I have the original GK2, found out about the XP installer and tried it, but looks like the game can't be installed on 64-bit Windows. I got it running okay in an XP virtual machine (with occasional stalling, but that may be Folding@Home's fault) , but I'm wondering how GOG is implementing Windows compatibility, so that perhaps I could find a more seamless solution.

I found a DOSBOX installer, which is possibly what GOG uses. I'll try that.

Not sure if the original will run as well in dosbox as the gog-version, but it's worth a try. You probably need to fiddle a bit with sound, graphics and cycles and such to make it work pretty well.

My solution before I found Gog, was to use an old laptop with win 98 installed. It runs perfectly there, but if you don't have that option, I'd buy the gog-version anyways.

In case you found your installer elsewhere, The Sierra Help Pages is a wonderful source that provides installers for all the old Sierra games (most are dosbox based, but the site has some Windows installers as well).

I'm playing through this one right now. It does use Dosbox. Not sure of any of the details... it just installs and works. The only issue I have is about half the time, if I tab out of the game, it crashes, but with the age of the game, I think its acceptable to just understand that you can't tab out.

I'm running 64 bit Windows 7 with a an SLI card, quad core processor, tons of ram, etc. and the game installs and plays just fine (from GoG).

Yes, the GOG versions work just fine. The installers at the Sierra Help pages only work if you already own the original disks -- but if you do, the installers provide compatibility with modern systems.

Instead of alt-tabbing, try using alt+enter to change DOSBox to windowed mode. You can switch between windowed mode and full screen without the game locking up.

I second gtrager's recommendation for the Sierra Help Pages. I've used several of their patches to get some of my original discs up and running on Win7 in no-time. Very easy to use. Excellent resource. (And, until GOG gets them up here, the only way I can play Leisure Suit Larry 1-7 <hint>)

It's quite normal that it crashes when you tab out of it, same thing happens to the gog-version at times. And it probably has to do with the age of the game as well as different graphicpreferances and resolution.

My mistake when running in VirtualBox was running the game in a window. I'm so used to it that it was the natural choice. Once I let it run "full screen" it worked much better, and of course the VM itself is a window, so instead of running in a window inside a window it runs in a window, which is how I like it.

Short of it, GK2 on XP in VirtualBox seems to work well so far. It also has the benefit that the VM can keep the last position when exiting, which is convenient.