Game Freezes

[zmohner]

Hey guys. I have SS 4.5.0, and lately, it has been freezing pretty much every time I try to play as a capital ship. The game will be running fine, and I'll be in the middle of a battle, and it'll freeze; I have to hard restart my computer each time this happens, and it's pretty annoying. Any help would be much appreciated.

[Dragonlead]

Just out of curiosity, do you have an anti-virus program (like Norton) running in the background?

V/R

[zmohner]

[font="times new roman"]Yeah, I have McAfee in the background.[/font]

[zmohner]

Does anyone know how to fix this?

[Dragonlead]

Wish I did. I'm having this problem too, but I'm at a loss because it happens in other games as well. It virtually disappears when I turn off the auto-protect in Norton, but it still occassionally happens to me. I'm running an Nvidia GEForce 7600GS and I have the latest drivers installed, so I have no idea what's wrong.

V/R

[SF]

  You should never run an anti-virus program in the background while playing a game.  They consume resources and can interfere with game operations.  In general, you should try to keep background tasks to a minimum while playing any game to improve stability and performance.

[zmohner]

All right...I've tried eliminating all background applications, and it still freezes.  

[SF]

  It's most likely something to do with video  or other resource problems then.  If you're running the 'latest drivers', you might want to try rolling back to an older version that might be more stable.  If you're running an AGP at 8X speed, try 4X (not much of a performance reduction).  Check that fastwrites are off and your AGP aperture is set to 64 MB.  If your card is overclocked, return it to normal settings.  Run MSINFO32 and on the system summary screen, scroll down near the bottom and verify you have at least 256 MB available in the value listed next to 'Available Physical Memory' (512 MB or more is best for gaming, but you can usually run many games reliably with more than 256).  Run MSCONFIG, click on the startup tab, uncheck anything that isn't necessary (there will likely be quite a few programs on that list if you've had your computer for a while).  The goal is to improve your system's resources and reduce possible problems with video.