Age of Empires II does not work with Vista or Windows 7

Anonymous
2009-11-24T16:43:16+00:00

I have been unable to get Age of Empires II to work on my laptop - first with Vista and now with Windows 7.

It installs OK and when you go to launch it the small graphic launch box comes up, then the screen goes phsychedelic before reverting back to normal and nothing more happens.

It is a Compaq Presario with a Mobile Intel R45 chipset.

Any advice?

Windows for home | Previous Windows versions | Gaming

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Anonymous
2009-12-02T14:15:24+00:00

RusFry,

    If you were not able to get the game to run in this same PC with Vista or Windows 7, then it appears that there is a hardware conflict with this game.  I see that this game was for older systems and only supports 800x600 graphics.  You may want to turn your desktop resolution down to 800x600 with 256 colors, then launch the game.  If this doesn't help then you may want to install DirectX 9 and see if that helps.

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  1. Anonymous
    2015-10-12T02:24:17+00:00

    Same problem. I removed updates until I could get it to work, and the last one I removed was KB3086255, so that's probably the one with the problem.

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  2. Anonymous
    2015-09-15T20:22:18+00:00

    This is exactly what happened to my father's laptop except in Windows 7.

    Games worked fine last week, now after some updates they no longer load.  They'll install just fine but when you click on the game to play it, you get a spinning icon for a couple seconds then nothing happens. 

    I'm trying to revert to see if it'll fix the problem, but the updates installed were high priority security updates so uninstalling them to get the games running seems like a short sighted fix.

    **Update**

    Using System Restore to take his laptop back to before the last two security updates did indeed fix everything and get his games working again.  I've told him to keep his CC at least 10ft away from his laptop and under no circumstances put any personal information into it.  Still a short term fix.

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  3. Anonymous
    2015-09-11T07:16:58+00:00

    Hello. I had both AOE II AOK and the Conquers expansion recently installed on my older Vista SP2 HP G60 labtop and both games worked well. I sometimes had strange color issues but were solved by just alt-tab out and back again, no big deal. But after all the Sept 2015 updates that got installed by windows update, and now the games both no longer start up. Here are all the updates that I got.

    Now, when the  game's desktop icons are clicked the splash screens or pre game videos dont even load up, but I get the message "Age of empires II has stopped working". I have searched all over the net and looked at all the proposed solutions for color issues, etc, and nothing works. Strange that my games worked just fine, after all these years until this month. Is there anyone else using Vista that is having the issue of AOE II games no longer even loading up???

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  4. Anonymous
    2013-11-06T23:39:47+00:00

    The simplest way is to put your desktop into classic view and open and leave open the resolution window. Then run AOE2

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