I assume that you have managed to build and run the 5.24 version on a 'standard' pc running only DirextX 7 without problems. If so, this suggests that the graphic chip-sets in the lap-tops are not handling some of your code. A wild-ass guess would be that your textures are too big for the laptop's rendering engine. Have you converted all your graphics to 8-bit for the 5.24 version? If not you may want to give it a try.