MsProll21

Originally posted by: A Nonny Moose Have fun. Make a check list, and be sure to follow it exactly. Well Noony, I just remembered, my disk are upgrades, not sure if this could be accomplished with just an upgrade version of the OS. But I had even bigger problems than that later on. In the end I had to take my system into my local PC repair shop. He had to swap out my current hard drive cause for some strange reason instead of it showing the assigned drive letter C it read 'unknown' so I could not access any files on it at all. So now I got a new, bigger hard drive with a new, clean install of the full edition of W7. And get this: now I'm able to play SC4! Cities load up just fine, no crashes, but I only played for about 20 minutes. Install was fast. Sad that I lost all my beloved plugins but good thing that the BCS has the feature for members to pull up all past downloads so they can re-download them again. Well so this did work out cause the original problem before all of this happened was trying to get my game to run. Thanks again for you help and take care.

Originally posted by: A Nonny Moose If you plan to try dual booting, back up your data to an external medium. If you scrag your disk, you want to be able to recover, eh? Dual booting depends on what O/S you want to dual boot. If you want to dual boot XP with w7 already installed you should be able to do it from the XP install disk. It might give you an argument, if so, I'd suggest you ask a local computer geek about it. Whoever you get will have to be good. If you were going to dual boot another operating system, you need to acquire or make a boot disk, the follow the other system's instructions. If you have the XP install disk(s), try just putting it in the drive and do a restart. Windows installation stuff should come in. Just read carefully what it tells you, and very carefully follow the instructions. The first instructon to note is how to quit in case you get cold feet. quote> Once again let me extend my thanks and gratitude for your help. I did a bit of research on dual booting and watched a few tutorials I found on YouTube. Unfortunately when I purchased my system back in '06, XP came preinstalled and I never created any backups. Sometime after Vista was released I purchased the upgrade version and installed it, and I still have this original disk. Running 2 OS that are similar doesn't make much sense to me, would really prefer XP and I can kick myself for not saving up a few bucks more to purchase the Ultimate version so I could run on XP mode. Oh well. The task of dual booting/creating partitions seems interesting enough to give it try. So if I get up the nerve this weekend I just might do this.

Hello Moose, Please excuse the delay in responding, Here are my specs: Windows 7 32-bit 2GB of system RAM HIS Radeon X1650Pro GPU (w/512/vram) DirectX 9.0c (downgraded from DX11 to see if this helped to issue, it didn't) 250GB hard drive (99GB free space remaining) I tried cleaning the disk and checked for scratches, no aval I currently have the XP compatibility mode set on XP SP2 If nothing else, I can just play the game on my husband's dinosaur laptop that runs XP, but I'd rather have it working properly on my system. I'm not familiar with dual booting but if you could point me in a direction of an 'how to' I will be happy to give that a try. thanks again.

Please help I upgraded to Windows 7 a month ago and ever since then I cannot play SC4. When trying to load a city, any city, there will be a break in the music and the game will shutdown to the desktop. I tried everything I could think of, removing my plugins folder, run as admin, adjust compatibility mode, update the drivers on my ATI x1650 graphic card, nothing works. According to the list at Microsoft's site SC4 isn't compatible to run SC4 but I know there are others on here who run the game on Windows 7 PC's with no problems. Maybe the disk is corrupted, I don't know. I seen a SC4D game at Office Max for $9.99 I'm thinking about getting that, uninstall the one I have and install the new one. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I'm at my wits end. I really miss playing my game. Please help! Thanks in advance.

A good practice to keep your system is up to par is setting up your system to run a defrag on a schedule that you choose (ex: every Sat @11pm) that way your system stays maintained without having to cut into time on the PC waiting for it to defrag & disk cleanup. My plugin folder has over 3GB of items. Defragging helped the load time tremendously, as like many of the others stated. I never heard of the DATpacker program, but I'm going to look into it.

After HOURS of research, retrys, reboots, I finally got the game to work. And wouldn't you know it had absolutely nothing to do with the game & Win 7 compatiability issues, it had nothing to do with my graphic card, and nothing to with which Windows version I run SC4 on. So what was the culprit you wonder? My plugins folder. My plugin folder has over 3GB of goodies. It later dawned on me to remove the folder and start up the game. No crashes, no slowdowns, quick loads played for a good 20 minutes until I started missing my goodies. Now to go through the task of finding which download(s) are faulty. That can take a while, so I'm in no hurry. I was at the point of going back to Vista but now I don't have to.

Well, I'm having the same issue. Yesterday I upgraded my OS from Vista HP to Win 7 HP, 32-bit. Same problem as the OP, pic of bridge flash, blank screen, then desktop reappears with message box 'Can't initiate Direct Draw'. I'm running a dual-core AMD CPU, the 4200 chip (2.2GHz), so I disabled one of the processors and changed the affinity priority. This allowed the game to start and get as far as selecting a city to open, then it crashes while loading back to the desktop. I'm running the SC4 Deluxe version btw. My graphic card is a Radeon X1650 w/512mb or vram. Since Win 7 runs DirectX11, I figure I should piggyback to DX9 or DX10 so I'll give that a try. Updating the video card drivers didn't help, so i rolled back to the previous version, since that worked before. Someone mentioned in this thread about changing the screen res if your monitor is a wide screen, which mine is. It's currently running on 1980x(? can't remember this number) which is the highest setting, so I'll piggyback that down to 1280x980, it's worth a try. I wasn't a fan of Vista by a long shot, but now I'm sorry I even upgraded. At least SC4 was working properly. I've been all over the internet searching for a solution, so hopefully when I return back home, I'll give some of the suggested mentioned here a go, as well as rolling back the Direct X, even reinstalling my graphic card.

Well, I hope this works for some cause it definitely doesn't work for me. I've been trying to DL missing dependencies found via the Cleanitol and for the past 2 days I was only able to get 3 files DL'd and hey, 3 out of 55 is a heck of a gap! Might as well mention that I tired using IE8 & Firefox, even on my netbook which has Windows 7 (yeah I know the OS doesn't make a difference) which also have IE8 & Firefox, no luck.....

Hi, I do believe we're on the same wavelength. I recently had heart surgery and was hospitalized for a month. After I returned home, I swapped my laptop with my brother's netbook so I lost my optical drive and now can only play on my desktop.I also lost a great storage of downloads too. I was told that you can only play the game using the original disk. In fact, I'm going to get started now. Hope you enjoy your return to the City...take care

Ah man!!! That's too bad, oh well, I'll just stick with playing on my desktop. Thanks

I had given my laptop to my brother so besides my desktop I have a handy little lightweight netbook. Not the most powerful, but it's great for school. Anyway the specs are Win 7, 250GB Hard Drive, Intel Atom 1.6Ghz CPU & 2GB Ram. Now since netbooks lack having the optical drive, can I just purchase a new copy of SC4 for download and load it that way? Any other suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks

Well, actually I didn't know that. I never use diagonal networks but that's a good tip. Thanks for pointing this out.

It's in the STEX here's the link: https://www.simtropolis.com/stex/details.cfm?id=3599