I have just loaded Nancy Drew :Ghost Dogs of Moon Lake and have just sent a report to their customer service.. game not activating..just spins. Just wondering if any gamers with a window 8.1 might have had the same problem?

Make sure you don't have an antivirus or software firewall blocking the game's access to the Internet. You may also have to start the game by right-clicking the shortcut and choosing to "Run As Administrator" in order to get it to activate. The activation may be blocked by a feature on Windows 8 that restricts what programs can do when they aren't run as an "Administrator" -- and the game won't run if it can't activate.

Also check their Windows 8 instructions (Ghost Dogs is one of the games listed)
http://www.herinteractive.com/2014/05/windows-8-game-installation/

Ghost Dogs was released in 2002, and according to their website
http://www.herinteractive.com/shop-games/nancy-drew-ghost-dogs-of-moon-lake/
it works with Windows® 98/ME/2000/XP/Vista/7 -- they don't list 8/8.1

It may work in 8/8.1, but you may have to do a little more to get it running than you would have with 7 or earlier.

One of our forum members has played this game in Windows 8.1, so it's doable. Jenny gave you good advice.

Thanks, I've turned off fire wall and avast. Run ad admin. just shows activating on BF screen. the instructions are for a disc. I have reloaded.. maybe I need to move it out of program files

Since this game is from Big Fish, it may be that the Big Fish server is having issues. Are you able to activate other Big Fish games, Winfrey? You'd have to test with a Big Fish game you haven't activated on your computer before because the computer remembers Big Fish activations even if you uninstall the games.

In the past, when Big Fish activations failed, I'd try again in a couple of hours and they'd work.

ok, I can not try anything else. Tried to download a demo to try and it goes into the 2nd position in my queue. I manually uninstalled as it kept saying it was open. I ran ccleaner. will try putting it in my C:\Games folder ... see if I can activate... I will also wait until tonight and try again. then wait for their response.

Just wanted to mention that Big Fish says on their download page that it supports Windows 8 - be sure to point that out if you can't get the game running before you hear back from their Customer Support.

Thanks I will

I did some reloading.. put it into C:\games and made changes to the data execution Prevention file and it let me start the demo.... then I closed it down and it let me start the game..... phew!

Good for you for getting it working. I hope you have fun with it.

Thanks for letting us know how you fixed it.
I set my Big Fish Game Manager to install into the C:\Games folder a long time ago.
However I haven't used Windows 8 for any Big Fish games and never changed DEP settings.

I've had issues with games not activating like you describe and had to start over.