Hm. Well, I guess you should email support to check on this. I was just reading what Neil said earlier in the thread, so maybe it's because you have the slower 4x bus? Do you know whether you have a 2x/4x/8x AGP interface?

Okay but the ATI 9800SE was one of the very least AGP 4x and it's almost 5 years old.

The point I'm making still stands, the people who said "70% of users.." pulled that number out of thin air.  The number of users who have AGP 4X at this point, running XP, who would even remotely be into this kind of thing is tiny.

Let's face it, we're talking about animated wallpaper. If you have an ancient machine, common sense should tell you that it's not going to be something you can use.

Is no one gonna respond to this question?

I believe the more memory on the video card the better.  I have an older Nvidia AGP card with 256mb of ram and DeskScapres runs very slow.  Having enough system ram is also important, I have 2gb.  I need to decide if I upgrade the video card or not.  Do you know if you have a AGP or PCI video card?

If you all ready have a subscription to Object Desktop that is current just load the updates and you will have the 2009 version.  You should still be able to do it through SDC, but I would load up Impulse, it's the future for downloading Stardock programs.

Hope I helped you some.

Just a quick note to day an old fashioned PCI card (rather than PCI Express) will not work.

Plain PCI cards are rare and always low end, but there will be some around still in older pcs.

Does anyone know what codecs are needed to run dreams on XP?

it depends on how the dream was encoded.

I used teh cccp ones and did ok.

Thanks for the responses, oh boy I guess I made a mistake then,

Time of this report: 11/26/2008, 12:27:42
       Machine name: JAMIE-7U0AXESF0
   Operating System: Windows XP Professional (5.1, Build 2600) Service Pack 3 (2600.xpsp_sp3_gdr.080814-1236)
           Language: English (Regional Setting: English)
System Manufacturer: INTEL_
       System Model: D945GCR_
               BIOS: Default System BIOS
          Processor: Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU 2.66GHz
             Memory: 1012MB RAM
          Page File: 572MB used, 1862MB available
        Windows Dir: C:\WINDOWS
    DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)
DX Setup Parameters: Not found
     DxDiag Version: 5.03.2600.5512 32bit Unicode

Could anyone look at this info and tell me if I would be able to run the Deskcapes properly, I think I just have a regular PCI card I don't think it's PCI Express. I just bought OD yesterday for the first time from a standalone upgrade. I thought it would be a bargain even though I already have most of what OD offers, just to get the rest of the program. Should I delete SC and download Impulse? I'm sorry I don't know much of anything

Well, I think Frogboy or Neil said earlier that cards running on the original spec PCI bus are probably too slow to handle DeskScapes.

I believe you can download anything that you need using Stardock Central but I don't know how much longer updates will be available through that client.

What?

cccp = Combined Community Codec Pack

Thanx! 

Well I have since discovered that, even though my Device Manager tells me that my graphics card is PCI, that it is actually AGP x8. So I will probably have to wait until the new drivers are released.   Bummer. The way it reads, that will be Dec. 2009.  I was led to believe Dec. 2008.

If drivers are being worked on now it's very hard to imagine that it would take a year plus to get them.  That just has to be a typo.

typo confirmed. 

Ah, you weren't involved in that, were you? 

It's an 8.

Quite an interesting response from Stardock "support". My computer has served me well over the last two years and has run everything I have asked for it up to now, only for it to be described as "crappy". (maybe not such a good idea to insult your current subscribers if you want them to continue to subscribe)

You are perhaps lucky to be able to afford to run the latest hardware. Others (that pay good money to Stardock) have to put up with "crappy" systems that seem to run other DirectX 9 software without problems.

Also if Stardock had put out the right info before release and maybe avoided people downloading the softwarea and screwing up their systems people might not be so quick to jump on you.

Brad may have used a pajorative word but the fact is that there are now many apps that won't run to thier full potential on a cord like yours.  Some may be able to "scale back" but this one doesn't.  Oh well.  Life is full of choices, ain't it?  If you want dreams, you buy a new card.  YOu don't want a new card . . no dreams.  Easy-peasy.

So maybe *your* particular card isn't crappy.  It's just too old for this.  Brad defines that as crappy.  That's his right.  You can call the same card "super-duper wonderful" or "Bob".  It doesn't really matter.  It won't run dreams.  But then you look at what MS said; that XP couldn't run dreams at all.

If you feel insulted because someone insulted you video card  . . well that's interesting too. 

pajorative?  

   I have a question that may make me look stupid, but I gotta ask.

I took my notebook which was loaded with Vista from the factory, and installed XP on it. Dreams would run poorly on it. Back to Vista dreams run fairly well. Now why is that? Same graphics card, I assume same driver. Can anyone enlighten me here?

Vista was designed for it.  XP wasn't.  The drawing engines are different.

The Vista driver will be very different to the XP driver.  WDM vs XPDM.

If you have an AGP ATI board then the newer drivers which should be out soon should help.

Don't be a fool. DeskScapes won't screw up your computer. It hasn't screwed up anyone's computer. It simply won't run on low end hardware. I'm sure your computer is fine at word processing and surfing. 

There's a reason why there aren't a bunch of animated wallpaper programs for Windows XP and that is the OS isn't designed for it (Vista lends itself more).  But through a lot of very hard work, we found a way to make it happen and all it requires is a decent video card.  Not a great one. Not even a good one. Just a decent one.  So yea, if you have a 4X or older AGP video card then yea, you have a crappy computer.