Solution to Riven Freezing

Hey everyone!  With the relaxation and time off provided by summer, I've had time to actually play some games!  One of my favorite game series is Myst.  Some of you may have heard of it, others probably not.  It is a pretty old series, but its basically the mother of all escape games.  If you want to find out more about it, please visit this article.

Anyway, after already completing the first game of the series, Myst I, I started playing Riven, the second game of the series (I know right, playing games chronologically?? Who would do such a thing?!).  Although both of them are old, and both of them need to be run in 'compatibility mode' on Windows 7, they should both run fine.  Or so you would think.  For me at least, Riven wasn't working very well.

I would start up the game, it would run for a little while and work just fine, and then, very randomly, it would freeze.  It would lock up so bad that I had to go to Task Manager and end the process to kill it.  But I was always able to restart the game and run it for a little while again before it repeated this.

But for those of you reading this for the solution and not just to hear me yammer on, good news!  A solution is here! Thanks to the help of one of my friends, I was finally able to fix this problem!  I believe the problem occurred because I run a 64 bit system and not a 32 bit.

1. Start Riven as you normally would.
2. As soon as it gets to the main menu in the game, hit CTRL+SHIFT+ESC.
3. This should bring up Task Manager.  Click the "Processes" tab.

1. If you are not already running as an Administrator, click on the "Show processes from all users" button near the bottom of Task Manager. 
2. Once that loads, look for "Riven.exe" and click it.  

1. Now right click it, and then click "Set Affinity..." 
2. De-select all of the CPU processors except for CPU 0.  It does not have to be CPU 0, it could be any of them, but make sure you only have one of them selected.  Riven is an older program, and it does not know what to do with more than one CPU processor running it. 

1. Click "OK" and return to the game!  Simple as that.  

Hope this helps somebody!  Please comment!