CTP1 - Windows 7 - Dell Vostro Laptop - Screen does not Refresh unless mouse moves vertically

[Luke Latham]

Hi there

I'm trying to play CTP on my laptop and it's causing me a bit of bother.

I've installed it and everything went smoothly, I downloaded and tried to apply pat1.2 but it says that this is not needed.

I also installed v1.21 for the hell of it, and Indeo Video 5 codec.

So when I start the game the loading bar comes up as normal, and then the videos don't play (I'm not bothered about this). I click past the videos, and the main screen loads up. I say it loads up, what happens is it loads 'in the background' but is obscured by black horizontal bars where my screen has not refreshed. These disappear if I move my mouse vertically up or down, and force that horizontal area to refresh/become visible to me.

If I click on a button (e.g Single Player), the other buttons all change in the background, but the change does not become visible to me unless I hover the cursor over them.

I tried for a while to fix this (see below) but then thought 'ah sod it, it'll be ok'. Turns out trying to move a unit whilst refreshing the screen and not scrolling the map (and thereby changing the screen, requiiring further refreshing) is nigh on impossible!

So I've come to ask if anyone has encountered this before and knows what I need to do to fix it. Or, alternatively, if they can work out what is wrong/malfunctioning from the description.

I tried to take screenshots but when I do it shows the fully loaded screen in the background, without the black bars. So I printscreen, alt tab out, paste, alt tab back in, and what I see when I come back in is still obscured/not refreshed - but the pasted image was the full screen!

I've tried all kinds of things to fix this, compatability modes, adjusting resolution of monitor, of the game in the user file.

I've also tried installing a virtual XP machine and running it on that. Now that *did* stop this issue, but caused several others that were even worse! I can go into these if needed but for now it'd be preferable to focus on the Windows 7 problems? Especially because I know I've seen others posting comments about this around the internet that were never fully resolved AFAIK....

So yeah, let me know if you think you can help please!?

Thanks
Luke

[Luke Latham]

So after further messing around I've found that it's because it was on a laptop.

I tried it on a desktop and it worked absolutely fine - which as you can imagine was a bit frustrating!

So then I plugged the monitor into the laptop, and that also worked fine - replicated on both the monitor and the laptop.

I then tried replicating the monitor's settings on the laptop by itself (same screen ratio, refresh rate, colour settings, etc), and it doesn't work again.
It's a shame I couldn't get it to work on the laptop, but at least I can play it now.

Thanks
Luke