Land Battles not working

[Xavier Dragnesi]

Hey guys,

Since I brought ETW and installed it on my Dad's PC, I've had a bit of trouble with the land battles in the game. I already know that the computer isn't really up to the task, but in asking around some of my mates at school, some reckon the problem is actually to do with the game itself, and is not my computer's fault. So I'd just like to ask, which is it? Here is the scenario:

I go into the main menu, click on single player, then go for a custom land battle. I select my map, and my troops without any problem. Then I click on the "next button" and it start loading. So far so good. Then, about one centimetre from the end of the loading bar, it stops loading. Then the strange things happens.

With the sound on, I can hear the noises in battle, i.e. the birds chirping, rain splattering, thunder etc. Also, if I hold my mouse and drag it across the screen as though I'm selecting some units by drawing that rectangle, then I can hear the units being selected. However, I don't see anything on the battle. All I can see is the loading screen, still one centimetre from the end of the loading bar! It happens both in custom battles, and in campaign.

After a bit of experimenting, I found a rather long winded way of making land battles work. Basically, what I had to do was estimate where the "end deployment" button was, attempt to click it, then as soon as I heard the "click" sound, I had to Ctrl+Alt+Del out of the game to open Task Manager, then when I went back into the game, the battle would work. However, this meant that I had no way of deploying, not putting any defences.

Recently, however, the problem has gotten worse. I think it might have been the downloaded patch that has done it. But now, even with going out of game and coming back in using Ctrl+Alt+Del, the battle still doesn't work. Now, all I see when I go back in from Task manager is this fully white screen with the golden cursor, yet I can still select troops and give them orders, just that I can't see anything on the screen!

Here are my computer specs so that you can give me the most accurate solution to my problem, or tell me the most likely reason its happening.

Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 1.86 GHz
RAM: 1 GB
Graphics Card: NVIDIA Geforce 7600 GS

Hope you can help guys! Thanks!

[Xavier Dragnesi]

Any ideas, guys?