Empire Earth Freezes Windows 8.1 and Windows 10
I’ve been running a dual boot of windows 7 and windows 8 for a year or so. I wanted to keep up on windows 8 but windows 7 was so much better for the desktop computer that I couldn’t see changing totally until last week. When I finally did the deed, I got most of my applications running OK, but the one thing that caused me problems was my major time waster, Empire Earth III.
Empire Earth kept freezing up during the game. I scoured the web, but all the forums either were too vague, you know those forums where a hotshot spreads his bull because he doesn’t know the answer, or the solutions didn’t work.
Finally I found the answer, at least for me. I did a few things that may have helped, so I’ll list them in order, but the last one did the trick. I don’t know if the first solutions affected my result, but they may have.
- I ran Empire Earth in administrator mode. This did seem to improve things a bit.
- I went to the folder Empire Earth was in and set all of the permissions to full control.
- In Empire Earth, I lowered the video quality to the second best quality. That did the trick for me.
In windows 10 it seemed to be primarily a graphic card problem and has to do with how it’s handling the display.
I still can’t minimize the game. I play it full screen on one monitor, and I can’t get out without shutting it down, but that’s minor. My guess is that it’s something to do with Windows 8 metro.
If the second setting for video doesn’t work, you might try to lower it further. I’ve got a pretty good video card on a two monitor system. It’s an ATI Firepro V4800 (FireGL) graphics adapter. I had 2 choices to set the graphics in settings in the game. 1. Direct 3d and 2. direct 3d harware Tnl.
I was still dealing with the freezing until I chose the 2nd graphics option.
To run in administrator mode, right-click the icon and click “run as administrator”.
To set the permissions, click the file folder on the task bar to pull up an explorer window. Go to the folder that Empire Earth resides in. On my machine that’s: “C:\Program Files (x86)\GOG.com\Empire Earth III”. back up to the folder that holds the Empire Earth III folder and right click on the Empire Earth folder. Click propertys, and the security tab. Press the edit button. Then select each user name one at a time and check the full control box. Press apply and OK on each dialog box as you close them.
If anybody finds a different fix, or has some other ideas about this, be sure and leave a comment.