Windows 7 Beta 1 Not Compatible with GameGuard

Okay, I admit it, I cannot resist the temptation of testing Windows 7 Beta 1 so I decided to visit one of the many known torrent sites and downloaded a copy of this new operating system from Microsoft. It took me 2 days to download the image. Downloading was painstakingly a long wait especially for me who is stuck with SmartBro’s 384kbps. 🙁

My main concern actually is will Windows 7 run games? I already heard tech people proclaiming how stable Windows 7 is. It actually detects and install the right hardware without much issue. But none of those i read said about gaming so my curiosity grew bigger until finally I caved in and gave it a try even though my copy came from an unofficial site.

I tried Philippine Ragnarok Online. The game successfully downloaded all the patches but wont start due to GameGuard’s failure to load.

Same problem was encountered for Cabal Online, GameGuard wont start so I cannot play the game. I suppose other games that use GameGuard will suffer this same problem.

GameGuard started to suffer this kind of problem on Windows Vista but was later fixed and is now loading well. Before then, gamers will have to disable User Account Control (UAC) introduced first on Vista. Then I thought maybe this trick of disabling UAC might temporarily fix the loading problem.

Windows 7 offers 4 different settings for UAC. I chose Never Notify me when: setting to see if this will fix GameGuard loading problem. Windows 7 requires me to reboot my system for the new settings to take effect.

I tried running Ragnarok Online once again and I was dismayed to see that the problem didn’t go away.

I tried a few more tricks such as running ragnarok.exe as Administrator and trying Compatibility Mode but no luck either.

Windows 7 is a significant software upgrade from Vista. It was stable, faster, and equipped with new shiny graphical effects such as rotating wallpaper which I most liked.

On the other hand, World of Warcraft, FreeStyle and CrazyKart work perfectly so my guess is most, if not all, online games that doesn’t use GameGuard will have no problem running.

The new OS is still in Beta 1 and we can expect more fixes and enhancements to be added by the Microsoft Dev Team including this GameGuard issue. And I do hope too that nProtect, the company responsible for GameGuard, would start fixing this issue as well before Windows 7 becomes ready for consumers later this year.