In case this is helpful for someone else still stuck in a similar situation that I was in a year ago:
Just over one year ago I wanted to turn my back on GP4 and totally give up playing this beautiful & timeless F1 simulator, but and I have found new hope for GP4
, as I can start to see some progress regarding overcoming CTD issues - I finally discovered that AVG Anti-virus has been the BIGGEST part of my CTD problems all long, and that disabling Anti-virus to play GP4 is ABSOLUTELY NOT a solution! The reason being, ever since I switched to Avast Anti-virus, GP4 CTDs hardly ever happens anymore, or at least it happens much much less now
(once-in-a-while the game still crashes while loading, during the Calibrate Audio / Calibrate Graphics phase, but at least now I can pretty much expect to get through an entire race distance at almost every attempt - which had become nearly impossible to do under AVG Anti-virus without guarantee of constant CTDs, even when you temporarily disable AVG just to play GP4).
So my recommendation, if you happen to be using AVG Anti-virus [or any other virus software] and you are having constant & frustrating GP4 CTDs, get rid of AVG!!! It is NOT ENOUGH to just disable it whenever you wish to play GP4 - to me it still seemed somehow to be able to affect the stability of GP4, All. The. time. ! (I suspect it may have been invading or stealing GP4 memory space? dunno
).
So, Just uninstall AVG completely (which was actually a painful process in itself, but that's a whole 'nother chapter for another day!) and then go with a totally different Anti-virus program... e.g. Avast seems to be adequately OK, and much much more friendly towards GP4.
BTW I gave up on windows 10 too - it felt too much like Microshaft spy software to me - and I reverted my machine back to factory-installed Windows 8.1.
Intel quadcore, 64bit, 2.41 GHz
8GB RAM,
450GB HardDisk
Intel-HD graphics, 2GB RAM
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"You will never find time for anything. If you want time you must make it." ~ Charles Buxton