Running Fallout 2 on a Dell netbook with XP sp3. I've finally gotten it running and the graphics stabilized, but now it's glacially slow. Even at a run, it's taking too long, and is obviously slowed down. I've tried playing with the ddraw settings, but they don't seem to do anything; I'm not seeing a difference between 100 and 1000 or disabled.

Any suggestions?

Same problem. Menu runs fine, but when I get into the game it's lag city.

My problem was with fallout 1 that the mouse was laggy as shit. And I suppose it was caused by that old ddraw.dll. So I removed that from my fallout-directory (take a copy in case) and it really seemed to do the trick. After that i could use the a bit higher resolution (with a mod). But no point going much higher then 800x600 seems just fine. But try that ddraw.dll thing. Even if it is fallout2, those are same engine.. at least they look the same. =)

Edit: original poster didn't seem to have luck but I remember (but not clearly) that I renamed it first and that didn't work but removing worked. Also I have all the mods.. well to a certain point. =)

Many people report that deleting ddraw.dll from the game directory, as Antimateria suggests, will work. You can create a backup of the file in another location first.