Pentium D incompatible with Microsoft Games?

[MaddieMax]

Have a Dell OptiPlex 745 with a newly installed Windows 7 64bit OS. Everything works fine with the exception of the included Microsoft Games - Solitaire etc., - they begin to load, and then throw up an error screen "the executable for Solitaire Game has stopped working". Same result with all the other card games. The suppliers of the machine (Official MS Re-furbers) say it must be because Windows 7 is not 'officially' compatible with the Pentium D processor. Which strikes me as weird that everything else works just fine - just the card games don't. If anyone has experienced this and found a work-around, I'd be grateful for the shared knowledge. Specs: 4Gb RAM, Pentium D 340GHz 64bitOS.

 

[Ian]

I don't think that's the cause - Windows 7 will technically run on a Pentium 3 all the way down to 1Ghz. I've run Windows 7 on a Dell P4D myself (although only the 32 bit version).

Could you fire up "event viewer" and see if anything is logged under "windows logs > application" at the time of the application crash. It should provide some more details which will help diagnose the problem .

 

[Ian]

Another quick thought is to try re-installing the games. Search for "turn windows features on or off" on the start menu, run that app and then uncheck the games category. Restart, then do the same again, but this time check it to re-install it. You may need your Windows 7 CD for this .

 

[Ian]

Sorry for the 3rd update, but I just read about a similar problem to this where the user copied this folder:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games

to

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Games

Once that was done, bingo - they could launch them from the new location .