I've checked 'DirectPlay' under the Programs and Features menu in the Control Panel. I tried installing DirectX 9 through both the standard and standalone run-time installers. I tried XP, but couldn't find any drivers for it, while W10 (mostly) just works. I'm running Windows 10 (my university bought the license for me, if that makes a difference), which has mostly been a good upgrade from the Vista OS the laptop came with. I believe the flickering occurs in fullscreen only, and the non-flickering occurs in windowed mode only. In some cases, there's no flickering, just the greyscale part of the image without the full-color version showing at all. The problem itself is that the game flickers between a normal render and a render where the image is squished so it takes roughly ¾ of the screen (left-aligned) and is mostly greyscale. I'm not positive, but it seems like it may be games using DirectX 8.1 that are the problem. A lot of stuff works, some of it's even got playable framerates, but a few games have been giving me a weird problem. It doesn't play much from this century, so I've been trying to run some of my old games on it, along with some things I bought on the Steam summer sale.

■ Storage - Crucial 240 GB SSD from Craigslist. ■ RAM - Some random 4 GB (2x2) DDR2 from Craigslist. ■ GPU - integrated GeForce 7000m / nForce 610m I upgraded from 1 GB to 4 GB RAM, and a 240 GB SSD instead of the HDD, plus I did a fresh install of Windows 10 otherwise it's stock. I've got an old laptop (a Compaq Presario F750US) from like 2008, which is currently my only PC.

Directx 8.1 for windows 10