nickfindley

Found it. It was this lot that was making a mess. I installed it, then built a new city that contained it, then ran the game and freaked out. No moving/deleting/tweaking of plugins in between. Just some unfortunate effects when I adjusted global health and education funding.

I'm not sure it's the Phantom Slider as I've seen described here. Here's what happens: The budget for everything looks normal for a month or two, then suddenly one random educational building will suddenly have a budget of about $2 billion. Moving the slider a little bit gets it back to normal funding, but then all of the other health and education buildings will get set to $0. And then a few days later I get run out of the city with $92 billion in expenses showing up in the budget. The buildings that are getting the surprise $2 billion are mods that I've used for years with no issue, although I am using a couple of new educational buildings that may have done something weird. But they're never getting the crazy budget increase. So is this Phantom Slider or some other thing that I have to isolate?

I've been playing on a G4 Mac that's about eight years old now. Not ideal. I'm thinking about buying a Windows laptop that would pretty much only be used for SC4 and as a portable DVD player, but I haven't shopped for a PC in ten years. So what should I be looking for? Does the game run well on Windows 7 or should I look for a gently used XP machine? What kind of processor should I get -- Intel or AMD? I don't know what's what as far as that goes anymore. And is there a point of diminishing returns? A sweet spot in the middle where any additional processing power will just be overkill? I've read anything over 4GB of RAM won't be used by the game. True? Anything else I need to be looking out for? I'm just trying to run the game smoothly, and hopefully for around $400. Thanks in advance for your advice!