Which computer to use

Sirs,

I purchased Galactic Civlizations II (Gold edition) Sunday night (10/14/07) from Best Buy. I took it home and installed it on my one year old, with updated video drivers, HP workstation. It would run well for ten or so turns and then the screen would black. through tinkering, I could save the game and quit, but I had to restart. I could resume play again, but again after ten to fifteen turns, same thing. Oddly, it often seemed to happen whenever I first met a new alien race.
So, then I installed it on my three month old HP Pavilion Notebook PC, again with all updates. It does have Vista home. It would let me play perfectly for about five or six turns and then just freeze so that I had to use task manager to exit the program.
So this brings us to my questions. Perusing this site, I discern that it is difficult, once you register your serial number to do so again. I would prefer, I think, to register this product and use it on my laptop. (I would of course remove it from the desktop) But, I have a concern about Vista running this game, and again I have had trouble determining if the game runs in Vista.
So I am asking for advice, should I use the laptop, or the desktop for this game? I have not downloaded any updates. That is another question, does the Gold Edition come updated, or do I need to update from the website. I may be over-analyzing this, but I don't want to register the serial key for the laptop, and then find out that because of Vista it is not going to work and hassel with trying to re-register to use my desktop.
Any thoughts would be appreciated.

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Perusing this site, I discern that it is difficult, once you register your serial number to do so again

Well, registering your game is just linking your serial ID with your e-mail. It has nothing to do with the computer on which it runs. You just need to register the game only once.

That is another question, does the Gold Edition come updated, or do I need to update from the website

Updates have been mad on DA since Gold Edition has shipped. Updating it should remove some bugs. The easiest way to update the game is to install Stardock Central and update from it. But its requires that the computer is connected to the Internet.

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Cool. Then I will register at once.

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If the problems persist after updating:

Please open your debug.err file in notepad, and copy/paste the contents into a post here. This will give us some technical information that can help troubleshoot your problem. The location you'll find the debug.err in varies depending on your game version:

Dread Lords, all versions:
C:\Program Files\Stardock\Totalgaming\GalCiv2

Dark Avatar 1.5-1.6 (non-Vista):
C:\Program Files\Stardock\Totalgaming\GalCiv2\DarkAvatar

Dark Avatar 1.6+(Windows Vista), 1.7+(non-Vista):
My Documents\My Games\GC2DarkAvatar

Be sure to copy the debug immediately after the error occurs; if you start the game again, the debug will be erased and recreated for the new session.

At least for Vista machines, particularly ones with nVidia graphics, the issue is generally the drivers (the ones that come with Vista are buggy and cause the game to crash; that was fixed in 101.41 in March).

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