I want a new computer. Let me explain.

For starters, I got this computer (HP Pavillion zd7000 line) a little before my freshman year at college and I really love it. However, a lot of the letter keys are rubbing off at this point, the left screen hinge has begun to crack, and now my optical drive is acting up. But fine. I can deal with all those things. Afterall, I’ve basically left this thing on for about 3 years straight with the exception of carting it around on about 15-20 plane flights, going through about 3 complete reformats, installing all number of programs and downloading at a rate of probably I’d guess 1.5-2 gigs of data per day for various reasons.

Unfortunately, the graphics card it’s equipped with is this NVIDIA GeForce4 Go bullshit that is compatible with absolutely nothing. The only thing it can handle are games designed prior to, like, 2000 (I’m guesstimating, but you get what I mean). I actually like a lot of old games though. So, fine. However, the OS does not like trying to play those games that were designed for Windows 95 or anytime before that. It makes it kind of unstable and there’s a lot of crashing, restarting, debugging, running emulators, setting profiles, setting CPU cycles, etc. etc. So basically, there’s rarely a game that actually plays all that nicely on my computer. Grr.

Anyway, so I mentioned previously that I bought Psychonauts, and I found out after spending 3 hours getting it to install (my CD-ROM drive kept screwing up – I think the lens may be a little wonky) that I couldn’t play it because it’s incompatible with my stupid graphics card. Grr. Furthermore, my third favorite game of all time (Curse of Money Island comes in second) is Civilizations III. I was very, very excited about and following the development of Civs IV up until the point that I discovered my graphics card could, once again, not handle it.

So fine, I wouldn’t mind shelling out some cash for a new computer except — I don’t want to get another computer with XP because in a couple of years I’ll wish I had Vista. Secondly, I don’t want Vista until Service Pack 1 comes out because I don’t want to mess with the general buggy-ness that is Windows. SP1 is slated for the end of 2007, which means no matter what I have to wait until then.

That’s where I am. Honestly, I’m not that upset except I really wanted to play my game. :( Woe is me. What do I do?

This entry was posted on Friday, May 18th, 2007 at 4:18 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

Tags: Electronics, Videogames