My girlfriend recently the bought the cheap netbook from Acer branded as Gateway. All is going well until I installed Plants vs Zombies. The netbook turns black; the logo of PopCap loads then the netbook shuts down on its own. Luckily, this problem is now solved.
It turned out that the problem lies with the 3D acceleration feature of Plants vs Zombies and other PopCap games like Peggle. The Gatewy netbook’s video card somehow cannot handle the 3D graphics of these games.
The Fix
Here’s what I did to solve this problem. First, I right clicked on the Plants vs Zombies icon and clicked on Properties. In the Compatibility tab, I checked Run in 640 x 480 screen resolution and clicked Apply.
After that, I opened Plants vs Zombies once more and it successfully loaded. However, it is blurry due to the very low resolution settings. I then clicked on Menu > Options and unchecked 3D Acceleration. I clicked on Apply and restarted the game.
Finally, the Plants vs Zombies game already run smoothly as it should. This is also the fix for the Peggle game which is another game from PopCap.
The only difference that this method rendered to the game is the quality of the clouds in the pool levels and the Extreme Fever in Peggle.
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