Battlefield 2 + 1.5 Beta Patch = Works on Vista

I fought to find the answer to this question for weeks. I almost pulled the plug on my Vista adventure, to revert back to Windows XP, in order to play Battlefield 2.  I finally found the answer, there’s a secret v1.5 beta 2 patch being hosted on the mirrored sites, which has Windows Vista support.

Backstory

I am running Windows Vista: Home Premium (32-bit) with a nVidia GeForce 8600 GT video card.  My original problem was I’d double-click on the BF2 icon and my screen would go black (as if it’s loading the game), but then exit to the desktop. I was sorely stuck… in Linux you can run the program in Terminal and if there’s an error it’ll print it out there so you can know exactly what’s causing the issue.  In windows, I don’t know how to do that. If I run it in the command prompt, I don’t get any print outs.

I did numerous Google-searches and most of them took me to forums where people talked about removing the annoying User Account Control (UAC) feature within Vista.  Other suggestions were to change the shortcut properties to run the program in a “Windows XP Service Pack 2″ compatibility mode, some even suggested changing your screen resolution, in order for the game to at least load and then switching it back.  None of these simple suggestions worked for me.

At my whims-end, I figured, at this point only a software patch could fix this problem.  I only found the official v1.41 patch on the official sites and I accidently came across a beta patch on a mirrored site.  I downloaded it, patched the game, and now I’m happily running Battlefield 2 on my Windows Vista 32-bit system.

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