![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Computer: excitemant machine
Oct. 27th, 2005 04:40 pmThe past couple of months have been fairly stressful for all concerned, and a few hours ago I hopefully put it all behind me.
DS came to me back in August, all agog because a new version of one of his favorite games had been released, and if you did the pre-order thing, you got a special avatar of a tiger. DS likes tigers out of all animals, and this was a sign from above. He had to have the game.
I looked it up on the US company website and checked out their deal. The game itself was about average in price as these things go, and airmail postage was another 50% on top, making it at the high end.
I went into the local franchise of the same game company and asked about the game, hoping to save on the postage. They knew nothing about this special offer and after a couple of phone calls the chap behind the counter wasn't exactly blowing confidence into my wallet, so I went home and committed to the pre-order.
Or rather my son did, while I supplied the credit card details.
About that time his freebie mail service decided to eat the confirmation email he was supposed to reply to, so after a week and no action, I tried again, this time in my name. That worked fine until I got an email saying I needed to confirm my details because I was in a foreign country. Yeah, like Australia is a hotspot of Internet fraud. But OK and I gave my details again.
They cancelled the order!
On inquiry, I discovered that because the same credit card details had been used for two different orders with two different names, it registered a hit on their suspect-o-meter. I explained the situation and ordered again, wondering if I was going to be charged three times for the one game.
Came the release date in the US and the son started camping out, waiting for his delivery. I had to explain that it would take at least a week to get over here, but he still wanted it NOW.
That was three weeks ago.
Ten days later he'd cooled down a bit, and one morning when I got back from dropping him off at school, there was a card in the letter box saying there had been a delivery but nobody home.
Bugger! More phone calls and waiting but by the time he rushed home from school on the next day, we had the package, and he raced off to install it.
Poked his nose out some time later to say it needed a patch and he was downloading it.
Typical. They work for a couple of years on a game, test it and release it and as soon as it hits the streets it needs a patch that takes half an hour to download and we're on ADSL.
Downcast when next I saw him. Game wouldn't run.
Worked my way through the error message, downloaded a new version of some DLL, made sure that it was in the right directory, downloaded the patch again and found out that we went past the error and hit a new one.
Probably memory.
Loaded the thing onto my laptop, downloaded the patch again and fired it up. The game needs 512meg and the thing was saying I had 511.2. Maybe there was some marked off or being reserved or Dell had shortchanged me, but bugger!
Went to the computer shoppe, got a half gig, had the chap install it, now I've got 764 megs or whatever. And a spare laptop quarter gig I'll never use.
Went home, hit the GO button. Same error.
More research on the internet, rummaging through all sorts of frothing afficionados and their gushing reviews. Turns out I need a better graphics card. Just bought one for son's machine last year and that was trauma enough.
Crap, I think, looking around at a house full of computers, none of which will run this dam' game. Do I buy some more memory and graphic card and whatever else I need to run it? How much is that going to cost?
So we all sit down and nut it out. DS will do a junk mail delivery run to pay for this thing, the alternative apparently being flipping patties at McDonalds, and he's not keen on that. So I've contacted the junk mail supplier to see if there's a local run for him.
And yesterday arvo I made the credit card glow a bit more as I rummaged through Dell's site.
They have their usual special limited offers and online specials, but the upshot is that DS is getting a new machine, and although I tried to keep the cost down, I upspecced it to get a wireless keyboard and mouse, and a better optical drive. It comes with a gig of memory and a 19" flatscreen. There's a printer in there somewhere as well.
Cripes! He's going to have a better machine than I have!
Much better.
Oh well, I've got enough to get by. I don't play any fancy games, and so long as I don't have more than fifty browser windows open at once, it all seems to work okay. What I might do is switch over to the laptop with the new memory and feed it through my existing monitor and keyboard, leaving this one as a file server. This will have the advantage and convenience that when I'm on the road I'll have my normal set up with me.
Back to DS's new machine. I checked the specs twice over against the game's requirements, but if this thing arrives, we load the game on, download that bloody patch abloodygain and it doesn't bloody run, well, there will be words said!
