Running old games in Windows 7

Mustrum_Ridcully · Sep 27, 2010

Gulla said:
GOG released Baldur's Gate a few days ago, and promises more "Habsbro Licenced" games, coming up, so you might avctually get IWD in a few weeks.

What you really pay the $5 or $10 to GOG for is that they have done all the work of getting it working on Windows Vista and Windows 7. To me at least that is worth the money many times over (even though I have all but 1 of my GOG-games in original boxes on the shelf )

Temple of Elemental Evil with all Co8 patches?

I figure the game will look very dated now, though.

but if it weren't for the bugs, it would have been THE D&D game.

Thanee · Sep 27, 2010

Merkuri said:
...Norton antivirus...

OMG, you are actually using that!?

Bye
Thanee

John Crichton · Sep 27, 2010

Merkuri said:
Did you need to do anything special to get it running? Did you have to install a particular patch or set it to run in compatibility mode for a certain OS? It would be nice to compare notes with someone who has it working so I know I'm at least heading in the right direction.

Patched it using the normal DL/install method. Otherwise nothing special. I'm pretty sure we didn't even have to click for a compatibility mode.

Seonaid · Sep 27, 2010

John Crichton said:
Patched it using the normal DL/install method. Otherwise nothing special. I'm pretty sure we didn't even have to click for a compatibility mode.

I'm the one who actually installed and played it on the Win7 machine, and it was fine. I installed it fine from disk (well, CD). I downloaded and installed the newest patch just out of habit, so I don't know if it needed the patch to run or not. The game runs great. I do use ThrottleStop with it, but that's mostly because my laptop has issues. It didn't require anything to be changed in the settings or whatever. I'm pretty dumb when it comes to getting things to work, so if I figured it out, there was nothing complicated about it. I didn't even have to pick where to install the patch!

Merkuri · Sep 27, 2010

Merkuri said:
...Norton antivirus...

Thanee said:
OMG, you are actually using that!?

Hey, my ISP gives it to me for free. Who am I to look a gift antivirus suite in the mouth?

Gulla · Sep 28, 2010

Merkuri said:
Who am I to look a gift antivirus suite in the mouth?

I'm stealing that quote. If you want a proper reference (not just "Merkuri") send me a PM. Having spent many days removing the horrors that are installed when in-laws and relatives click "install" on the pop-up "You have a virus, install free virus scan now" this made me laugh enough to get strange looks

Merkuri · Sep 28, 2010

Merkuri is fine.

Yeah, my husband got one of those viruses. He's not as much of a computer expert as I am, but he knew something was fishy when the "you have a virus, click here to get antivirus software" dialog didn't have a cancel button, just OK. He was also swift enough to realize that his computer was not really blue-screening and rebooting repeatedly, it was just a screensaver installed by the virus. (I almost didn't catch that because wiggling the mouse didn't wake the machine up, only hitting keyboard keys.)

Ever since then I've made sure he has real antivirus software on his machine (whatever our ISP is giving us, which is Norton this month).

John Crichton · Sep 28, 2010

The new version of Norton is just fine from what I understand. Not nearly the resource hog that it's been in the past.

Merkuri · Sep 28, 2010

John Crichton said:
The new version of Norton is just fine from what I understand. Not nearly the resource hog that it's been in the past.

If I'm not already using that version I hope my ISP upgrades to it soon... My husband had to turn off some of the features on his laptop because Norton absolutely slowed it to a crawl and made it feasibly unusable. He was very close to ditching it until I convinced him to just turn some of the features down. (He's the one that always gets viruses, never me, so I really don't want him running antivirus-less.)

On my beefy desktop machine (which I spec'd out for gaming) it adds an additional 5 minutes to the startup time and if I try to use web applications before it's ready it can cause that application (or the entire machine, sometimes) to freeze until Norton's finished doing it's thing. When this sort of thing happens I can't help but think of the security at an airport. It's like Norton has to stop and frisk each of my applications and scan their luggage before they can board their plane.

Once that's done it doesn't affect my machine speed as far as I can tell, but the startup lag is seriously annoying.

John Crichton · Sep 29, 2010

Merkuri said:
If I'm not already using that version I hope my ISP upgrades to it soon... My husband had to turn off some of the features on his laptop because Norton absolutely slowed it to a crawl and made it feasibly unusable. He was very close to ditching it until I convinced him to just turn some of the features down. (He's the one that always gets viruses, never me, so I really don't want him running antivirus-less.)

On my beefy desktop machine (which I spec'd out for gaming) it adds an additional 5 minutes to the startup time and if I try to use web applications before it's ready it can cause that application (or the entire machine, sometimes) to freeze until Norton's finished doing it's thing. When this sort of thing happens I can't help but think of the security at an airport. It's like Norton has to stop and frisk each of my applications and scan their luggage before they can board their plane.

Once that's done it doesn't affect my machine speed as far as I can tell, but the startup lag is seriously annoying.

The usual caveat being the PC is up to spec and running on 4 gigs of RAM, etc.

Is the lappy Win7 or Vista?