Running old games in Windows 7

My husband's laptop is XP. It's getting on in age. I think it's got 2 GB, and that might be its max.

The funny thing is, his XP desktop has similar specs, but it handles Norton just fine (with some extra startup time like mine). It also runs a particularly CPU/memory intensive game (Dwarf Fortress) poorer than his laptop, so we were always under the impression that his laptop was a tiny bit better than his desktop. The laptop can handle Dwarf Fortress just fine, but chokes on Norton.

Meanwhile, my brand new (or nearly) Windows 7 laptop handles Norton fine and chokes on Dwarf Fortress.

Merkuri said:

My husband's laptop is XP. It's getting on in age. I think it's got 2 GB, and that might be its max.

The funny thing is, his XP desktop has similar specs, but it handles Norton just fine (with some extra startup time like mine). It also runs a particularly CPU/memory intensive game (Dwarf Fortress) poorer than his laptop, so we were always under the impression that his laptop was a tiny bit better than his desktop. The laptop can handle Dwarf Fortress just fine, but chokes on Norton.

Meanwhile, my brand new (or nearly) Windows 7 laptop handles Norton fine and chokes on Dwarf Fortress.

Click to expand...

XP laptop?

Eep!

John Crichton said:

XP laptop?

Eep!

Click to expand...

Hey, we're saving up for a house.

Plus, it works perfectly fine for his needs, which is a word processor and internet. While it still powers up there isn't a lot of incentive to get him a new one.

Woot, I seem to have gotten Icewind Dale working!

The problem was definitely my antivirus program. I had to dig through its settings before I saw that turning off "Antivirus Auto Protect" doesn't actually turn off all of its protection. There's another feature buried in it called "antispyware" that's not as easily disabled. Once I shut that off it finally allowed IWD to run.

To summarize what I had to do:
1) Run the setup.exe program as administrator (not sure if this part was necessary, since I have UAC turned all the way down, but I did it anyway)
2) Install the latest patch for IWD (I think it was 1.06)
3) Go into Norton Security Suite -> Settings -> Antivirus -> Antispyware and Updates, then turn Antispyware off.

I did not need to set any Windows 7 compatibility settings at all, though I did tell it to run Icewind Dale as Administrator (again, not sure if that was necessary, but I did it just in case).

The really bizzare thing is that I slowly re-enabled all of the different types of spyware/adware categories in Norton, and even after I had all of them re-enabled the game still worked! I even rebooted, and it continued to work.

I wonder if the part Norton was objecting to was that bit in the beginning that asks you to register the product. In the process of trying to figure out what kind of adware Norton thought it was I started and stopped the program enough times that I was able to make that nag box go away.

Yay!