DS came to me back in August, all agog because a new version of one of his favorite games had been released, and if you did the pre-order thing, you got a special avatar of a tiger. DS likes tigers out of all animals, and this was a sign from above. He had to have the game.
I looked it up on the US company website and checked out their deal. The game itself was about average in price as these things go, and airmail postage was another 50% on top, making it at the high end.
I went into the local franchise of the same game company and asked about the game, hoping to save on the postage. They knew nothing about this special offer and after a couple of phone calls the chap behind the counter wasn't exactly blowing confidence into my wallet, so I went home and committed to the pre-order.
Or rather my son did, while I supplied the credit card details.
About that time his freebie mail service decided to eat the confirmation email he was supposed to reply to, so after a week and no action, I tried again, this time in my name. That worked fine until I got an email saying I needed to confirm my details because I was in a foreign country. Yeah, like Australia is a hotspot of Internet fraud. But OK and I gave my details again.
They cancelled the order!
On inquiry, I discovered that because the same credit card details had been used for two different orders with two different names, it registered a hit on their suspect-o-meter. I explained the situation and ordered again, wondering if I was going to be charged three times for the one game.
Came the release date in the US and the son started camping out, waiting for his delivery. I had to explain that it would take at least a week to get over here, but he still wanted it NOW.
That was three weeks ago.
Ten days later he'd cooled down a bit, and one morning when I got back from dropping him off at school, there was a card in the letter box saying there had been a delivery but nobody home.
Bugger! More phone calls and waiting but by the time he rushed home from school on the next day, we had the package, and he raced off to install it.
Poked his nose out some time later to say it needed a patch and he was downloading it.
Typical. They work for a couple of years on a game, test it and release it and as soon as it hits the streets it needs a patch that takes half an hour to download and we're on ADSL.
Downcast when next I saw him. Game wouldn't run.
Worked my way through the error message, downloaded a new version of some DLL, made sure that it was in the right directory, downloaded the patch again and found out that we went past the error and hit a new one.
Probably memory.
Loaded the thing onto my laptop, downloaded the patch again and fired it up. The game needs 512meg and the thing was saying I had 511.2. Maybe there was some marked off or being reserved or Dell had shortchanged me, but bugger!
Went to the computer shoppe, got a half gig, had the chap install it, now I've got 764 megs or whatever. And a spare laptop quarter gig I'll never use.
Went home, hit the GO button. Same error.
More research on the internet, rummaging through all sorts of frothing afficionados and their gushing reviews. Turns out I need a better graphics card. Just bought one for son's machine last year and that was trauma enough.
Crap, I think, looking around at a house full of computers, none of which will run this dam' game. Do I buy some more memory and graphic card and whatever else I need to run it? How much is that going to cost?
So we all sit down and nut it out. DS will do a junk mail delivery run to pay for this thing, the alternative apparently being flipping patties at McDonalds, and he's not keen on that. So I've contacted the junk mail supplier to see if there's a local run for him.
And yesterday arvo I made the credit card glow a bit more as I rummaged through Dell's site.
They have their usual special limited offers and online specials, but the upshot is that DS is getting a new machine, and although I tried to keep the cost down, I upspecced it to get a wireless keyboard and mouse, and a better optical drive. It comes with a gig of memory and a 19" flatscreen. There's a printer in there somewhere as well.
Cripes! He's going to have a better machine than I have!
Much better.
Oh well, I've got enough to get by. I don't play any fancy games, and so long as I don't have more than fifty browser windows open at once, it all seems to work okay. What I might do is switch over to the laptop with the new memory and feed it through my existing monitor and keyboard, leaving this one as a file server. This will have the advantage and convenience that when I'm on the road I'll have my normal set up with me.
Back to DS's new machine. I checked the specs twice over against the game's requirements, but if this thing arrives, we load the game on, download that bloody patch abloodygain and it doesn't bloody run, well, there will be words said!
