Well, individual sysytems are different, and in my personal experience DEP has ALWAYS needed to be disabled for FF7 when running it on a modern OS like Vista/7/8. i have ran this game on around half a dozen laptops in the past few yrs, with different Windows OSes installed, and it always needed to be disabled. DEP is a technology by Microsoft designed to try to prevent malicious apps from running, but it also interferes with some games, especially old games that were created long before DEP came around. Just google "DEP" and "games" or <name of game here> in the same line, you'll see what i mean. if you dont need to turn DEP off then you must be doing something differently..........