I am running Windows XP, and for some reason I can't play Wizardry 8 for more than say 10 minutes at a time before the game crashes. Most of the time the game simply shuts down, I will be playing and suddenly the desktop appears and the game window closes. However, some times it causes the computer (a laptop) to completely shut down; when it starts back up it announces that my system has recovered from a serious error caused by a driver, but it can't figure out what driver it is.

Does anyone know what is wrong here, or how to fix it? I am not using any patches (I like pickpocketing, haha). Otherwise my computer works fine, it is just when Wizardry 8 is running that it messes up.

Wolfpack,

How much memory do you have in your system? I play on a system with 256MB RAM and one with 512MB RAM. The 512MB RAM (Windows 2000) never crashes. The 256MB (Windows XP Home) crashes after substantial playing time. I've read elsewhere that Wiz8 has a serious memory leak and what you (and I) are seeing supports that. My advice - and I hope others chime in - is to get more RAM.

Not 100% sure, but really only two drivers are involved, the sound card and video card drivers. I would check the vendor's sites for what the newest drivers are, see if yours are old at all, and upgrade them if so.

I'm using XP home on a pc with 512 MB Ram.
The unpatched version crashed sometimes (me thinks it was related to number of save/load), but i had very very few crashes with the patched version.
No driver changes.

So you choice seems to be: either pickpocketing, or no crashes.

I bought mine with Patch 1 written in on the CD; not crashing and PP!
Maybe you can try the various patches to see if any others work, i don't think they "fixed" (as in what you do to a pet) PP until the most recent but one.