Sim City 4 is jumpy, eventually crashes

Hey all,
SimCity 4 has been giving me a weird problem lately. I'm absolutely sure my computer meets specifications:

Athlon 64 X2 4200
Geforce 7900 GT
2 GB RAM
Soundblaster Audigy 2 ZS


When I first start up the PC, and launch Simcity 4, the game runs great. Everything is as it should be. After about 10-15 minutes of play though, the game will "speed up" and becomes extremely jumpy. When I scroll to the right for example, it's normally a 'smooth' gradual process of moving the screen to the right. When it speeds up though, its a very rigid, jumpy, and breakneck process where you can't actually get much done because your overshooting. After about 5-10 minutes of this though, the game apparently has a heart attack and crashes to desktop.

Attempting to relaunch it has it immediately being jumpy again. The only way to get it to run normally is to either shutdown/restart the computer and play right away.

Any ideas what the problem could be?

Jam it back in, in the dark.

I don't know the exact solution to your problem but have you tried general things like latest game patches, latest sound/video drivers, defrag hard drive, etc. if those don't help try reinstalling the game. also does the stuttering occur on other games?

There's nowhere I can't reach.

I've done the standard stuff like patching and updating drivers. It's weird because the problem is limited to just SimCity. Other games such as Battlefield 2, EvE Online, and CounterStrike: Source run great.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.