Civilization and Windows

Civilization and Windows 

I'm a big fan of the game "Civilization", and I've been eagerly awaiting version 7 of the game. Then I discovered that they'd released upgrades to Civ 6; "Rise and Fall" and "Gathering Storm", and everyone playing Civ seemed to be using them. So I went on to Steam and bought a bundle of all the upgrades, costing £50, and installed these on my games machine.

Very soon. I found that it was crashing frequently at a late stage in the game. It got so bad that it was crashing every few minutes. A bit of thought and some research, led me to think that the problem was insufficient memory. I was running Windows 7 on a Dell Inspirion with 8gb of memory, and the computer memory couldn't be increased.

So I had to use a different computer - an HP xw6600 with 32 gb of memory (and that's the most you can put in) with an Nvidia Geforce GT1030 video card and a 3840 by 2160 monitor. That was currently running linux, both Fedora and Ubuntu.

First I tried running Steam and Civ under linux. That was a complete disaster. Clearly, I needed Windows. Sadly. So I installed Windows 7 on the HP. But when I tried to run Civ, it wouldn't run, complaining that the graphics card driver wasn't up to the job. I tried looking for an updated driver, but no luck.

So I downloaded Windows 10, but that came in at 5.5gb, too much for a DVD. I tried putting it on a USB and installing from that, but I couldn't make that work; it wouldn't read from the USB. I put quite a lot of effort into trying various things, but I couldn't get it on.

There is no  Windows 9, so I went to Windows 8.1. That's only 4.2 gb, so fits on a DVD, and I was able to install that. And then I went back to steam, logged on and accessed Civ 6 (plus upgrades). That downloaded 10 gb of files to the HP, and when I tried to run Civ it worked!

But then I found that at the full 3840 by 2160 resolution, the screen kept blanking, so I reduced the resolution to the next value, and that seems to work.

Running Civ 6 takes 5gb of memory, and that plus all the other stuff in memory comes to 7.6 gb; since I've got 32gb, there's plenty of headroom.

So I'm back in business!