When attempting to play Age of Empires 2 (Gold Edition) the following message appears: ‘Could not initialise graphics system. Make sure that the video card and driver are compatible with DirectDraw’. I have tried all the suggestions in the Microsoft Knowledge Base article which addresses this issue: support.microsoft.com/kb/242902. In addition, I have also reinstalled the updated ATI driver, installed (and reinstalled) the latest version of DirectX, tweaked the hardware acceleration settings, reinstalled the game, booted into Windows VGA mode, and run the game in various compatibility modes. However, none of these procedures has resolved the issue. As a sidenote, other games, such as Sport of Kings and Medieval Total War, work perfectly! The software vendor’s advice and computer manufacturer’s advice was to download the latest graphics card drivers, which I tried without success. The computer is a Toshiba Satellite M70 notebook running Windows XP Professional (SP2) with 512MB RAM and an ATI Mobility Radeon X700 graphics card. Any advice you could provide to get the game working would be most appreciated. (more…)

If you need to patch multiple Windows computers with the latest updates, then running Windows Update on each individual computer can be a real nuisance and waste bandwidth downloading the same updates multiple times. A solution to this issue is a package called AutoPatcher (www.autopatcher.com). AutoPatcher contains all the monthly updates in one downloadable package. Once downloaded, AutoPatcher can be run on multiple computers to apply the updates. The monthly AutoPatcher releases are available for Windows 2000, XP and 2003 in five types of packages: Full, Lite, Update, QMUP and Beta. You should read the description of each type prior to downloading, to ensure you obtain the correct package(s). The AutoPatcher download links and package descriptions are available at: www.autopatcher.com/downloads . Please be aware: AutoPatcher is a third-party software package and is not a Microsoft product. (more…)

My new laptop computer is unable to access any secure websites, such as internet banking or eBay. However, an older desktop computer on the same internet connection is able to access everything. I have checked the security settings in Internet Explorer, disabled the pop-up blocker, disabled the firewall, but the problem continues. The encryption strength of Internet Explorer is 128-bit, and all the security settings are exactly the same as on the desktop computer. How can I make the computer access secure sites? (more…)

My home setup consists of two networked computers: one running Windows 2000 Professional and the other running Windows XP. With a view to enhancing backup and recovery I recently purchased Norton Ghost and a portable hard drive. My intention was to do a full backup of both computers once a month to the portable hard drive, enabling a full recovery in the event of a disk failure on one or both computers. The portable hard drive is large enough to cover the used volume of both hard drives and then some. However, after using Ghost to backup one of the computers to the portable hard drive, when attempting to backup the second computer Ghost overwrites the backup of the first computer - there does not seem to be an option that allows a second image on the portable hard drive. How can I do a Ghost backup of both computers onto the one portable hard drive? (more…)

When playing a movie in Internet Explorer the movie always opens in Windows Media Player. However, I would like to use another program to play these types of movies. How can I change the default player? (more…)