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unmerged(1047)

Commander, US Pacific Fleet
Feb 21, 2001
5.167
1
I've been running EU2 with the NA 1.04 update on a brand-new emachines T4160 (it's a P4/1600 with 256 RAM, etc; I bought it four days ago.) under windows XP, with no other programs running.

Problem: every so often (say about every 45-60 minutes) the screen flickers to black and then back to the game (accompanied by a loud pair of clicks, as if I'd turned the monitor off and back on), and sometimes (probably about 1 out of 4) Europa CTD's at the same time. I haven't noticed any pattern as to in-game actions at the time. (This has also not happened to me playing any other game.) It also ALWAYS does this flicker when going from the startup video to the static 'loading' screen (the one with the four faces on it).

I have also had a few random CTD's without the monitor flicker... the most recent was in about 1461, I was playing England... had given up all the continental provinces except Normandie, and diplo-vassaled Eire and Scotland. Tried to diplo-annex Scotland (for about the fifth attempt) and it CTD'd just as I hit the button in the 'they refused' box. It has also happened when I was moving troops, etcetera.
 
What video card and driver? Try for newer driver versions.
 
It's a 32 meg AGP3D video card, with an NVDIA driver. I don't know where to look for new drivers, but the ones I have can't be that old... I just bought the machine, brand new, last weekend.
 
>I don't know where to look for new drivers,

I'm going to take a wild guess and say www.nvidia.com ? You might also look at refresh rate settings in your existing driver.
 
I had black screen flickering problems on win2k. They seem to happen on graphics updates on the desktop screen

Try two things:
A)
Shut down the explorer.exe from the taskmanagers PROCESS screen. After this your desktop will vanish, but you can start EU2 via the run-Commando of the Taskmanager. This helps me in all cases of black flickering screens in EU on win2k. In order to restore your desktop just choose 'run' in taskmanager and type in explorer.exe... (Taskamnager can always be started with ctrl-alt-del, at least on win2k)

2) I often experienced problems with network card and games. To test this just do temporary disabel those network connections.

Maybe one of it works for you...