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When starting a game of Freecell the cards are dealt but only the top card in each column is visible. If I move the cursor over the card columns the pointer changes from an arrowhead to an hourglass, and will not allow me to move and drag the top cards. Reinstalling the Windows Games does not fix the problem, neither does restoring the FREECELL.EXE file from a backup (which was made before the problem occurred). Interestingly, I did experience this problem last year but the issue resolved itself without any apparent action on my part. All the other Windows Games work correctly. I have tried downloading other versions of Freecell, but they all have limitations so I would prefer to use Windows Freecell. The computer is running Windows 98 SE.

At a sale I purchased an old computer game called Friday Night Poker Club (which must be about 10 years old). The box contained 3½" discs and a "How to Play" booklet (which is not the game manual). When I tried to play the game on my Windows XP computer, the message appeared ‘Please enter the first word on the third line of page 12 of your Manual’. This instruction varies apparently at random. As I don’t have the game manual, I have been unable to get into the game. I have been unable to find an Australian representative for this game. Is there a way to get around the message? I only paid a couple of dollars for this game, so I don’t intend to spend any money on expert consultants to help fix the problem!

Recently I purchased and downloaded Bejewelled 2 Deluxe from MSN games. My computer will not run the game properly unless all other applications have been closed. Moreover, when the game is played for more than half an hour (sometimes up to an hour) the computer freezes, and not even CTRL-ALT-DEL works. To restart the computer it must be switched-off at the power point. Is turning off the computer at the power point harming the computer and/or OS? Also, is there anything we can do about the freezing of the game? The computer is running Windows 98.

When playing games recently, mainly Civilisation 3, many errors appear such as: ‘civ3conquests.exe has caused an invalid page fault. Beginning stack dump...’. In an attempt to fix the problems, I decided to upgrade from Windows 98 to Windows XP. However, during the installation a message appeared saying ‘C: drive is corrupted. Installation cannot continue. Press F4 to quit setup’. Could this be the source of my problems?

Six months ago I bought The Sims Deluxe Edition. This worked until I installed The Sims Hot Date Expansion Pack. The game goes through the usual loading process but then returns to the desktop.