[Sailor Steve]

I can only answer that with my own experience. In 1986 I played Sid Maier's Silent Service on an Atari 520ST. I loved it, but then of course that has nothing to do with Silent Hunter. I bought my first Windows 95 PC in 1998, and quickly discovered the original Silent Hunter, which was then two years old. I had no complaints about the game or the way it played. I never had a crash. There were a couple of routines I didn't like, but they were minor. I quickly discovered Hawk's Silent Hunter Utilities, which didn't have to fix any game problems, but did change a couple of historical innacuracies.

Bottom line: I had no problems with it whatsoever.

SH2 was a huge disappointment for me because I was expecting SH1 with u-boats, and instead found myself playing a shooter-style game with levels that had to be completed. It also had a couple of annoying bugs that were resolved with the only patch they did. I still hated the gameplay until I found out I could play online. I got Destroyer Command and had a blast playing with other people trying to kill me.

I bought my current eight-year-old rig just so I could play SH3. I did and I had a great time. I had very few problems. I see you say you bought a laptop. While many people play the SH series on laptops, it does say right on the box that laptops are not supported. Maybe you should have read the fine print. I've had minor complaints about the way SH3 works, and there's a lot I would like to see different, but I've been playing it on the same machine since March 2005 and every frustration I've encountered has been my own fault, since I love all the different mods. My biggest complaint right now is that my old computer won't run the mods I really want, so I've been trying to get a new one for several years now.

SH4 had some bugs, and more importantly they didn't fix some of the leftovers from SH3. On the other hand SH4 has some new routines that should have made it better. The problem there was that SH3 was still new and nobody was interested. In some ways SH1 is still better, but I still play the 20-year-old Aces Of The Deep, so what do I know?

Yes, SH5 still has problems. On the other hand a great deal of work has been done on it and most of them are resolved. My complaint is less one of playability than one of style. I wish they had upgraded SH3 to SH5 standards. Actually I wish they had upgraded AOD to SH5 standards.

I still play SH3 and SH4 on my old machine. It won't run SH5. When I get one that does I'll probably still stick with the older versions because of that "style" thing. But my old computer runs all the older ones just fine. It's not the games.