Thanks Schrullenhaft,
I was not aware there were many options so far as heatsinks are concerned, it’s one designed for the Athlon (up to 1GHz) just the normal arrangement of metallic fins (large) with a standard CPU fan whacked on top, as a precaution I have located a much larger secondary case fan a short distance away providing a boost to the airflow over the chip. Originally there was another fan located at the rear end of the case (behind the processor) drawing the air out, unfortunately that broke, not that it’s of much consequence CM was keen to crash even then!
Every one of my saved games is corrupted, although having said that I’m not sure there ever have been any saved games associated with other battles in the folder at the same time. CM is installed on drive C, the SCSI hard drive, although installing it on the IDE drive made little difference when I last tried it.
The AGP multiplier is set to 2X, I have changed this in the past, in fact, I think I did so after reading your advice on a similar posting.
I can find no reference to Sidebanding anywhere, what is it and where might it be?
I have just looked on Nvidia’s site for their drivers, however they look remarkably similar to the ones I tried before, the ones that resulted in the blank screen. Are there any others lurking elsewhere?
I’m not overly sure of the speed of my PCI bus although I would expect it to be at about 33Mhz, is there anyway to check it without looking at the jumper settings?
IBM doesn’t seem too keen on updating firmware, well for either of my drives anyway. I had a spate of updating firmware versions on most of my hardware a few months ago; at the same time I updated the BIOS on the Adaptec card, which is 2.57.2. I also believe that I currently have the default Windows drivers installed for this device, I have been using the Adaptec drivers in the past, but again they made little difference.
I used to use a PS/2 InteliMouse before upgrading to the USB one. I before that I used a serial one! Still nothing new, game crashed.
I investigated IRQ’s a while back, again following up a similar posting, and discovered the sound card to be sharing with the graphics card. I attempted to fix this by shuffling the cards around on the mainboard, removing devices etc. This I recall did absolutely nothing – they remained assigned to the same IRQ. I have just checked through Device Manager, and discovered quite a number of devices sharing the same IRQ – namely the graphics card, the sound card, the USB controller, the TV card and the SCSI card!? Not sure what’s going on there, I don’t think they were like that when I last checked – I’ve added bits since then!
I’m not the most technically minded person in the world, but surely there must be something consistent here causing the crash to occur. Why is it that whilst on some days I can play a scenario through to its conclusion without fault, yet on another day on the same scenario, I cannot get beyond the first turn? I know there is a high degree of variation during each game, but surely the mechanics of the game are the same or at least similar. Whatever the trigger to this fault is it is clearly something subtle enough not to occur every time, yet severe enough to total the system when it does…only a computer!