Hail All,
Markus here.
I just thought I'd let you all know that I've recently acquired a brand new computer so I should be able to rejoin my comrades on the battlefield soon... although, after five tries, I'm reasonably certain it won't be in WoW.
Ahem. The real reason I'm writing this to all of you now is that my brand new computer is... shall we say... less than operational.
Don't misunderstand. The internet works flawlessly, the system has a 500GB hard drive which is a major improvement over my other systems.
Everything works okay until I try to play games. I currently have three games installed on this computer and they all work reasonably well.. I have Flight Simulator X and Acceleration pack, I have the Sims 2 Double Deluxe with the University add-on pack and I also have Hard Truck: 18 Wheels American Long Haul.
These three titles I've mentioned above are currently the ONLY games I can play. For example.
I do have Mechwarrior 4 Vengeance and the Black Knight Expansion installed. But every single time I've tried to run those games... well, either it will go as far as playing the opening cinematic and displaying the Profile Creation Screen but any name I type in is flagged as invalid... or it just won't run at all. That was before. Now, with the help of some IT friends of ours, we can launch the game, but just after launch and before the cinematic I get an error message basically saying my hardware doesn't meet the minimum requirements for the game. Now, this is a brand new $670.00 computer, it was listed as a Gaming Machine on the site from which I ordered it. There should be no problem here, and yet, the problems persist.
And that, as they say, ain't all. I just convinced my big sis to shell out $28.00 or so for a brand new copy of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic Collection, that's KOTOR 1 and 2 bundled.
We unpacked, we installed, we built a character (Appearance,traits,feats,stats etc.) and clicked the well known "Play" button. Now, normally, you see a loading screen for a second or two with a blue progress bar dead center. The bar fills up and voila you're in the game. Unfortunately, we only got as far as the loading/transition screen when we discovered that nothing happens... the bar doesn't move, the game doesn't progress and is essentially locked, or frozen, in this state.
We tried downloading the latest patches for KOTOR 1 and 2, but all they did was unleash a gremlin that locks the game into what we call the WDB, or "Wrong Disc Bug". To start the game, as always, you put the disc in the drive for either KOTOR 1 or 2, click the associated icon on the desktop and the game launches normally. This new bug seems to have damaged that approach because a popup always appears asking for Kotor disc 1 (or KOTOR2 Disc 1). Even if the correct disc is in the drive, we've retried thousands... well... dozens of retries with no results.
So, with the exception of a few other glitches and gremlins, what I've got here is a nice expensive paperweight that can do everything except what, I hope, it was built to do.
The thing that irks me the most about this is that none of our techie friends seem able to agree on a single answer. I think, the problem is windows 7's utter inflexibility. He thinks it might be the Graphics card or other hardware. She thinks... well... you get the idea.
My Older sister has many friends who are apparently quite skilled at this sort of thing. But even a mutual techie friend of ours had to give up on the mechwarrior problem. So that means it's serious if he can't figure it out.
Help me lads/lasses, I long to return to the days of old where I could do my bit to serve the watchers of the realm.
