skyring

I went out for my run this morning - and afternoon, and when I got back on the stroke of three to collect the boy, there were a number of big square packages in the hall, all marked DELL.

Grabbed DS's passport, had a quick shave, and raced off to collect him. "Your computer's arrived!" I told him, filling him full of enthusiasm.

Found a great free park at Dickson, dived into the bank, got DS's bank account going, and then off to the junk mail distributor where the money for the computer is going to come from over the next six months. Hence the bank account. No way is that money touching me - I might have to pay tax on it or something!

Got the map showing the area and the first load of leaflets and rollicked home.

A pleasant half hour unpacking boxes and plugging things together. A 19-inch flat screen looks pretty cool, especially when you compare it to the ginormous old CRT beside it. DS copied over a file or two and then I left him to install his game while I went off and cooked dinner.

That was the start of it. Halfway through I heard mumblings of discontent from down the corridor and eventually DS came out to tell me all was not going well. Seems that the dialogue box for each new DVD - there are four in all - was misbehaving and the blessed thing would hang.

Well, over the next two hours I tried everything and I got real handy entering in that activation code, let me tell you! Sometimes I could get to disk 3, but mostly it would hang on the first change and I'd restart it, delete the existing files, turn off the virus checker, polish up the DVDs, and every combination ot the above.

Nothing worked and I was getting mightily pissedoff. Spent all this money on a new computer and this bloody game STILL WON'T RUN!

Eventually I figured out that the default location in the dialogue box was wrong - by one crucial character - and I had to browse to the right spot AFTER giving the DVD time to be recognised by the file system.

Bloody bloody bloody. This sort of stress I don't need, especially with DS having waited so long for his game.

But last time I looked in, we'd coaxed it through the initial load, he'd gotten past the splash screen and he was downloading that massive patch. I dare say he'll finally get stuck into playing it any time now.

I hope!