This trick worked for me. Am playing ANB in my Acer laptop, Win 7, 4 GB RAM, 115 GB free HDD space, game crashes as soon as I (playing as Bent) is at the open door of the H2 lab (Atlas part 2) where he sees Lissa's necklace - the game keeps crashing at this point.

Could it be b/c of the 115 GB of free HDD space on drive C or what?

How to I fix the crash?

Looked for a patch on google, only found no-cd patches, or the like.

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Might this recurrent crash be b/c the Acer's HDD doesn't have enough of free space for the swap files needed by the game (plus the screenshot taker app running in the background)?

How much RAM does the Acer have?
If you have enough RAM, you may not even need Virtual Memory (cache)

Here's a site with illustrated instructions for how to change your Virtual Memory settings in Windows 7
http://www.itechtalk.com/thread3588.html

The recommended minimum is 1.5 x the amount of RAM you have.
The recommended maximum is 3 x the amount of RAM you have.

On a laptop with 4GB RAM or more it's unlikely that the size of your Virtual Memory would cause the game to crash. However there could be a conflict between the game and your screenshot program at the point where it crashes. You might try rebooting (to clear your cache) and playing the game past the point of the crash without the screenshot application running in the background.

Jenny, I got past this point of crash the other day. I had to not use the screenshot program to get past the crash point, then after I got past it, resumed the game with the screenshot program running. Why might the game be crashing at the entrance to the H2 lab while the screenshot program is running - is it a RAM issue, or what?

My Acer has 4 GB RAM.

It's most likely an issue with the game having a conflict with the screenshot software at that point in the game.

Got farther, this time to the hatch where Bent & Fay have to escape after the Breeding Lab explodes, when the game froze up at the hatch (had the screenshot prog running), started Task Manager & saw that physical RAM was at 28 - 27%, processes running were over 87, CPU usage about 1 - 2%, What does this tell you, Inland, Jenny? I think maybe all these 87+ processes are tying up my 4 GB RAM.

Restarted PC, > Task Mgr > Physical RAM 31%, Processes 88, Free HDD space 144 of 500 GB, (without game/screenshot prog running). My hypothesis as to why the lockup is happening in the game at the hatch - might be b/c these 88 or so processes are tying up my physical memory (and the game needs memory to run the sequence/respond to my input?)

I think you may be correct Jenny100 . Either it is the aforementioned screenshot software , or there is another program causing a conflict of some form , that is utilizing either 100 percent of the system ram , cpu resources , or both . Having 88 running processes seems to be a large amount . What cpu is being utilized in this laptop ?

I wouldn't be too concerned about 88 processes; most are likely swapped out (or idle) and not consuming any substantial resources.

To see their impact, open task manager and select View, Add Columns - add Private Working Set and Working Set to the list. Click the column headers to rank their usage.

If you've got a runaway process, you'll see it there. I think it’s more than likely a conflict with your capture software.

Yeah, so I started wondering if I'd get better results with running the game in XP instead of Win 7. So I installed the game in my Dell M1530, and I want to know where are the saved games located? I went into the Lace Mamba/new beginning directory to find the saved games, but there's nothing like "saves" in there, and I checked in both of my Acer's Win 7 My Documents, Documents and Public Documents but they're not located there, either. I just want to transfer the saves from the Acer into the new installation on my M1530 so I won't have to start all over again from the beginning?

And why can't I no longer edit the title thread (my original post) in this thread accordingly - has been disabled b/c of something I said/did recently?

I was asking - where are the saved games located for A New Beginning?

There is a time limit on editing. Your thread was started in August.

And I am answering that the saved games for ANB is located for Win XP in:
C:\Documents and Settings\your computer's name\Local Settings\Application Data\Daedalic Entertainment\A New Beginning\Savegames

MaG, I was playing the game on Windows 7 Home Premium on my Acer laptop and I want to move the saved games from the Acer to the Dell M1530 (which is running XP), so I would like to know where are the saves located in Windows 7, please?

Why don't you figure it out for yourself, Cruise?
Do a search of your hard drive to find out where the game put your saves on Windows 7.

You keep saying you want to be a tech, but a tech has to be able to figure things out for themself. Being able to search your hard drive is pretty basic. Pretend this is a school assignment and see if you can find the saves yourself. If you don't know the name of the save file, make a new save and try a "search by date."

I didn't know that you could search for a file/folder by date. You taught me something, Jenny, and that's what I did - I loaded up the game on the Acer, saved, noted the date and how the save file was dated, then I went to the Win 7 Start menu, typed in the date exactly as it appeared in the game's save menu, at the first couple of tried I searched in vain but then I tried clicking on the "date modified" text below the search box at the upper R corner of the screen (when I was in "computer") and the computer came up with a bunch of files that had dates next to them to the right, I kept scrolling with the mouse until I found dates of "2.18.2012" and I came to a listing of at least 2 folders marked "C:\users\[my computer name]\AppData\local\Daedalic Entertainment\A New Beginning with the date of 2.18.2012" and the folder to the extreme left of this listing was labelled "savegames". I then copied this folder to my flash drive, and wrote the path to this saved game folder down on the back of the w/t printout. Now that I already have the game on the Dell M1530, I'm going to find the save game folder in the game directory and paste the save folder in there, and will let you guys know how it goes.

<bumped post, sorry>

Guys, I'm on my Dell M1530 (XP) now, I did a search for "Daedalic Entertainment" on the C:\ drive, I had to do a total of 3 searches, each time expanding the search to include subfolders and then hidden folders and I finally found the game directory (except that the full path wasn't listed but only the beginning of the path) so after I inserted my jump drive into USB, and copied all the save game files, I minimized all windows, and I clicked on the "Daedaliac Entertainment" folder that showed up in the search results and Lo and Behold, there was the "savegame" folder, so I simply opened it and pasted all the contents from the folder on my jump drive, started up the game, and sure enough, all the saves were in place! Plus I tested one of them by loading it, it loaded OK, moved some of the characters around, made Bent search the algae refrigerator (this save was in the lab), everything was fine. Oh, the game still had that problem with no inventory as Bent, so I F8'd to the game's menu, clicked "return to game" and R=clicked, the inventory was back! Yay!!! I'm guessing that I might have better performance with running the game with FRAPS running (screenshot taker for games) in the background b/c of the fact that many of these latest releases, if you run them on Vista or Win 7 they call for 1 gig of RAM, but if you run them in XP they only call for 512 MB of RAM, and since the Dell M1530 has 4 gigs of RAM, I think this will likely prevent the game's freezing up at certain points while the screenshot program is running, but I'll start playing the game and I'll let you guys know.

Anyway what do you say re "better game performance while running background apps" in XP vs Vista/7, Jenny, Inland?

EDIT - just checked my system specs, it says XP sees a total of 3.50 gig of RAM.

You're the one who has the game installed with FRAPS running on both Windows 7 and XP. Why don't you do the test and let us know if there's any improvement running on XP?