[Cunjurongkid]

Hi team,

I was hoping that someone could give me some advice. I'm not sure if I'm posting in the right Operating System bit as my query involves both Windows 7 & Windows XP.

For a bit of background; I am currently running Windows 7 Home Premium on my Asus K53SC-SX046V laptop which has just passed it's first birthday (it celebrated by going back to Asus & getting a new ODD installed, but that's beside the point)

I have quite a few "old favourite" games from my previous XP laptop (Zanzarah, Lego Indiana Jones, Lego Pirates, Lego Batman, Beyond Good & Evil) all of which I tried on my new Windows 7 laptop & most didn't work.

I had given them up for a lost cause until the other night I was talking to a bloke in JB Hifi about compatibility & old games etc & he mentioned that if you had Windows 7 Premium or Ultimate that you could download Windows Virtual PC & then run Windows XP there, I was stunned by the possibilities.

As I mentioned, I've only got Windows 7 Home Premium so I couldn't download the Windows Virtual PC with the Windows XP SP3 "attached" & the only XP disc I had was a very old one of Windows XP SP1 so instead of going with the Windows Virtual PC, I installed VMware & then put Windows XP SP1 on.

Imagine my surprise when I installed my old games onto the new Virtual XP machine & some worked! Indiana Jones, Pirates & Batman worked flawlessly, I couldn't find the other 2 discs for Beyond Good & Evil so that wasn't tried but unfortunately with Zanzarah, although the game runs smoothly & the video sequences are lovely, when you interact with anything else in the game for example dialogue boxes, they just pile on top of each other (don't know how to fix that one)

Sorry, I'm getting to the point, honestly.

After my success with these old games I went & got the Lego Harry Potter ones, the first one works perfectly but the second one that's supposed to run on Vista/Windows 7 & XP SP3 the video's not the best & it's quite "slow" so I thought that maybe I should do some Windows updates.

I went to the Windows Update bit in the start menu on the virtual machine, when I clicked on it, it opened a new window stating "You may be unable to access the Windows Update website from Windows XP, Windows 2000 or Windows Microsoft Internet Explorer" then it asks me to select what I'm having a problem with so I selected Windows XP but couldn't find anything to help me.

I'm not really all that worried about not doing updates as one of the whole reasons that I set up this system is working fine (Lego Indiana Jones) I just thought that I'd ask if I could do updates (with a Virtual Machine) & if I should.

Thankyou for listening & thanks in advance for any help you can offer me.

Regards,
Jodie

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Download and install SP3 in the XP client, then try Windows Update again.

[Ztruker]

Download and install SP3 in the XP client, then try Windows Update again.

[Cunjurongkid]

Thanks for that Ztruker,

I didn't realise that you could independently install the SP without the Windows update, so I did SP2 & then SP3 & Windows Update now works.

Now to see if there's any updates that may help my old faithful game Zanzarah!

Cheers,
Jodie

[Ztruker]

There are usually 120 - 140 updates on top of SP3 so have fun!

[Cunjurongkid]

Yep, it's happily downloaded & installed them all.

No help for Zanzarah though, the dialogue boxes were still all illegible, but I tried the game in Windows 7 & ran it in compatibility mode & it works perfectly.

Success all around!

Thanks again for your help