How do i get warcraft 3 to work on windows 7

I have recently purchased a new laptop, sporting an I5 processor, intel HD graphics card, and 4 gig of ram. I have fully updated the computer, but cannot play warcraft 3. I installed the game fine, but when it came to playing the computer would freeze on the starting icon, and i would have to restart the computer to do anything else. People have been saying you have to download drivers...but i have no clue which ones and, honestly why would i have to download something so that a game can work...I own macs as well and have never had any problems like this. Can anyone help me, I am completely new to PC's and so far upon some investigation it seems windows 7 is the problem. Don't really care what the problem is, just would like a solution. Thank you.

Because the game was invented before W7. You should have the latest video driver for your video card. Unless you specify the laptop make and model we cannot point you to the right video driver.

And there is also a game patch: Warcraft 3 Patch v1.26a (yes they changed their game to make it work better) that you should also install.

I would also suggest that if you install the game do not install to the program files folder. I recommend you create a new folder off the root directory called C:\Games and then install you game there. The reason I suggest this is because some older games like to add ini files, maps, etc right in the program folder and W7 does not like this. W7 tries to protect the program files folder and basically treats it as read-only except during install. (Newer, well behaved games use your User ProgramData folder instead and don't have this issue but some older games just don't, I don't know if WC3 would have this problem or not but using a Games folder you don't have to worry.)

I don'ti know which driver it was, i updated all and manually checked them all then downloaded a wide screen patch, because of the resolution issues. Then set my computer resolution high, and then in game resolution to highest which was higher than the screen reso, which worked. Don't know why, but some of the drivers had to be manually updated. As well as giving the game full access, because it was not being correctly identified. Yea bottom line is Win 7 does not like the older games. For all those still having issues, if you search out the solution you will find it faster than someone can reply to you. Oh yes and sometimes windows 7 doesn't like to automatically update. So you must go in and do it yourself. gl hf.

thanks to those who replied to me.

Yes, definitely a keyword search in a good search engine is faster than a forum reply. A lot of the time all we do to help people is run a search and link to the info, that's how I got the information I posted.