Hi guys - I am currently having issues whereas after playing the game in single player for a period of 30-45 minutes (sometimes less) the laptop will hard lock. (Doesn't perform a memory dump)

Other (more hardware taxing) games do not cause any crashes.

I'm on Windows 10 Pro x64 with UserPatch 1.4RC. I suspect the issue may be related to [You must login to view link] as I am running an older Dell Vostro 1500 with a 8600M GT.

I suspected the issue may have been related to forcing the game to run in 32-bit colour. I have created an Application Compatibility Toolkit shim to force the display mode to use 32-bit colour.

I've also applied DirectDrawEmulation and HighDPIAware fixes as per the following screenshot.

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Any ideas as to whether any other compatibility fixes may resolve the issue?

This is a clean installation. According to your guides I have installed Age of Empires 2 and patched correctly.

Microsoft's Application Compatibility Toolkit is hardly 'third party'...