Old style Solitaire

Is there any way of getting the old (XP and earlier) style of Solitaire? This version is pretty awful.

I have played it on and off for 6 or 8 years and don't recall the XP version.

How was it different? It's the same game as far as I know--the game I played as a child.

Well, if you've played it for the last 8 years you will remember that there was a king's head in the middle which looked in whichever direction you were using your mouse, and the cards themselves were crisp objects that actually looked like plaing cards.

With Win 7 version, there is no king at the top in the middle (not important) but the cards look terrible and, when selected, get an "aura". You can't properly see what you have selected, and so it is more difficult to play.

To me, it looks as though someone said "Let's see what pretty visual effects we can add, the more the merrier" instead of saying "Let's make it look clean and crisp and a pleasure to play."

I don't remember the King.

Yeah, I see that aura thing. More unnecessary eye candy, but it doesn't bother me. Maybe if you turn off a particular control somewhere in Win 7 generally, it would go away?

For all I know, you could replace the Win 7 version with an earlier version and it might work?

Incidentally--I recently read that the best strategy is to play ONLY from the dealt cards (3 at a time, turning them over) for as long as you possibly can, and only then start making plays down on the stacks. First time I ever even tried to research solitaire strategy. I think I read that over 50% of games can be won?

The whole problem revolves around the fact that I was talking about FreeCell not Solitaire!!! I even searched on Solitaire, instead of FreeCell - will start again

I don't like the look of Win 7 Solitaire either, and much prefer the cleaner look of the XP one. I tried placing the sol.exe and cards.dll files from the System32 folder of XP into the System32 folder in Win 7 but it didn't work. I don't think I'll be playing Solitaire any more to kill time (while waiting for something) unless there's a way to get the look of the old one back.

The awful, stiff and looking like it has been bleached Solitaire of XP? lol

That's the one! Clean looking too.

After reading another post I found that the XP Solitaire works OK if you copy those two files to the desktop, or any folder other than System32 (and run sol.exe)

There was a delightful bug in the old XP solitaire.
Drag a card to any valid position, don't let go of the mouse-click, press ESC and the cards return to their original place. However, the 'valid-move' bit has now been set and so a click on any other card will move it to the place you were when you pressed ESC.