DJB

I posted this a few days and got no response so here goes again:

My PC is 2 years old and is admittedly not exactly state of the art. It has a AMD K6/3 running at 400 MHz and I've just upgraded to 192 Mb of RAM. All the other components are reasonably up to date (ATI Rage Pro video card with 8 Mb through AGP, Sound blaster PCI, etc). The OS is Windows 98SE. The problem is that it will not run any of the car games included on the CD-ROM which came with last month's EVO mag. In most cases the game downloads fine but once I try to run the game, I get through the intro screens and the PC then reverts to desktop sceen. No GP faults or other errors just resets to original screen.

I thought upgrading memory would help (only had 64 Mb). Made no difference. I upgraded DirectX to 8.1 as suggested on CD - again did not help. The video card drivers are right up to date.

Now it may be that the CPU is the problem (just too slow) but it does by some margin exceed the minimum requirements.

Please help.

D.

DazV

Try running the directX diagnostics program to check wether everything is running fine with DirectX like sound, video, etc...

I've just got Medal Of Honor (a new game just out that needs decent hardware), running on a similar kind of system for a friend. It autoconfigured the graphics to more or less the lowest detail settings. The game ran fine, although it didn't look as good as it could.

You can upgrade your CPU pretty cheaply these days (check your motherboard can handle it)

-DV

DavidRB

If they don't run, it's likely that there is a problem somewhere, but to be honest, your hardware is getting long in the tooth. The CPU while old, isn't prehistoric just yet, but the graphics card is a bit outdated. A cheap 32 Mb NVidia TNT would improve things a hell of a lot and would cost you less than £40 from Scan.

Of course, if your budget will stretch to about £500, then a new motherboard, CPU, RAM, graphics & sound card would make a world of difference!