Getting Battlefield 2 to run on the laptop

battlefield-2pc

I have a nice laptop.

It is not fantastic but it rates in the high 6 and low 7 on the windows 7 user experience.

I tried to run Battlefield 2 and it will not run. I get the splash screen then a black screen then the cursor flickers 2 times then back to the desk top.

I know I have enough power to run this game (my gaming graphics score is 6.8).

I think the problem is that my laptop has a Quadro FX graphics card it it. And that is not on the "list" of supported cards.

Is there some way to tell Battlefield 2 to just try any way? Just give it a go? It seems like it is checking my card and saying "oh! not a card on our list! I give up!"

NOTE: I tried running with the 1.5 and 1.41 patches. I also tried as administrator and with XP compatibility.

Best Answer

It seems there are compatibility problems with some of Windows 7.

It seems that UAC causes most of the problems, so try these instructions. If you're not running the expansion just skip those steps.

  1. Disable UAC if on Vista/7 and reboot your PC.
  2. Insert BF2 DVD, close anything that auto runs and then view contents of DVD, right click Setup.exe and select Run as Admin. Notice you do not get prompted to confirm Admin Rights as UAC is turned off.
  3. Follow installation instructions to install BF2, if our installation appears to hang after setting up the VoIP settings and before the installation of Gamespy, open the task manager->processes, find BF2VoiceSetup.exe, right click and select end process - NOT END PROCESS TREE!
  4. Reboot to finish installation of BF2.
  5. Once restarted patch to version 1.41 by right clicking the patch and select run as admin. Do not restart after patching.
  6. Insert BF2 - Special Forces DVD, close anything that auto runs, view DVD contents, right click setup.exe and select run as admin.
  7. Once Special Forces is installed re-run patch 1.41 by right clicking it and selecting Run as Admin.
  8. Once BF2 and Special Forces are patched to 1.41 then patch to 1.5 by right clicking patch 1.5 and select run as admin.
  9. Once you have finished patching to 1.5 then right click the shortcut within the start menu for BF2 and select run as admin.
  10. Download PBSetup.exe from punkbuster to manually update BF2.
  11. Once everything is installed and patched and Punkbuster is also updated right click on the BF2 shortcut and select properties. Open compatibility tab and then select run as admin. Click Ok.
  12. Hopefully if you have followed these instructions you can now play BF2 with Special Forces patched to version 1.5 and it will not crash to desktop!!!

Source

Note: I haven't personally tried this method.