Please help!! Much appreciated

Hello Im new to Planetary Annihilation and Ive played a few full games( three so far) . The game will run smoothly when just idling at start screen but when I join a room then thats why I get the problems. It allows me to join but shortly after a windows box pops up and says "pa.exe" stopped running. Another error pops up behind but it will not let me see it. I attacked my dx.diag . I updated all my video drivers and direct x drivers also. In the 3 games I did play it was alot of fun . Currently I have windows vista service pack 2 with a instell duo core E8400 processor 2.99 GHZ with 4 mb of ram. My video card is a GTS 450 with update 331.65 Thanks Greg

You may be joining games with too many planets, with 4GB of RAM there would be alot of systems that will use more RAM than that and cause it to crash.

haha, i have made this typo many times too

can you please post your PA log file it will help too

C:\Users\"YourUserName"\AppData\Local\Uber Entertainment\Planetary Annihilation\log\PA-00-00-00.000.txt
"Click sort by date so the most recent one is at the top, And post that one here."

Also is your Vista 32bit or 64bit ?

I tried making a AI game with me vs the computer with a scale 3 planet. I finally just got the error message and was able to write it down.

Runtime Error!

program:...m/steamapps\common\planetaryannihilation\bin_x86\pa.exe

I have the 32 bit windows vista but I saw that it met the requirements

32 bit can effectively use only 3 GB of ram, so you're basically playing with 3GB of ram. Upgrade to windows 7/8 64 bit and get more ram. You can't survive with less than 6 GB these days.

it may be a ram issue. not because you dont have enough but because your using a 32bit system
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/236549-44-what-vista

i will get some other peoples advice
I will also try and find a good solution to see if we can get you back into playing
My best solution would be be rid of vista .. lol *jokes* but honestly vista is very resource hungry so it may be eating up vital resources PA needs causing the crash, that coupled with 32bit os's bad ram support for anything 4gb and over

I might have to buy a new computer but I dont know if i can afford it now. I have the dell XPS 420 which I think the most ram it can handle is 4gb so i cant add more. I really appreciate these fast replys since Im not that computer savy. How can I find the pa file which you guys asked for above?

Unfortunately current version of PA cannot properly works with 2GB RAM limitation which you have on 32-bit system. You can check this workaround:
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/crashing-on-32-bit-windows-heres-a-guide-to-help.51990/
It's will let PA use about 3GB RAM, so it's should crash less often.

also stuart98 is correct, your onboard video card would be using a portion of your 4gb leaving you with 3gb
your DxDiag says 3.3 gb left after your Vidcard steals its share

Your computer is fine , just the OS holding you back

you can find the log file by going to C:\Users\"YourUserName"\AppData\Local\Uber Entertainment\Planetary Annihilation\log\

So what operating system should I upgrade too. Any places that sell them for a fairly good price? Thanks for the replies when I get up and running we will have to get a team battle going.

To get your log file

do this (goto link to find out how to unhide hidden folders)
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-au/windows/show-hidden-files#show-hidden-files=windows-vista

to get pa logfile
goto " c: " drive
go into the "Users" folder
then go into "your username" folder
the go into "AppData"
then "UberEntertainment"
then "Planetary Annihilation"
then finally into the folder called "Logs" or "Log"
then post as many of those PA-00-00-00.000.txt as attachment as you want i'll look em over

Win 7 or 8 - 64bit

Most computer retailers have Upgrade options for just upgrading to new OS. some even perform the upgrade too.
(backup everything important to external disk/memory stick as it will be deleted during upgrade)
Here in Australia it cost's about $60 to upgrade to Window 7 or 8

Ok I ran the upgrade utility and It says my computer can handle Windows 7 32 bit. Is this even worth it cause I read that windows 7 can only handle 4gb of ram. So is it even worth it.

You cannot upgrade to 64-bit OS using any upgrade utility. You need to make clean reinstall of your system. As long as I know license key of Windows work for both 32-bit and 64-bit versions, so you shouldn't buy it twice.

Also your hardware is capable to run 64-bit OS, so nothing you should care about, but not forget to backup all important data before install anything.