Where is DirectX 9 on my computer?

I just bought a new notebook with Vista Home Premium pre-installed. When I tried to play a couple of my XP games that should also work with Vista, they wouldn't work. I figured that I needed to download DirectX 9, which I did but that didn't seem to work. When I run dxdiag it still says that I have DirectX10 on my computer. Would it tell me if I have both versions? Also, when I tried to find the DirectX 9 files on my computer, I couldn't locate them. The directx folder under my System32 folder is empty and I don't know where else it would be. How can I find out if DirectX 9 was installed properly on my computer?

 

AFAIK there is no way to install directx 9 on vista, you can only use dx10. You shouldn't have a problem running dx10 even if your graphics card is only dx9 compatible because all that will happen is that the dx10 features will be unavailable to your dx9 card. Besides dx10 is backwards compatible with dx9.

What you can try doing to make the XP games work is to right click on the executable for the games and run them under compatibility mode for say windows XP; (also try looking for any patches available for the said games) try those things and see if they work. If none of these things work then the games you are trying to play might not be fully compatible with vista.

 

Thanks. I tried both of your suggestions and no luck with either one. I guess they're just not fully compatible with vista

 

Actually you can install DX9 on Vista and some programs requires it to work properly. I think both DX9 and DX10 can coexists or maybe the installer will install some missing DX9 files on to Vista for compatibility reasons or whatever.

Even the DX9 download page lists Vista as a compatible OS. I've done it before.