IWD keeps crashing in Vista - any advice?

[reprobate163]

Hi,

I'm playing Icewind Dale with HOW and TOL, fully patched, on a Vista laptop with (so it tells me) a Mobile Intel 4 Series Chipset Family graphics card. It worked fine for the first few chapters, but I've found that on the lower levels of the dungeons, starting with the snake-shaped portion of Dragon's Eye, the game becomes extremely unstable and frequently crashes - makes a 'bong' noise and goes straight to black screen, no error message, nothing. I just about managed to grit it out until the lower levels of Dorn's Deep; combat with the Neo Orog marauders past the prison cells always caused a crash, and from the second part of the Hall of Heroes section, the game crashed in similar fashion when I was trying to take out Terikan. After I finally did succeed and moved out onto the glacier, it keeps crashing when in combat with the Greater Ice Trolls. Combat and opening doors seem to be a particular problem, with the game frequently hanging just at the point where I select a hostile target or attempt to open a door.

I have tried pretty much everything described on the web; the game is running in Windows 2000 compatibility mode, as administrator; I've also tried adjusting the resolution on the game and on the machine itself so they match, but I'm out of ideas. I tried installing the specialist UK patch, even though mine isn't a UK version, but that makes no difference. Any suggestions? It's incredibly frustrating because it means the game is essentially unplayable.

Cheers.

[dragon wench]

Welcome to Game Banshee Reprobate

Wish I could help you, but I'm not quite that tech savvy.. Hopefully others here can lend some assistance. If you don't receive any replies here, I'll move this thread to our Tech forum with a redirect.

About the only thing I can think of... are you able to upgrade to Windows 7? I noticed in the Baldur's Gate forum that 7 runs that game fine (same engine), so maybe it would also work for IWD?
Regardless, by all accounts Windows 7 is a much better OS, so something to consider anyway.

[reprobate163]

Thanks for the welcome!

Yeah, I've actually been seriously considering upgrading to Windows 7 anyway - I've had no end of annoying minor problems with Vista. The odd thing is that I have BG2 and played that on the same machine with no issues, so...?

[ultramarine]

try running it inside virtual pc 2007 running XP sp3