Preferences & air sorties & flickering & crashes

[DRG]

What version of DirectX are you running?

Are you running the most up-to-date driver for your video card?

If you don't know the answers to that ( or don't know where to look to find the answers ) I would suggest you go to the nearset computer shop and ask them to check. What you describe happening is not in any way normal behaviour for the game and in fact you are the first person who has described anything quite like that and also.....before anyone suggests the problem may be he's running WinME.... I run WinME as well and my game is rock solid. ( however.... there *may* be laptop issues with ME I don't know about...) IF you have a good computer shop in your town they may be able to help you sort this out and get you the drivers you need ( if in fact that's the issue here )

Re Running DXDiag----- if you click on each of the tabs and read the info at the bottom and you see one that DOES NOT say " No problems found " then you may have found the problem.

Did you run "Test Direct draw " or "Test Direct 3D" ?

Don

[Noah_Vaile]

I ran the DXDiag and found "no problems" in anything. But problems showed up in Display 2 for both the Test Direct Draw (my diagonals were red instead of B&W) and for Test Direct3D (where the square never appeared) but have no idea what that means, much less how to fix it.

[DRG]

OK try this

1]Turn off all sound and let me know if this makes a difference and..

2] try running the game in windowed mode instead of full screen and let me know if that changes anything

Also, note what Andy said above...

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In reading the Dell website - the Inspiron has a "shared memory" graphics adaptor, and not a stand-alone video card with at least 32MB of dedicated video RAM, as we specify as a minimum requirement in the GG. That could be your problem - you dont have a "real" video card. As you cannot fix that (since it is a laptop) - see if changing the amount of shared system RAM assigned to the card to a larger amount helps.
=======================

The game may simply be too much for your machine to handle with that shared memory graphics adaptor but try the two things I mentioned and let us know if you see a change

Don

[Noah_Vaile]

I have been playing with the sound off (it drives my wife crazy after about an hour) all along. I tried the windowed mode and see no difference in the flickers in the campaign set-up screen.
The view map seems a tad smoother though.

[Mobhack]

Try it in windowed mode, but turn regular Windows GDI graphics on, and see if the problem goes away - that will determine if it is a DirectX problem.

Cheers
Andy

[Noah_Vaile]

Nope. Still flickers with each increase in number. Does not (seem to) have any effect on game play.

This is a beautiful and versatile game and with whatever/any minor bugs it may contain it is no less grand. It certainly contains all the changes I ever wanted to SP-1 (which at the time I considered as good as it gets). The only change I would want is the lessening of the MP penalty for loading infantry and loading onto tanks in the deploy- load all key. ((+:

[Helm]

Helm: What do you mean by "when my virus runs"? Do you mean your anti-virus?

Whoops yes