Game completely freezes up and have to restart the power to the computer

**Schwarzenegger** · April 21, 2011, 12:11 PM

Every now and then my game will completely freeze up and my computer will be completely unresponsive and a very loud static/grinding sound will continuously come out of my speakers and I have to press the power button on my tower to be able to restart my PC.

From my recollection, it has been happening when selecting settlements. I'm going to also add that it seems to be happening when selecting castles, not that I'm ruling out cities entirely but of the times that I actually visually remember the crashes, they were castles.
There doesn't seem to be any precursor to it, and no (as far as I can tell) similarities or conditions other than being settlements (castles). It can happen on the first turn of a playing session or after a few hours of playing, completely unpredictable.
I've reduced all of the graphics settings to low or medium or even off.

Unfortunately, my log is empty, which I think may be due to the fact that I read something about adding some line to remove cache or something like that to help with stability.

I'm on XP SP3
Gold Edition of Medieval (no patches or updates downloaded after install)
SS 6.4 with Early campaign, BG disabled ,RR enabled, permanent watchtowers and the third AI in the install menu (don't remember the name off the top of my head)
DirectX is at the latest version of 9.0c
All resolutions set to 1680 x 1050
Video card is Radeon HD 4850, I'm not going to try updating the driver because ATI's driver updates are VERY buggy.
I have Realtek HD Audio from my intergrated sound adapter, which I just updated before posting this but I may have to revert after restarting because I remember the last time I tried updating I didn't have anymore sound. (I updated the driver but it doesn't work at all- that's another issue, though)

Every now and then I also get one of the "unexpected error" CTD's but those are less frequent less annoying because it doesn't freeze the whole computer, and mostly seem to happen when I'm on or loading the battle map, so it seems to be a different issue altogether.

A possible contributor might be the fact that I installed the faster turns, which seems to either not have installed properly or not be compatible with 6.4 because my turns are going painfully slow and when I try to run SS_setup it tells me "There seems to be an error with:Faster_Turn_Times_3.0.txt"

Any help would be appreciated, thanks!

Edit-
Reinstalled SS, but forgot to delete the SS folder after uninstalling. DOes it matter that much?

It happened again, this time it happened after a battle as soon as I pressed "execute" AFAIK this is the first time not in a settlement window.

I have some stuff in my log now, here it is.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

**Gorrrrrn** · April 22, 2011, 05:23 AM

You can try updating the catalyst drivers to v11.2 - have it on my system with a HD4850 and it works fine.

(Don't know if that will solve the problem though.)

beyond that it could be any of a variety of things: hardware overheating, hard drive problems, driver problems, installation issues etc.

How much RAM do you have? (might be memory related?)
And main processor?

**Schwarzenegger** · April 25, 2011, 07:11 AM

Originally Posted by Rozanov

You can try updating the catalyst drivers to v11.2 - have it on my system with a HD4850 and it works fine.

(Don't know if that will solve the problem though.)

beyond that it could be any of a variety of things: hardware overheating, hard drive problems, driver problems, installation issues etc.

How much RAM do you have? (might be memory related?)
And main processor?

Well, the last time it crashed I decided to open up my tower and I felt around and even though I don't know if things were excessively hot, they wre pretty hot. I also noticed one of the cables was touching the video card fan so that might have prevented it from spinning properly.

I've got a P4 3.0 Ghz and "properties" sayss I have 2.75GB of RAM. I have 4 gigs installed, though, I think that it's lower due to the page file size.

Interestingly, it hasn't been happening much, if at all, lately. I'm going to say that it was after moving one of the cables taht was touching the fan.

Hopefully this won't be an issue anymore

**bɑne** · April 25, 2011, 07:46 AM

Originally Posted by Schwarzenegger

I've got a P4 3.0 Ghz and "properties" sayss I have 2.75GB of RAM. I have 4 gigs installed, though, I think that it's lower due to the page file size.

Not following you there - if you have 4GB of physical RAM then this should be the amount displayed.
Some might be used for a onboard card but if you had one active then you wouldn't be able to run M2TW very well.

**Schwarzenegger** · April 25, 2011, 11:29 AM

Originally Posted by bane_tw

Not following you there - if you have 4GB of physical RAM then this should be the amount displayed.
Some might be used for a onboard card but if you had one active then you wouldn't be able to run M2TW very well.

I'm sorry, that's what I get for making a post while half asleep.

What I should have said was that since I'm running 32-bit XP, I'm limited to a maximum of 4GB RAM, with more or less being actually available due to it being used or limited by hardware.
If that doesn't make perfect sense, which it probably doesn't since I'm still partially asleep, this post here xplains it better (no I'm not the one posting about it, I just googled)

http://forums.techarena.in/windows-x...rt/1084067.htm

All 32-bit client versions of Windows (not just Vista/XP) have a 4GB
address space. That's the theoretical upper limit beyond which you can
not go.

But you can't use the entire 4GB of address space. Even though you
have a 4GB address space, you can only use *around* 3.1GB of RAM.
That's because some of that space is used by hardware and is not
available to the operating system and applications. The amount you can
use varies, depending on what hardware you have installed, but can
range from as little as 2GB to as much as 3.5GB. It's usually around
3.1GB.

Note that the hardware is using the address *space*, not the actual
RAM itself. The rest of the RAM goes unused because there is no
address space to map it too.

**bɑne** · April 26, 2011, 12:38 AM

Originally Posted by Schwarzenegger

I'm sorry, that's what I get for making a post while half asleep.

What I should have said was that since I'm running 32-bit XP

Ok that explains it

No idea why I assumed a Vista/7 System

**Ichon** · April 22, 2011, 04:15 PM

Sounds GPU related to me... either drivers or your settings are too high for the card you have. Although a grinding noise could be hard drive... if its from your spears and not your tower its probably driver related though.