The thing is defaulted to run in full screen mode at 800x600.
Your laptop seems to have problems with trying to drive a game at 800x600 (hence the Directx failure message).
So try setting:
- Game Mode to
Windowed
- Screen/Window Size to
Desktop
Windowed mode is the most co-operative mode (especially with vista or Seven Aero). Remember that your Windows task-bar needs to be in the default position and
not set to auto-hide as described in the Game Guide section "tuning your machine", in the paragraph on
Windowed Mode.
Desk-top resolution will use the natural resolution of your monitor (or rather whatever you have Windows currently set up to be).
Full-screen mode is
not really needed or required in Windows vista or Seven, if you have the full game (As you have desktop mode). However, some folks want the last few pixels of the task-bar (Me I prefer to be able to see the clock and email notifications etc
)!. See the sticky thread on Windows Vista And Seven at the top of the forum for details should you want to drive this (it will need a batch file run to kill Aero, and will not let you use other Windows programmes happily).
Once that is up and running then you'll probably want to play with the map scroll sensitivity zone in the Misc screen of the GameOptions launcher as described in the "Map Scroll Sensitivity" section of the tuning your machine page in the Game Guide.
The Game Guide is your user manual. to get to it, go to the Help tab of the GameOptions launcher, and press the "read The Game Manual" button. Navigation keys are displayed down the LHS of the Game guide.
Cheers
Andy