I am running windows 7 on a Laptop

I had a lot of different problems and had to go through several forum posts to find all the different fixes for the problems that I had. This post has all the different fixes in one place for my particular problems.

Problems:
-Weird colours
-Words not appearing in menus (e.g. go to customize game rules and the menu would appear but the options would be blank)
-Crash due to "Unable to allocate draw buffer:terminating program"
-Crash - terran/terranx has stop working

Fixes:
Alpha Centauri.ini
In the Alpha Centauri.ini file located in the c:/GOG Games/Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri/ folder
Put the line

directdraw=0

others have said that you need to set
DisableOpeningMovie=1
but I have seen no change to crashes with it turned off or on it just stops the opening movie

Change your keyboard and language
From the start button go to Control Panel
If your control panel is set up by categories under Clock, Language and Region click on change keyboards or other input methods

If it is by icons click on Region and Language

Either way
Go to the keyboards and languages tab
Click change keyboards button
Click Add..

Find
English (United States) Click the + symbol next to it to expand
Find the keyboard US
Click the box next to it to make a check mark then press the ok button

Change the drop down menu under Default input language to English (United States) - US

Under Installed services
find English (United States) with Keyboard US in the list
Click on the English part to highlight it then the Move Up button until it is at the top of the list
Press the okay buttons until you get out of al the menus

Finally Change your screen resolution
Mine was set to 1366 X 768
I set it to 1360 x 768
That extra 6 pixels on the side caused many many crashes

That was all the fixes I needed to get it running without crashing

Cheers,
Rezzard.