Age of Empire 3 Freezing

I have Age of Empire 3, the game starts up fine and I can get into a game, but the it will freeze within 5 mins of playing. I tried installing the patch and have made sure my graphics card drivers are updated. I get no error message, the game just stops working, although i can still hear the music. Any help you can give is appreciated!!

I am running Windows 7 Professional 64-bit with and Intel i7 processor @ 2.80GHz and 4.00GB of RAM.

 

http://support.microsoft.com/gp/cp_aoeiii_master#tab0

http://download.cnet.com/Everest-Ultimate-Edition/3000-2086_4-10499291.html is a 30 day trial set it up to check ALL sensors every one it wil let you check you are looking for temperature anomolies

i like http://majorgeeks.com/Game_Fire_d6576.html is a beta though needs setting up not just running

start type dxdiag enter check all ok and reports no problems found

make sure you have defragged especially the game file

re check in event viewer you will get errors detected in there

 

I believe I've solved my issue on why my game is freezing after the first 10 minutes. I just played a 73 minute game with no issues whatsoever on LAN with two friends.

In Windows Task Manager, you can set how many "processors" that each process uses.

1) To do this, go into Windows Task Manager (either hit CTRL+ALT+DEL, or right-click on your Taskbar and choose Windows Task Manager).

2) Find the process named "age3.exe" and right-click on it. Choose "Set Affinity." This will allow you to choose what "processors" you want the game to use.

3) Uncheck "<All Processors>" and recheck any one of the processors listed. I used "CPU 0" since it is considered the "first" CPU in the series.

This solved my issue since the game was trying to run all 8 processors (Intel CPU, 4 cores with hyperthreading = 8 logical processors). Note: you will be REQUIRED to do this EVERY TIME you plan to run AOE3, as it does not set the processor affinity permanently.

Thanks for the help, and I hope this fix will help anybody else who is having the same problem.

 

detailed method for me,I met the same problem