Returning, lots of frustration so far with POL Viewer & IDFollow

So, after deciding to come back to the game since I got a new Alienware laptop last year for Christmas, I've had nothing but problems thus far. I first tried to transfer my old Playonline ID to my new Square Enix account, but it seems I must have forgotten it in the past 5 years( I swore to myself I remembered both the account and the password ). It looks like I'm going to have to contact Square Enix via the online chat support tomorrow, but there is another major problem I'm having. I downloaded Playonline Vista/Windows 7 version from the website, and it let me through to update it, but after it finished updating, I try to run Playonline it just freezes my computer up and says "Playonline has stopped working" or something along the lines of that. I read the NVIDIA drivers might be the problem and I tried to do the integrated graphics trick( if I'm doing it right, please tell me if I am: Right click on Playonline Icon, highlight "Run with graphics processor", click Change default graphics processor, click Integrated graphics). Im stumped! I can't figure this out! I hope someone can shed some light as to what the problem may be, and I really don't want to start all over again with 5 75's plus all of my old equipment, not to mention having all of my friends list ID's.

Any suggestions?

I threw all of my CDs away thinking I had quit for good. I don't have any CDs or the steam version of the game downloaded at the present moment, just Playonline Viewer.

Im just trying to log in viewer to see which of my friends still play to clarify things. Not trying to download the game right now until I get POL working .

Edited, Aug 7th 2012 11:20pm by KylerLyler

Atleast I found out my old allakhazam account! This is the OP. Frustrated... rebooted my computer like 20 times in the past ten minutes. I don't want to go back to WoW or join FFXIV, please help!

You: Will Playonline run without ffxi installed?
Agent Thomas A: Yes.
You: Im on a new alienware laptop trying to log onto playonline to see what friends still play
You: and if jsut gives me playonline has stopped working
Agent Thomas A: Playonline will still log on, but you wont be able to access FFXI.
Agent Thomas A: There is a known program conflict with alienware laptops, its the program that does the lights on the laptop
Agent Thomas A: try disabling that.
You: Any idea how to go through and do that?
You: Doubt it, but it would help :)
Agent Thomas A: Im not too sure there, alienware laptops are not my expertise

Anyone know how to do this?

The obvious answer here is: don't buy a laptop that has ground effects and racing stripes.

What didn't work? Disabling the software that controls the lights did not fix your problem with FFXI?

Gonna find a naked character when you log in ...

Fixed it, after finding a post on the internet , It's really simple. Anyone with a new alienware computer go into Device Manager and disable your NVIDIA graphics card. Then it works! Now all I need to do is pay the 38 dollars that is due from 2009 and I'll be good to go!

Not that I support buying an Alienware laptop, but I think it's more of a problem with supporting a 10 year old game...

Also, it sounds like this laptop was not bought to play FFXI specifically and it was more of an afterthought, but I could be wrong.

Only Alienware could cock something up like that, and so commonly that SE's support knows about it.

They were decent until Dell bought them out and got the Dell taint all over them.