Thanks. 80 Days has installed and run perfectly in Windows 7 and is already listed as one that will play. I'd like to include Jazz and Faust in our Windows 7 and Games thread. I know you've tried it in VMWare, but have you tried to do a simple installation directly in Windows 7? I got Sanitarium - a game written for Windows 98 - to install in 64-bit Windows 7 simply by using compatibility mode.

XNView (version 1.97.8) is listed as being compatibile with Vista and Windows 7. Perhaps you just need to download an updated version?

Please let me know about Jazz and Faust. And also why wouldn't 80 Days or Zelenhgorm play for you? Crashes? Error messages?

i'm just going to throw in my 2cents , cruise02 , and no offense is meant ,honestly.

i don't understand how you are going to be a computer tech ,when it seems that when you get in a little bit of a spot ,you change your mind about what to do ?
have you thought of paying for,and taking a computer class at maybe your local school where you could get some solid background and be able to maybe take your laptop in personally for live help?
just a thought to try and help you out....

They may all have croaked by now.
***Problem: G1 and G1S Nvidia cards problem***
I can keep warning you about the problem with Nvidia cards in previous generation laptops, but it's starting to look like you may have to learn by experience. There are worse things than having a modern laptop on which you can't install XP and which doesn't play 100% of your games -- for example a laptop which lasts a few weeks than then gives you no video at all.

If you're going to look for a laptop from the Core Duo/Core 2 Duo generation, look for one with an ATI card. But I'd recommend asking about a modern, current generation laptop that has XP drivers over at notebookreview, where someone may have managed to put XP on their new laptop. Otherwise you're better off using VMware's 3D emulation, or possibly looking into ***3danalyze***, which emulates 3D effects like T&L and could possibly be used inside VMware or VirtualPC.

Just googled for some of the laptop models (Sony, etc) that support Win 7/XP and it seems like Amazon, newegg, etc. just stopped selling the older models - even tried typing in the laptop/desktop models that I own now/owned previously just to see if I'd get any computers for sale on amazon but it's now the same results - just a bunch of parts for these models, not the whole computer itself - what gives?

What gives is that it's time to move on, cruise. XP is a 10 year old operating system which is being fazed out. You have a perfectly good 160 GB ASUS EEE XP Netbook which will do what you keep saying you want to do - play all your older games on XP and it's portable. Why the obsession with having yet another XP system? You have the best of all worlds right now with your various computers... a new modern one that will play new games for several years to come; a recent XP Netbook which will play older games and even your ancient old Dell with the old hardware in case you run into one that doesn't like newer hardware. If you don't move on here, you're going to find yourself not two operating systems behind the times, but several operating systems behind the times. You'll never have a chance of being a computer repair technician. I'll always have an XP and if I want I can put 98SE in a virtual environment. But I no longer use XP as my main operating system as I don't want to be left not knowing how to work with new technology. I can't expect people with Vista and Windows 7 to ask for my help if I don't know anything about them.

I agree with niteowl - if you want to truely learn how to do all this "tinkering," take a class and use their computers to take apart and put back together. Or partition and repartition etc.

Wow, that's the first I've heard about that. I recall the 8600's having issues, but not the 7600 series.

Was it a heating issue?

Hi cruise, I've just bought a new system with Windows 7 in the hope that it will play most of my older games that worked in XP. I'm reassured that most of them will - and if I really want to replay something that won't work I have my '6 year old XP' waiting in the wings. From what you've said so far you seem to have enough equipment to swap around to play older & newer games. You can only play one at a time! The fact is that no one system, whatever you do to it, is going to be capable of playing absolutely everything. If you want to play all of the latest games (which is what you've said you wanted to do) then Windows 7 with lots of memory & a good graphics card is the way to go.

If you buy something from e.g. an Ebay seller & they were honest about the description, you really have no rights to return it unless there is something wrong with it - changing your mind about what you wanted is your problem & not the sellers. I don't think it's fair to keep contacting them to tell them you're not happy, happy, not happy etc & could be seen as harrassment which could get you barred from the site.

I think you should keep the laptop you've bought & if you want to fiddle around try & find some cheap laptops to play with.

From what I can tell, it was the same issue as with the 8600's, only maybe not as extreme. Something to so with heat differential and the way the bumps (that dispersed heat) were arranged on the chips -- over time the heating/cooling cycles put too much stress on the plastic that contained the circuitry -- once the plastic developed a crack, the circuitry would break contact and your video would go bad. It wasn't just a matter of how hot the laptop got as of the difference in temperature between its hottest point (often while gaming) and when it was off.

I don't think they replaced the 7600's and 8600's in most 17" models -- at least I don't recognize any 17" Dell models with the 7600 or 8600 in ***the list***. The Dell Inspiron 1720 is a 17 incher that was sold with an 8600 card, and it's not in their list. The 17" Macbook is in their list (and I think it had an 8600) but the Macbook was very thin and ran hotter than most 17 inchers. The Dell M1710 had a 7900 or 7950 card and the M1730 usually had 8700 cards, so they probably ran hotter than the 8600 in the 1720.

Before I do this, I'm waiting about whether we're going to return the acer laptop, Mom called the bank, the bank said the check (it was paid by check) wasn't cashed yet, but

we got a call from the seller, who listened to the issue of finding XP drivers for my particular model (acer aspire 5745G) especially the NVidia GeForce GT 420M driver, he told me he's going to have his tech try to get these drivers for me, and we don't have to pay for this help - it's a courtesy offered to his customers, and he's going to get back to me Friday afternoon, so hopefully I'm going to keep this laptop and have all the XP (32-bit) drivers for all the hardware.

