Ok, so I finally got Windows 7 installed! Yay! 
Here at Lemon Labs, we work tirelessly to enhance your Civving experience. To that end, I thought it might be a good idea to ask everyone who has done it to share their Win 7 - Civ install experiences in order to try to help us all with some of the problems that come up. I'm going to be researching these things to add to my Civ/Vista guide in my sig, and the more information I can get, the more complete the addition will be. So, if you'd like to participate, please do.
Please include some system specs, the problems/successes that you had, and maybe some steps that you took to overcome any install issues. Thanks in advance!
I'll start.
System specs:
Lemon Labs "Monster" model - Phenom II 965 @ 3.95 GHz, 4 GB RAM, Dual Radeon 3450 cards in Crossfire, Win 7 Home Premium x64, blah, blah, blah...
What happened:
Vanilla installed perfectly, but the in-game 1.74 patch broke it so badly that I had to resort to registry editing to get the Installsheild nonsense out of the machine.
What I did wrong:
It seems that installing the game to anything other than the default location works fine, but the patch installer assumes the default location, and mangles both the installation and the registry. I couldn't un-install, so I had to manually delete the game, and the custom assets, and the Installsheild folders in the appdata directory. (Civ installs on Seven exactly like Vista. 64 bit, anyway.) When I tried to re-install, the manual patch install (The one I downloaded from CFC) would not complete without errors, and the game wouldn't load at all. "Missing msvrc71.dll" and "Error loading shader libraries" and "Valid program source not found" (It was looking on my floppy drive, for goodness sake.)
How I fixed it:
I removed all of the Installsheild setup files, and removed the corresponding keys from the registry. (Basically anything to do with Civ.) Then I removed the main program, and deleted the entire "Firaxis Games" directory that I had installed on a different hard drive. What had happened was that I installed the program on drive G:, and the installer put custom assets in the normal place in the documents folder on drive C:. Not a problem. But the patch tried to install into C:\Users\Admin\Appdata\Roaming\Firaxis Games... which is the default install path, (and where the game was not.), and then modified (mangled) the registry. After I noodled about for about an hour, reinstalling the game three times, the second and third times in the normal location, the game still wouldn't work. I had to manually run the DirectX runtime from Microsoft before the shader libraries would work. It finally worked right when I loaded it.
What I know for certain: You must install the game, as well as run it as administrator in Win 7. It doesn't need compatibility mode to work, but you need to elevate privilege to make it go. You also need to install any downloaded patches as administrator.
And remember: Just being the admin account doesn't count. You must elevate privilege for this to work.
The good news:
BTS installed and patched without a hitch, and my favorite mods went in just fine. It runs like a top! Faster than Vista, with none of the graphics lag that others have complained about. I am such a happy girl right now!
So, let's share, and see if we can make some sense out of this, and then we can all upgrade without fear, terror, or an excessive amount of Tylenol consumption.
Here at Lemon Labs, we work tirelessly to enhance your Civving experience. To that end, I thought it might be a good idea to ask everyone who has done it to share their Win 7 - Civ install experiences in order to try to help us all with some of the problems that come up. I'm going to be researching these things to add to my Civ/Vista guide in my sig, and the more information I can get, the more complete the addition will be. So, if you'd like to participate, please do.
Please include some system specs, the problems/successes that you had, and maybe some steps that you took to overcome any install issues. Thanks in advance!
I'll start.
System specs:
Lemon Labs "Monster" model - Phenom II 965 @ 3.95 GHz, 4 GB RAM, Dual Radeon 3450 cards in Crossfire, Win 7 Home Premium x64, blah, blah, blah...
What happened:
Vanilla installed perfectly, but the in-game 1.74 patch broke it so badly that I had to resort to registry editing to get the Installsheild nonsense out of the machine.
What I did wrong:
It seems that installing the game to anything other than the default location works fine, but the patch installer assumes the default location, and mangles both the installation and the registry. I couldn't un-install, so I had to manually delete the game, and the custom assets, and the Installsheild folders in the appdata directory. (Civ installs on Seven exactly like Vista. 64 bit, anyway.) When I tried to re-install, the manual patch install (The one I downloaded from CFC) would not complete without errors, and the game wouldn't load at all. "Missing msvrc71.dll" and "Error loading shader libraries" and "Valid program source not found" (It was looking on my floppy drive, for goodness sake.)
How I fixed it:
I removed all of the Installsheild setup files, and removed the corresponding keys from the registry. (Basically anything to do with Civ.) Then I removed the main program, and deleted the entire "Firaxis Games" directory that I had installed on a different hard drive. What had happened was that I installed the program on drive G:, and the installer put custom assets in the normal place in the documents folder on drive C:. Not a problem. But the patch tried to install into C:\Users\Admin\Appdata\Roaming\Firaxis Games... which is the default install path, (and where the game was not.), and then modified (mangled) the registry. After I noodled about for about an hour, reinstalling the game three times, the second and third times in the normal location, the game still wouldn't work. I had to manually run the DirectX runtime from Microsoft before the shader libraries would work. It finally worked right when I loaded it.
What I know for certain: You must install the game, as well as run it as administrator in Win 7. It doesn't need compatibility mode to work, but you need to elevate privilege to make it go. You also need to install any downloaded patches as administrator.
And remember: Just being the admin account doesn't count. You must elevate privilege for this to work.
The good news:
BTS installed and patched without a hitch, and my favorite mods went in just fine. It runs like a top! Faster than Vista, with none of the graphics lag that others have complained about. I am such a happy girl right now!
So, let's share, and see if we can make some sense out of this, and then we can all upgrade without fear, terror, or an excessive amount of Tylenol consumption.
![[civ4]](/images/smilies/civ4.gif "Civ4 [civ4]")
like we used to do in the old days by putting the disk in the CD drive, etc. It seemed to install fine but it wouldn't play so I couldn't patch it. No problem, I have the two expansions so I moved on.![[c4w]](/images/smilies/c4w2.gif "Civ4 Warlords [c4w]")
the old fashioned way. Same problem, but again, I have 
.
Anyway I can play ![[c3c]](/images/smilies/c3c.gif "Civ3 Conquests [c3c]")
then bought this computer so I'd be able to play the Civ IV games again. While my new computer is dead practically dead in the water Civ IV-wise I've figured out it was a virus on the old computer and fixed it. So the old hand-me-down computer is hands down better than the new one as far as I'm concerned.
