Gaming on Windows 7?

[Reverend]

I'm still on XP (Vista never looked like a good idea to me) and I know sooner or later I'll have to upgrade but I am concerned about which games I will and won't be able to play anymore - I have a fairly sizeable collection of windows games, some rather old, most not-so-old but not exactly new either.

As it stands I'm already unable to get neither GTA III or Vice City to run on XP (switching off svchost.exe does allow it to work for some reason, but without any sound which isn't very helpful) and some games like PoP Sands of Time can't seam to deal with multi core processors and either run very slow or very fast. I imagine these problems can only be made worse by an upgrade.

[John Clark]

That's odd. GTA3 worked fine on XP-sp2 & 3 for me (AMD 64 x2 Dual Core 3000+ and 9800GTX as graphics card.) That said, there other games I had that were not happy with XP or Dual Core Processors that were Windows based

I haven't tried them on 7-64 bit yet though. (I also have a different video card as that one went and died on me). I haven't got Vice City, but San Andreas was ok on XP.

I do have spares around so I may just chuck together one for older games (Say, a pure dos machine and a Win95 or 98 one just out or curiosity. I could use dosbox, but I guess it gets my old DX2-66 some more usage )

[Reverend]

Intel 2.66ghz Duo, 2gb RAM, GeForce 8600 GT and neither of those work. I've been on to Rockstar and nothing they've suggested works. Literally the closest I've come is to terminate the svchost.exe process that using the most memory. The games run but it somehow prevents the game from detecting the audio and graphics drivers. The games run but totally muted and on the lowest graphics settings.
San Andreas works fine, as does GTA2. I'm at a loss really.

[Anthony Sabre]

My experience so far has been limited to MMOs, but I haven't had any issues aside from the user access levels. Eventually I'm going to reinstall some of my stand alone games, like Deus Ex, and see how they do.

[Sanji Himura]

Reverend wrote:

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2gb RAM...

Now there's your problem. Upgrade your RAM to 3gb or more. OS's now a days recommend that you have at least 2gb of RAM just to make your OS work properly. You are relying on virtual memory to run applications and that is really a bad thing.

It is either that or you have a memory leak in which case you still need to upgrade the RAM.

[Kaziarl]

I haven't had too many problems with 7. It definitely runs a heck of a lot better then vista did.

I will say some older games are a bit tricky. And if you're like me, and want to hold onto some old favorites, you have some McGyver moments ahead of you. For Example, I got Klingon Academy to work, but the game itself crashes occasionally, and there's always this strobe light effect in the starfeild. The Descent series, I've gotten 2 and 3 to work, but not the first one. Final Fantasy 7 and 8 for PC work, but you have to do a couple of things that make your computer mimic older sound and video drivers.

[clint g]

There are a couple of games I had massive problems with (Fallout 1 and 2) but I expected as much since they were pretty old. I also had issues with Command and Conquer 3 which shocked me since its so new, but I was able to find a workaround

[Sparky]

I have an older processor Intel Pentium D (Dual Core) Running Windows 7 with 3 gig of ram and an nvidia GTX 260 gfx card. Vice City runs just fine for me. It ran fine back when I had XP 1 gig of ram and a gfx card from 2005

[Reverend]

Sanji Himura wrote:

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Now there's your problem. Upgrade your RAM to 3gb or more. OS's now a days recommend that you have at least 2gb of RAM just to make your OS work properly. You are relying on virtual memory to run applications and that is really a bad thing.

It is either that or you have a memory leak in which case you still need to upgrade the RAM.

^ I did have 4Gb but it turned out (after a year or so of random crashes) that one of the sticks was corrupted and so I pulled it. Regardless, as I said I'm running XP still, so the OS isn't an issue and these games I mention aren't exactly new. Hell I can run new games (ME2, Metro 2033, RF3, L4D2) at reasonably high settings without any trouble at all.

I actually got an email from rockstar tech support the other week that says the issue has suddenly become recognised and will be an addressed in a steam update, so we'll see. If they do then I'll take full credit for pushing them into it. You wouldn't belive some of the things they had me trying. I think the last one involved creating a new admin user account. Buggered if I know what difference that would make!

clint g wrote:

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There are a couple of games I had massive problems with (Fallout 1 and 2) but I expected as much since they were pretty old. I also had issues with Command and Conquer 3 which shocked me since its so new, but I was able to find a workaround

I actually got Fo1 & 2 working on XP and by got it working I mean I downloaded a patch from somewhere that someone else had made to get it to work.

[WeAreTheBorg]

When I upgraded from Vista to 7 I instantly stopped lagging in WoW. It was pretty amazing... didn't even reformat or anything.