Because the 420M is a secondary IGP, I sure don't know how he's going to do that. Remember, the only thing your laptop see's is the Intel graphics processor. Optimus takes care of the smoke and mirrors under the covers.

The only drivers that are currently available are specific to Windows 7, there is no XP support.

Edit -

From Device Manager, what devices do you see listed under Display Adapters?

Which probably explains why the warranty does not cover any other operating systems except Windows 7 on this laptop.

In Device manager on my new laptop (XP) now - there's no such listing for "display adapters", but there is a listing marked by a yellow question mark, "other devices", and it has 2 yellow question-marked labeled listings (among 4 other yellow Q-marked labeled items) for "video controller (VGA compatible)". I suspect this is where the Intel HD graphics and the NVidia 420M devices may be hiding.

That's what I suspected you'd see - I know of no drivers for XP that will support the Optimus configuration.

Maybe you can select Update Driver from device manager? It may locate an Intel driver for the primary IGP. If not, the standard VGA driver is probably all you're going to get.

I thought ***this*** was interesting. Apparently it is possible to use the Nvidia graphics in XP as long as the BIOS allows you to switch off Optimus -- as the Lenovo T510 mentioned in that thread does.

Found this -

how to fix nvidia optimus disabled to switch to descrete graphics

but I don't know if this will work, btw, how exactly do I flash nvidia through the bios (I upgraded my Acer bios to v16) rather than windows 7 or XP?

I'd run across that one as well, but I thought I recalled Cruise mentioning that the option was disabled in her BIOS.



I would be very careful flashing the video BIOS - Generally once that's done, it can not be reversed.

It might come enabled if Acer produces a new version of the 5745G BIOS. Cruise02 already flashed to the latest (1.6), but she could keep an eye out to see if they come up with a 1.7.


I agree. If you flash with the wrong BIOS, you may end up with no Nvidia graphics and no way to recover them. I didn't see any video BIOS updates on the Acer site and the one at Nvidia may not be compatible.

Since I deleted the win XP partition, and enlarged the win 7 partition back to original size last weekend when we thought we were going to return the laptop, and afterwards shrunk the win 7 partition again, recreated the XP partition, and talked to the seller over the phone Wed, he told me to email him a list of all hardware devices found in device manager (under XP) so he can pass the list to his tech, and the tech is going to try and hunt down XP drivers. While waiting for the seller's Fri. afternoon phone call, I found that my laptop wouldn't boot into win 7 even after I set it to AHCI mode in the BIOS, and I booted back into XP (after changing to IDE), reinstalled Easy BCD, and tried to fix the Win 7/XP entries, but this wouldn't work, EBCD gave me an error, couldn't detect, so I tried to fix it by removing all entries, rebooted, and after this the computer wouldn't boot up into any OS at all - it told me to insert the Win 7 startup disc (recovery disc) and go from there. So I tried to open the optical drive, it was unresponsive. So I powered off the computer, waited a few minutes, powered back on, and this time the optical drive door slid open. I got my recovery DVD's that I created beforehand (when I first got the laptop) and I used these to recover the system (win 7).

EDIT - the computer seemed to lock up when installing SysPrep - Factory Mode for over an hour or more. So I powered off, powered on, and it booted into windows 7. I then deleted the D: partition (created last weekend for XP), enlarged the Win 7 partition back to original size, and as for this 3D graphics problem in XP, I'm going to use Virtual Box to create a Win XP VM, as Virtual Box will use my host's 3D graphics in the XP guest to run certain games.

Good thing you made those recovery DVD's.
Let us know how VirtualBox works out with your 3D games.

Virtual Box works fairly well for me, VMware will also use your host IGP.

I'm not sure if either provides DirectDraw support, so games like Overseer (DVD) will have issues. So far as I'm aware only VPC supports it.

Let things settle in and get a bit more familiar with the new PC - I'm sure you'll be happy with it.

Just 1 question, Inland - why did you tell me to delete virtual box back in 2009 (around this time of the year) after I d/l it when I was saving up for my macbook pro?

If I recall correctly, you wanted to install an older version of windows - Sun's Virtual Box, doesn't support them well at all. If you're after Accelerated 3D support, you can only achieve it when running XP.

Yes, I guess it was Sun's Virtual Box (this I completely had forgotten about) but yes, I wanted to install an older version of windows at the time - windows 98SE, Windows 3.11, and DOS. Checking the review, I found that Sun's virtual box was taken over by Oracle.

From this table at the VB site -



I found that VB supports (as a guest OS) Windows NT and above, although users can have problems with this guest, and users can experience even more problems with a Win 98 (or 98SE) guest in VB b/c VB does not take full advantage of Windows 98SE and earlier, such as Win 3.11, DOS, and as a result, games may lock up/crash b/c of the slowness of this particular guest OS - am I right about this?

EDIT - according to a little research, I believe that the Windows NT that VB is talking about here is the Win NT 4.0 release of 1996, followed by the first Win 98 version of 1998, then came Win 98SE in 1999, next Win 2000 in 2000, and after this came Windows ME followed by XP. So I believe that b/c Win NT 4, Win 98, and Win ME guests can pose problems for VB users b/c VB was developed in 2007, therefore it wasn't designed to employ these OS's as guests - am I right about this?

Why haven't anyone answered my latest questions?

btw, I just bought myself a windows 7 for dummies 8-in-1 book today, and plan on using win 7 for these latest games that are coming out.

Only Sun Microsystems can answer those questions - we'd just be speculating.