Games won't play

Before my harddrive crash the games I had on this machine ran fine. So it must be something I am missing or have set different...so far the problem is with two games. Age of Empires III and the Sims Deluxe Edition. The program will start the first splash screen but when going into the game..nothing... it just does nothing..on Empire you get a black screen with music and an arrow you move, but no picture or anything. Have to Crl,alt,dlte to get out of it. ON sims there is no screen at all.. okay I am running XP pro with SP2 all updates, Avast, zone alarm pro, I use a registry repair to keep that clean..there is no spyware or malware present, Avast is upto date, I have been trying for days to figure this out...I have every Codec I can think of downloaded and updated. Gspot tells me on both of them : 0X80040265: Cannot play back file. The format is not supported. I have Nero Ultra installed .. I have media player , I have DVD players, what else do I need...the active X is upto date, where am I off?:cry

 

Alright, everything looks good so far, and your hard drive crashed? Have you reinstalled the games that were broken beforehand? Are you trying to load data that was on the broken hard drive(Might be corrupt)?
If Reinstalling doesn't work, then something is foobarred. Might be disc damage, but that's doubtful, and is it only with those two games? Has the problem spread?

 

the hard drive did more then crash...it DIED... I will never buy another WD this is the second of theirs I have had go bad on me. This drive is a brand new one(Samsung) . Since posting I have again run virus scans and and malware cleaning. IT is clean. I have uninstalled Zone Alarm Pro and installed another one I got on this site. The ZA was starting to block everything I did. I have now installed TuneUP Utilities 2007 and ran that and it fixed quite a few problems.. so I tried the Empires again..still the same problem..but my machine is faster!..I got a similar message when I installed the first firewall PCTools Firewall Plus. It gave an error message with numbers something like what the Gspot gave me on the games... makes me think there is something missing that I had on the old drive that I do not have on this... I am running pretty much the same programs as then. Maybe a few photo programs I had are not installed.. I have even tried to access the old drive from the new one but it stalls the computer and will not even start the computer when I try. I wanted to get things off it but no go. these games ran great on the old drive. so what can I be missing?...what else do I check for? It runs everything else so far...there are other games of similar nature (the old Sims Farm, Sim City, 1609 A.D. and a host of others)... plays DVD's and music and runs PrintMaster Platinum 11. I am baffled .. I have a 128 MB video card in it that I bought when I first put the games on the old drive because the onboard video was not enough to handle the graphics.. this system is not old..less then a year for most the parts...only the CD and DVD drives are from my old system now...I have even tried switching drives to see if it made a difference in which drive I used (CD or DVD) but it didn't...confused

 

This is probably already taken care of, but you have downloaded the latest drivers for you video and sound cards, right? And also the chipset drivers for your motherboard?

 

I will check those out...but as the motherboard and video card are less then a year old, I don't know that I will find any updates...but I WILL look. Thanks for the suggestion.