[Scorpius]

For about 6 years I have had this problem with FS that I have never been able to resolve and now that I want to play it again the issue has become important. The game will completely lock up after about 20 minutes of smooth gameplay. It will get slower and slower until the game completely freezes and I have to restart my computer. I know my laptop has the hardware to run the game. Does anyone have a solution? Is there a version of the SCP that I could run on my antiquated laptop?

Windows XP (Service Pack 2)
AMD athlon 64
512mb DDR memory
ATI Radeon 9600 mobility graphics card

Also, Back in the day I used to work with FRED a bit. I worked on a small campaign called Operation Avatar and I think I released a two mission demo of a campaign I was working on called Earthside. I doubt anyone remembers it but do you know where it could be? I kinda want to waste some time on it again.

[General Battuta]

You could almost certainly run FSOpen 3.6.10; you just probably can't handle the MediaVPs.

Try it out.

Sounds like (maybe?) some kind of memory leak...?

[Mongoose]

(Gonna boot this one over to Support.)

With the exception of that video card, those specs are no worse than my own desktop system (in fact, depending on what variant you have, that card may have more memory than mine), and I can run everything outside of MV_Advanced with no major slowdowns.  Your laptop certainly has far more than enough firepower to run the retail game.  There has to be something leaking memory, whether it's the game itself or some other program that's getting triggered by it.  Have you tried disabling any anti-virus/anti-spyware software you have running?

[Scorpius]

I havent tried disabling the antivirus but I will give it a try. So, if I cant run the mediaVPs is there an alternative or a scaled down replacement?

[General Battuta]

Well, it sounds like you can run the MediaVPs -- but even if you can't, it doesn't matter; they're just eyecandy. FSOpen itself will run fine.