Some Games Not Launching

Graham1101

right so basically my set up is a windows 7 laptop with an external hard drive it is a very high end laptop with its base score being 5.6 on the windows experience chart.

i am trying to play games that i install onto my external hard drive but some just dont seem to work.

the games i have installed and that work for example: Civ III, Europa universailis II, Age of Empires I Gold to name a few

while games that are installed but aren't working are: Civ IV and the BTS expansion, the total war series (Rome 1 ,Medieval 2, Shogun 1) to name a few.

i've tried compatibility mode on these and administrator mode and nothing. i click the icon and nothing. when i take out the disk and or/ put it in again/for the first time the disk menu will come up and when i press "Play now it dissapears yet nothing launches.

Any help would be much appreciated!

Shiminay

Installing to the External is always messy, you'd be as well off upgrading the internal HD if space is that tight to get things running. It's a very straight forward bitta work.

Raging_Ninja

If it's an external HDD then you're limited by the data transfer rate of the connection, which I'm going to guess is USB? That could explain your problems.

Also, the information you provide about specs is pretty vague. Graphics card, RAM etc are needed.

Graham1101

Its a super laptop i mean it has an i7 core processor and everything 8gb ram its just the computer isn't mine i am using it while i save up for my own so i cant be loading it up with games as the person who lent it to me might ask for it back on short notice.

the external hard drive is a 2 tb usb 3.0 and games even equaly demanding as civ IV such as warhammer 40k dawn of war and company of heroes run fine!

im really itching for a game of civ as i just got the beyond the sword expansion and i dont see why im not even gettin an error or something just nothing is happening when i click the icon.

thanks for the input!

Zillah

Installing games to an external drive is never a good idea and if it works at all you should count yourself lucky. It doesn't matter how good a machine it is otherwise. Why don't you just install one game at a time on the internal drive and play it, then get rid of it and move on?

If you really want the games installed at the same time, what you could do is install Game A on the internal drive, and if you need more space for Game B, then move the bulk of the game files out of Game A's directory onto the external drive, which will mean Game B will install and play. You won't have access to Game A again until you copy the files back in. Basically you're using the external drive as a swap space.

Like I said, you'd be better off just playing one game until you're done and move on, but this is the only solution I can think of otherwise - given that you apparently can't clear off the other files nor upgrade the internal drive.

Graham1101

Hmm ok i will have a think about it thanks! what is the problem with the drive not being able t play games? (I'm not really a Technical person can just do a few basic things)

Zillah

Games, like any big application, have large amounts of data that need to be accessed quickly and unpredictably, and external drives are much slower to access, so they lead to unreliable behaviour. As a rule games should always be installed on an internal drive. It's not guaranteed to fail, as you've seen, but your experience is exactly what I'd expect.