rec.autos.simulators

    You need a more recent Radeon or GeForce card.  Onboard video is
notorious for having problems with games.

  Having said that, I think the game has some stability problems in its own
right.   The game tends to lockup on me.  I got a Soundblaster Audigy 2
about eight months ago, and I haven't played the game in a while ,so
recently it's been having this problem.

  Unfortunately, EA hasn't released a patch for this game to update
anything.  Many other people apparrently have got it running fine, though.

It's actually 9.0b or c(just out). That might get the game working but
onboard video leaves a lot to be desired to say the least.

Bill

   Yup, I wouldn't consider playing any kind of PC game with 3D graphics
with onboard video.  It's just asking for trouble.

    You need an ATI or NVidia card for this game.

  I finally got the game working with my Radeon X800, all I had to do was
use "smartgart", go in and disable AGP writes.  It works, doesn't seem to
affect performance at all.

This one looks to have an Athlon XP 3000+ CPU, which is still pretty
powerful (moreso than my 2600+ which runs most stuff very well) so you can
basically run as much video card as you can afford.  I haven't looked at the
video card wars lately, but you're looking at $200-$300 for the good to
very-good cards from either ATI or nVidia, the only cards to really
consider.  ATI makes their own cards, nVidia chips are used by other
manafacturers.  Something similar to what I use is an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro,
which is showing at Best Buy for $250, and would be a pretty good
price-to-performance choice.  Others would be able to tell you what a good
midrange nVidia card is these days.

You'll see several sub-$200 cards that will be "ok" for *** but will be
slower and / or have less features than the $200-$300 cards, and some that
are no better than your onboard video.  You'll also see $400-$500 cards that
aren't worth the premium unless you have to have the absolute fastest thing
available.  In 6 months those will be the $300 cards.  So you're probably
best off with one of the $200-300 cards.

KenB

Your milage obvioulsy may vary, but if you have a local 'puter shop, that
guy can sell you a decent card, and install it for a decent price, NO I dont
mean as cheaply as the cheapest internet price, but a fair price.  you know
they have to make a living.

good luck

To be safe, you should be using a powerstrip, with cord plugged into the
powerstrip, with the strip off, in 99% of powerstrips, the ground is not
interupted with the strip off.  My machines at home, one has a powerswitch
on the Powesupply (near where the cord goes into the back)...

Now this is also "usually" the case, but at work, doing my Dell 4300,
without a powerstrip that I didnt want to shut off, because of 4 other
computers on the same APC batt backup strip at the time...  Anyway, I havent
had a problem changing memory, drives, and network cards with the front
power-switch turned off.  I feel the biggest risk always is ESD or in
laymans english, Static Electricity Discharges!

Your Milage may vary.  Now my friends, I wont tell you that you wont risk
anything, For what it is worth, any Do It Yerself project has risks...  but
out of 100 pc's I have worked on, only 5 have had damage by the 'owner'
(other than trashing the OSyou know) and 4 were 100% due to (ESD), one was,
he didnt know you should shut it off 1st before removing stuff, LOL!

In the 4, Each of these happend due to the owners decided that taking the
box, laying it in the middle of the carpeted living room or bedroom, (not
plugged in) and attempting to remove or replace memory or modem, or vid
cards, or CPU or something other than Drives...  OH YES, BTW, they thougth
it was OK when they had gotten away with unplugging the boxes, and taking to
the kitchen, den or where-ever, to do a HD swap or CDROM or what not.

IMHO ESD on the motherboard while messing with memory, CPU,  or an expansion
card, your screwed IMH-Experience...  most drives, on the otherhand, unless
your careless and are touching the exposed circuitry on them, are pretty
hearty.