symptomatic of these sort of memory problems? Certainly I will give it a go. Thanks.

[irishron]

It acts like memory to me. The deeper you get into a campaign, the more memory you need.