I am having problems playing Age of Empires. When the game loads it freezes. This also happens when playing The Sims and Monopoly. Can you help?

As this is happening across many different games, the chances are this is related to either the computer not being able to handle the game, or a graphics problem. Before starting the game make sure you close any non-essential background applications. Then, when you start the game and the graphics settings appear, try adjusting the settings to the absolute minimum for the game you try to load (e.g., Age of Empires) and see if that makes a difference. In that case, slowly increase the setting until the problem reoccurs - now you will know the maximum graphics settings you can get away with to run the game. However, life is generally not this simple. The next point of call is to verify that your video card supports DirectX. Go to the ‘Start’ menu > ‘Run’ and type ‘dxdiag’ and click OK. Click the ‘Display’ tab and ensure that all the ‘DirectX Features’ are enabled. Then, click the ‘Test DirectDraw’ and ‘Test Direct3D’ buttons to ensure that your video card supports these functions. If not, you have found the cause of your problems. You may also like to click the ‘Sound’ tab and click ‘Test DirectSound’ to ensure that your sound card also supports DirectX. Should you be running Windows 98 or later, it may also be useful to download the latest version of DirectX (version 9.0b) from www.microsoft.com/windows/Directx/. After all this, if you still have problems then from my experience this problem will be extremely difficult to diagnose and fix. I have encountered problems similar to this before and there could be any number of reasons why this occurs. You can try reinstalling Windows in an attempt to get a ‘clean’ system. If the games do not work after doing this, the problems are almost certainly related to either your video card or your computer’s general system performance (e.g., processor speed, RAM, etc’¦). I hope this helps!