Starting over again from scratch ..

[Krakoa]

I'm planning on installing a new hard drive next week I'd like to install Horizons from scratch on the new drive, mainly because I have so many CTD's ( usually 4-5 in an evening).
At the moment the game is installed on an NTFS formatted drive and I am planning on installing it on a FAT32 formatted drive as I suspect a lot of the CTD issues may be in the speed that files are processed on a NTFS drive ( just my personal gut feeling)
One thing that I am not sure of is whether I am going to run into problems downloading the game and getting my current account running again.I do not have a game CD as Istarted this game from a 7 Day Account and no longer have the CD key provided when I started.
What would be the best way to get the gamereloaded from scratch?

[Jazzi-Dragon]

well lets see the game is only 10 bucks just go get it and problem sovled. i just bought it for 10 wednesday

[Varangaard]

I've been running on NTFS since my last systems upgrade, no problems here. Are you running ATI card with VIA chipset on mobo? It seems the latter especially can cause CTDs.

You can get back up to speed by redownloading the trial executable (you could burn it onto a cd or dvd), log in with your account information, and patch. The game is the same, it is just the account (trial/full) that matters.

[Jazzi-Dragon]

[^o)] yea theres that too [^o)]

[Krakoa]

Yes I am running an ATI card with VIA chipset. Do you know if there is a fix for this?

[Varangaard]

No idea of a fix, though it seems Asus boards especially suffer from problems with HZ (my uninformed observation only). I run with an ATI card with Abit mobo+Via chipset, no CTDs. A guildie Had an Asus mobo+Via, he suffered from random CTDs (sometimes very frequent, sometimes not even once in a day) until he jumped to Abit+Nforce.

[gopher65]

I run an Asus with an nvidia card and have no crash to desktops except for the occasional one every few months related to the game.

My parents have an ATI 9700 128megcard (I never checked their motherboard) and I had no problems with framerate, but I noticed some weird pauses at certain times. The game would kind of slow down like a matrix scene and then speed back up to normal. This happened every few minutes. I don't know if it was related to the graphics card or not.

[Krakoa]

My motherboard is a Gigabyte with VIA chipset. I know there was an update to the bios (version F5) to fix problems using the ATI Radeon 9600, but I've upgraded to the latest version F8 and also installed the latest VIA drivers and ATI drivers (Catlyst 5.3), but I still get CTD and lockups. They vary, sometimes happening only once a day, other times 2-3 per hour. I notice that it seems to change in frequeny when ever there is a new patch, some times it improves things, and then the next patch hits and things get bad again.

I've also tried swapping my memory but did not seem to help. I've noticed the Vulga tech support has improved quite a bit, so I'm going to put in a trouble ticket and see what happens.