Running Final Fantasy VII on Windows Vista

Wasn't sure whether this should go here or in the FFVII forum, so if someones deems it so feel free to move it.

I recently got a laptop for use in college and figured I'd install FFVII and FFVIII for the PC on the because, well, they seem like they would work fairly well with a laptop's setup. The laptop (a Dell) came pre-installed with Windows Vista, and I'm leaving Vista on there so my warranty stays valid. So I have installed FFVII, but when I attempt to run it I get a black screen instead of an intro movie thing. Pressing any key moves me on, but then when I select "New Game" it goes black and stays that way. I attempted to install the FFVII XP Patch, since that allowed me to play this on my desktop, but it says that it can't install on the Windows NT 6.0 platform. Any help would be appreciated. If I had to guess it seems like something is wrong with playing the movies, but I'm not sure what.

I haven't played around with Vista, but can you set the compatibility of the installed program to Windows 98/Me?

Also, I'm not sure if this is the same problem, but I recently tried to get Grim Fandango to work on my PC, and it only seemed to be 100% compatible when I set it to use only one process (if you have HyperThreading or Dual Core processors). I don't think these old games like having more than one processor.

(To do that, when the game is running, you just open up the task manager, find the processor and right-click > set affinity > and choose only one processor)

Seems to be some suggestions here:
Final Fantasy VII XP Patch review and download