Installing Thief Gold on a notebook...

This may be among things I’ve asked for my LD GF, but she wanted me to ask again- The Gateway is going back to the dealer (Good people!) and she’s looking for another notebook which will play her favorite games, esp Thief Gold.

Yesterday, she was at Best Buy trying everything they had (Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Sony Vaio, Toshiba) all on Vista, and her TG only installed on one PC. The BB guys theorized this is because TG is a 32-bit game and the systems are all 64 bit.

On her Gateway with XP and on the BB units w/Vista, she kept getting a message that TG would not install on a WinNT programs. Folks at Eidos forums and Through the Looking Glass forums are suggesting using the -lgntforce fix to get it to run on XP and/or manually installing it by copying the CD files. Are there any other ways? Thanks.

Relevant threads up there.

This is a posting from the TTLG which updates her situation-

In another issue, she has a duo core notebook & is trying to fix the multiprocessor issue but the Alt-Tab out of the game does nothing, nor does any mention of Thief appear in the processes when we CntlAltDel to bring up Task Manager from the game menu.

She had Geek Squad look at it and they somehow got the game to install, but something screwed up and now it won’t uninstall. Maybe this is a problem because we can’t get it to uninstall. It says the data may be corrupted. She’s also tried various patches but they wouldn’t run because the game wasn’t properly installed. Even though Geek Squad screwed it up, they at least got it to install.

Who out there has a notebook that will run Thief Gold, and what do you have? What system are you running and what bit are you running at? What is your graphic card? What kind of processor is it? We were told this game will not install or run at over 32 bit. This seemed to prove true as she went through all the Best Buy PCs and notebooks. The only one she got to run there was a duo-core PC on Vista operating at 32 bit, rather than a 64 which everything else was running at. However, others have said they got theirs running at 64 bit.

Please stick with us on this. She’s a hard core gamer and this is her favorite game. She is sending back her Gateway, partly because she can’t get it to run this game, even though it runs several others, including old Doom in DOS.
If anyone can help us figure this out, you will be added to her personal Pantheon of Gods.

If this seems disjointed, remember that she & I are working together on this over the phone, as she is not on the Net, and I can’t see what she is doing.

I work at a supercomputing institute, and I have never, ever, had a problem with running a 32 bit software, even odd obscure scientific wares, on a 64 bit machine. I have been called in several times when folks have tried it the other way around. I have, on the other hand, seen over and over again, wares that could not run on Vista.

You may assume what my $.02 is.

I have had a whole ton of bad luck with not being able to install games on my new Vista laptop, when they ran on my XP laptop. Knights of the Old Republic 1 and 2, and Jade Empire will not run. I haven’t yet tried to install Baldur’s Gate 2 or the new Bard’s Tale, but I’m not eager to try and see them fail to even start like with the others. World of Warcraft does run on the new laptop.

Has she tried setting it to a different Windows compatibility mode?

If she right-clicks on the icon on her desktop, and goes to “Properties”, one of the topics on the bar at the top should be “Compatibility”. You can set it there to run as though it were an older version (like 95 or 98) or to only use a few colours.

Godsend for playing some of my older games.

I wish it’d worked for mine. :frowning: Good suggestion though; I’d forgotten to mention it.