Simple America

This is the last of the Power Player series of posts. If you missed any of the series they can be found at the following links:

1. Power Player 1
2. Power Player 2
3. Power Player 3
4. Power Player 4
5. Power Player 5. Eh hmmm. You don’t need a link. You are reading this now. Hello!

The PC has booted and shined its pretty blue lights. The BIOS recognized the peripherials enough so that the keyboard and mouse functioned. The hard drive was recognized and I had graphics for basic viewing on the monitor. This stage scared me more than any other. Slapping in cards, screwing in the boads and drives, as well as plugging cords was pretty easy. But if faced a blank monitor I would have been up a creek.

Since I can read the screen I proceeded to place the OS disc in the DVD drive. I loaded Windows XP Service Pack 2 onto the hard drive. This process took a couple of hours. This included formatting all 300 GB as can be seen below.

This is only the beginning of loading too. Several hours were spent loading all of the drivers, reading menus, downloading updates and getting the computer arranged to work logically. The order I suggest for loading software and drivers is first your operating system. Really, there is no option there. Next you should add any software that came with your mother board. Since everything processes through the mother board it only makes sense to load these first. But there are some exceptions. If you have a video card or sound board installed, you should be able to skip loading those particular drivers. This allows the system to avoid driver conflicts. Last I loaded the video card drivers and rebooted the system. Note the DVD had software, but this is for watching movies and burning and such. Not essential and usually not as good as other software available for purcahse. I did not load them as I want better software for this function.

After thre reboot the trouble bug reared its ugly head. The video card I bought did not like something. One thing on the Nivideo card I noted during installation is that  Microsoft warned it did not support this product in their approved vendors or something along those lines. But the manual said to ignore this and the card would work. Just download the most current drivers. And I did this and the big beautiful screen kept smearing the colors and it got just ugly. I spent hours on this card tweaking and poking. I even pulled the card out and popped it back in again.

Finally, I got fed up and repackaged the card. I loaded the motherboard video driver and plugged the monitor in the mother board’s VGA inlet.  The graphics were so much better. Unfortunately, not good enough to play Burning Crusade, the World of Warcraft expansion, but I could play World of Warcraft. But before loading on any games I loaded security software to give me a firewall and virus protection.

It took a few more hours to load World of Warcraft, which includes enduring all of the time spent downloading patches. It is so difficult to wait to play while all of this downloading is going on. Though I did spend some of this time at wowinterface getting my preferred addons ready. Once everything was loaded I enjoyed watching the cinematics on the 19″ screen. Really knocked my eyes out, drop down gorgeous even with basic graphics.

The next day I looked at Fry’s Electronics web page for Radeon cards. No way was I going to risk my time with another Nivideo card. I found a super deal on a VisionTek Radeon card at 512 MB for only $50 after the rebate. This card turned out to be cheaper and more powerful than the one I originally purchased. After work I went to Fry’s and had no problem returning the old card. And I found the VisionTek card I saw online.

So I took this bad boy home. I popped in the graphics card, which was not as easy I thought it should be. But finally got the card set and secured it with a nut. Loaded the drivers, updated them, and ran the World of Warcraft cinematic. Then I got a towel to wipe the drool off my chin. The graphics were so beautiful.

My next step consisted of a trip to System Requirements Lab to see if I can run Burning Crusade. This is a must link site for any PC Gamer. You go there to see if your system can handle the latest PC games. Find your game on the list and click the can you run it tab. This is my results for Burning Crusade.

Almost 100% green which is super. Not only did I meet the minimum requirements, I also exceeded the recommended requirements. Since I can play the game, I busted open the Burning Crusades and started loading it and then again patching the software.

Earlier, I did not open the box on the off chance that I might need to buy another copy of World of Warcraft too. But since the game runs off of a subscription service, my user name was recognized and logging on proved no problem. If I had to buy the basic game again I wanted to get the World of Warcraft chest, which has both games and user guides for both.

This ends the Power Player series. Mission accomplished, I can play Burning Crusade. I no longer crash every two hours from playing. Now I need to get some characters up to 70 so I am prepared for Wrath of the Lich King. That is the second expansion for WOW.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 19th, 2007 at 12:33 pm and is filed under Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.