Uru: Ages Beyond Frustration

I'm having difficulties playing Uru. It occasionally just plain freezes, and the computer restarts on its own about 30 seconds later.

My video card is a NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600

I am currently running Windows XP. It still freezes without other programs running. It's a fast computer, with plenty of space and memory.

The error message that pops up when I restart my computer says "the display driver for NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 (Compaq) seems to be responsible for the system instability."

Can anyone tell me how to fix this problem (updating drivers, etc.)?

Try a different version of the drivers. If you're using the drivers that originally came with the Compaq computer, they may need updating.

Forgive me, but I'm pretty inept when it comes to the technical aspect of computers. Where do I go, or how to I update my drivers to a more recent version?

If the computer and the card came from Gateway, first look at the Gateway site. If they don't have newer drivers, check out www.nvidia.com for generic Nvidia drivers.

Ok, I updated my graphics driver. Now instead of crashing, it freezes for 10-15 seconds and resumes. It is doing this all the time now, like every few moments. It is making it impossible to play this game. Any advice?

How fast is the processor on the computer?
How much RAM (memory) does it have?

I'm just asking because those symptoms might be caused by playing on an underpowered computer (underpowered for Uru anyway, not for other adventure games).

1.79 GHz
1.00 GB of RAM

That should be plenty.

The only thing I can think of is if your paging file (cache) is too small. If that's not the problem, then I have no idea.

Anyone else out there have any ideas?

I think it might be a video problem. Sometimes after it lags for 10-15 seconds, the video blurs together (polygons are everywhere, and certain objects like the moving character are in doubles across the screen). I updated my video driver at the nvidia website. Maybe this isn't the right one?

Have you checked the options settings in the Uru game itself? Maybe there is some option that your card isn't handling correctly. Uru apparently uses DirectX 9, though it says DirectX 8.1 on the box.

You might try different drivers. You probably got the latest ones, which are 53.03. But maybe the 45.23 or 44.03 drivers would work better. Some people have reported having better results using drivers that aren't the absolute latest ones. There should be a link for "driver archive" on the driver page at Nvidia.com.