Windows 10: AOE II crashes to desktop after splash screen - Windows 8 and 10

Hello community, this is my first post here and having exhausted all the asocial options for fixing the problem at hand I have decided to join this forum to see if any of the more tech-savvy among you can help me out here.

Since August 2013, I have been in possession of a computer system from HP-Compaq. It was not the best computer I've had - actually, far from it. In fact the internet browsing on that system was so painfully slow I ended up playing offline most of my days. One of the games I would play incessantly was Age of Empires II from Microsoft, a game which has since lost its support from the studio that produced it, but continues to be popular with retro gamers worldwide, at least, to my knowledge.

My older system has been proved capable of running the game with these specs:

Processor: AMD Vision C @ 1.4 GHz (Quad Core)
Memory: 4 GB
Graphics card: AMD Integrated (<- this was the bit that put me off)
Hard drive: 500GB
Sound system: Realtek HD Audio

http://support.hp.com/doc-images/927/c03048705.jpg
That's what it looked like - the HPCompaq CQ2000 PC.

Despite the unimpressive components, this rig was actually able to play AOE without any major problems. Nevertheless I could not bear the turtle-pace of this ageing device so I took it upon myself to find a new one. I scouted the tech-streets of the web to find such a system, and eventually stumbled across this eye-catching piece of hardware:

http://brain-images.cdn.dixons.com/1...106161_001.jpg
That's what it looks like - the Acer Aspire TC-705 PC.

The latter is the system I use the vast majority of the time, and the one with which I am, from the comfort of my study room, posting. These are its specs.

Processor: Intel Core i5 @ 3.2 GHz (note the 2.29x clocking increase)
Memory: 12 GB (11.9 GB usable - note the 3x RAM increase)
Graphics card: Nvidia GeForce GTX 745 4GB (<- this was the big selling point)
Hard drive: 2TB/2 drives
Sound system: Realtek HD Audio

However, every single time I install the game and run it, it refuses to start the animation. All I see is a black screen, then my desktop in a lower resolution, next a black screen again, and finally a crash to the desktop under normal resolution. Basically it won't go past the splash screen.

What's to do? I'm really confused as to how a technologically superior system fails to play a game than an inferior one succeeds in.

Event Viewer:

Faulting application name: Empires2.Exe, version: 0.14.22.712, time stamp: 0x39660360
Faulting module name: Empires2.Exe, version: 0.14.22.712, time stamp: 0x39660360
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x0000e412
Faulting process ID: 0x1024
Faulting application start time: 0x01d1e9a08e6c9c5b
Faulting application path: C:\PROGRA~2\MICROS~3\AGEOFE~1\Empires2.Exe
Faulting module path: C:\PROGRA~2\MICROS~3\AGEOFE~1\Empires2.Exe
Report ID: cb68d68c-0951-4eb4-a258-efe9b8bb80b3
Faulting package full name:
Faulting package-relative application ID:

Do any of you know what's happening, because I sure don't.

:)

 

Age of Empires II Conquerors

Any idea how to run AoE II Conquerors on Windows 10. I have a genuine CD which ran fine with Windows 8 but refuse to run with Windows 10

 

Connection Error when loading Age of Empires: Castle Siege (both Windows 10 and iPhone)

Thanks, I ran those tools and they reported "completed successfully", and "did not find integrity violations", and then I reinstalled AOE Castle. Same problem, game crashes with no error after less than a second. Sometimes the splash screen comes up, sometimes
it crashes before then.

 

Try play under compability settings set to Windows XP.

 

I have the steam version. AOE HD2. When I upgraded it crashed all over the place, would not go into single play, kept saying waiting for other players, all sorts of diff messages including server busy, come back later.

It wasn't it was windows 10 1607 doing something. I closed the pc down, booted up, and it began working properly.