How do I turn off hardware acceleration?

alishathomaz said:

You can turn off hardware acceleration completely or turn it down system wide in the following manner:
Click on Start > Control Panel.
In the classic view, double click on the Display icon.
Select the Settings tab and click on the Advanced button. The Advanced Settings dialog box appears.

Click on the Troubleshoot tab.

You can disable the hardware acceleration completely by dragging the slider to the extreme left of the scale. You can also choose to turn down the hardware acceleration by selecting an intermediate value.

If the issue is resolved with hardware acceleration turned off, the source of the problem could be old video drivers for your video adapter. In that case, you need to contact the manufacturer of your video card to get the latest drivers.

If you have installed the latest video driver for your video adapter and you continue to experience graphic issues with the Graphics Hardware Acceleration slider set to ‘Full’

My "Change Settings" button on the Troubleshoot tab is greyed out in Win 7. Any other way?

Nope. My monitor is properly identified as a ViewSonic VA721.
The graphics are properly identified as ATI Radeon HD 4250 integrated.

Strange... my Win 7 Start menu entry is listed as AMD VISION Engine Control Center, but in XP it's called Catalyst Control Center... and in XP, the button isn't greyed out and I can access the acceleration slider.

The bad news is that that post makes sense. I've also since read in a few places that the inability to disable or adjust video acceleration is due to M$'s implementation of DirectX 11. Running dxdiag shows no acceleration adjustments or test buttons like it does for DirectX 9 in XP.

The good news is that I found a workaround: HyperCam2 screen capture software. Works fine and costs $0.

Reviving this thread...
I also have this problem, the option is grayed out,
and i have GTX 580 3GB so its not the problem

I can't change the hardware accelaration either. I'm the administrator and as the game I want to video is an Internet download I can't change the settings. other people have videoed this game so it can be done

You need Windows Virtual PC to run Windows XP Mode under Windows 7. It is a professional version upgrade. It has to do with Direct X9 in Win 7 that compatibility mode should have options for. You won't need to disable hardware acceleration and your older program will run in XP mode.