Computer game keeps crashing to desktop - Help!

cdfreelancer

cdfreelancer

New Member
I'm quite a fan of Rome: Total War and about 5% of the time when I try to save the game (quicksave or proper save) it crashes to desktop. This also happens (again, about 5% of the time) when I click the hourglass icon to end my go.

I have no idea what's causing this. I've reinstalled the game about a million times now and have followed the correct procedure each time (deleted relevant registry keys after uninstalling and deleting activision folder etc).

This is becoming really infuriating now because it often happens when I try to save the game after a really close battle. This means that I have to fight the battle all over again!

Any help would be greatly appreciated!
 
Are you using onboard or a pci slot card for sound? Yes sound not video. The rush to update video drivers never seems to get results. Have you seen that before? Surprisingly the description is very common. Video cards with ATI chips on them and the Catalyst Control Center often see crashes to the desktop due to the vpu recovery feature for troubleshooting. That prevents the system from locking up totally.

With the Catalyst Control Center disabled in the startup group when using the msconfig utility plus exiting any antivirus programs you more likely will see at least some improvement. Antivirus programs are noted for causing problems with pc games when they are left running in the background. In addition to that the latest Catalyst is too new for that model card. I ran the 9550 that also has the 9600 chip on it.
 
PC eye said:
Are you using onboard or a pci slot card for sound?
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It's onboard. It's an SiS 7012 wave. I suspect this is what may be causing the problem because sounds are played both when I try to save the game and when I end my move. These are the occasions when the game crashes.

PC eye said:
Video cards with ATI chips on them and the Catalyst Control Center often see crashes to the desktop due to the vpu recovery feature for troubleshooting. That prevents the system from locking up totally.
Click to expand...
Should I disable VPU recover?

PC eye said:
With the Catalyst Control Center disabled in the startup group when using the msconfig utility plus exiting any antivirus programs you more likely will see at least some improvement. Antivirus programs are noted for causing problems with pc games when they are left running in the background.
Click to expand...
I have tried to disable my antivirus and firewall (both McAfee) by exiting and then using the task manager to shut down any lingering processes but they start up again sometimes all by themselves.
 
i played this game for hours on end with a 9600 Pro 128 Mb card never had any issues...have you patched the game to 1.2 at least? i never even got the 1.5 patch so im assuming its really not important as far as bug and stability fixes go...also you should work on upgrading your pc a bit medieval 2 total war will be out in november ;)
 
oh yea...what ddrivers are you using for your video card? i always ran the omega drivers for my 9600 Pro this helps with performance alot as well
 
Maddhatter said:
i played this game for hours on end with a 9600 Pro 128 Mb card never had any issues...have you patched the game to 1.2 at least? i never even got the 1.5 patch so im assuming its really not important as far as bug and stability fixes go...
Click to expand...
The game worked fine when I bought it 2 years ago. It's only recently I've been getting this problem. I have the barbarian invasion expansion pack patched to 1.6. However, I get the same problem with the 1.2 patch and even the RTR mod.

Maddhatter said:
also you should work on upgrading your pc a bit medieval 2 total war will be out in november ;)
Click to expand...
Tell me about it! My PC should run the game okay but not very well. I'm planning on upgrading before Christmas to a 3.5-4GHz CPU and getting a new mobo. Have you seen the trailers? Should be a corker! :D

Maddhatter said:
oh yea...what ddrivers are you using for your video card? i always ran the omega drivers for my 9600 Pro this helps with performance alot as well
Click to expand...
I have no idea! All I know is that I updated the drivers from the ATI website a few months ago. This updated the catalyst control centre.
 
Your not using a game crack with this are you? As I know that using the incorrect version crack to the version of the game often causes this problem.
 
actually i see nothing wrong with using the no cd cracks as long as you bought the game this saves you from having to swap discs alot and makes it run faster not having to read from the cd
 
You won't worry about disabling the vpu recovery. By using the msconfig utility you reduce the number of things that start up at the same time as Windows. One of the reasons for seeing items reload is that they are not necessarily fully disabled by the task manager. There you only stop individual processes and not the entire program.

With the msconfig utility you can move from the startup group to the services and check the "hide all Microsoft services" option and proceed to disable the services for McAfee and any others seen. You wouldn't disable the MS services needed for Windows to run by choosing the hide option. When using this by typing msconfig at the Run prompt off of the Start menu you would restart the system when exiting to put changes into effect.
 
I updated my sound drivers and I also make sure that all unnecessary processes including my firewall are shut down and it seems to have (almost) done the trick. I've had one CTD where ordinarily I would have had 20 or so. Still slightly annoying to have crashed at all though...
 
Well that's still a big improvement seen there. You can run into a few occasional game crashes with just about any game that places a good load on video and sound by grabbing memory or going after reserved memory addresses. If the game manufacturer doesn't have a patch available you can try a few different combination of settings in the game itself to see if that helps there. Using the Dxdiag utility sometimes is a great help bu lowering the sound acceleration there. Or you could try lowering the graphics acceleration one or two settings to see if that works.
 
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