Joleine Blog

Why I never let my husband go shopping alone.. or, how I got a new computer.

Jul 07, 2008

So a couple of weeks ago when I was laid up on the couch with a borked up back I sent Mike to the store to get me a new heating pad, he also needed a lamp of sorts..

That was my first mistake, letting him go shopping on his own!

He came back with 2, yes 2 copies of Age of Conan. He wanted us to play together.. Ooookay. So I’m reading the back of the box and thinking back to the parts my lovely laptop have inside and I’m telling him “UM, I don’t think I can play this.” Mike is convinced I’ll be able to play, wont be a problem he says. My main concern is that the game requires something like 32gb of hard drive space.. Windows uses up like 20someodd GB’s of space to run, and I’ve only got a 70gb (laptop) hard drive to begin with! So, after uninstalling EVERY SINGLE program that I do not use, and moving EVERY SINGLE file to Mike’s desktop, we start to install AOC. No go on the first try (which took like 3 hours) .. so, after trying a few hours of fixes, etc.. we go to bed. The next day after work Mike does a fresh reinstall and when I try to play the game it tells me that my video card drivers are not new enough. Well, after much messing around on the Nvidia site we find that my drivers are the NEWEST available.. Instead, my video card just isn’t good enough to play this damn game.

Mikes suggestion? Was it buy a bigger hard drive and newer video card? nooooope.. Lets buy a new computer all together!

Okay, not quite what I wanted to throw down a chunk of money on, but whatever you say dear. (Although secretly, I was kind of getting excited)

So he picks out a bunch of parts on Newegg and the following weekend we head down to Fry’s to see if they have any of the parts cheaper/no shipping.. We ended up picking out some different parts for certain items and saving some money overall. 3 items still had to be bought from Newegg though. The last of the goodies arrived on July 3rd, so we went home that night and I, yes *I* put my computer together. All by myself.. well, mostly. Mike helped with the CPU and the Heatsink and helped hold the computer until it just got to be too heavy and annoying. Then I did the rest all by myself. The dang thing even booted up right on the 1st try. WOoohoo. However, I had the hard drives plugged into the wrong Sata port thingies and Windows (Vista, 64 bit baby) thought they were both “slaves” and got confused.. So I had to turn them around. Other than that, everything is working spectacularly!

Check it out!

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