{"id":1723,"date":"2009-09-19T13:33:28","date_gmt":"2009-09-19T18:33:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.calvertgames.com\/cgblog\/2009\/09\/19\/painful-return-to-wow\/"},"modified":"2010-06-05T14:08:30","modified_gmt":"2010-06-05T19:08:30","slug":"painful-return-to-wow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.calvertgames.com\/cgblog\/2009\/09\/19\/painful-return-to-wow\/","title":{"rendered":"Painful return to WoW"},"content":{"rendered":"

After 18 months, last night on a complete whim, I decide to return to World of WarCraft<\/em>. After finding my finding my boxed version game \u2013 the older version with 5 painstakingly slow loading CDs \u2013 I installed the game. This took a good hour. At least it felt that way, but I was not closely watching the clock.<\/p>\n

After installing the software, the game downloaded a bunch of stuff (patches, installers, the typically PC gaming crap). Of course I ran into problems right away, which reminded me of why I despise PC gaming. I could not get the f\u2019ing WoW installer to work. Instead I got a nasty error message:<\/p>\n

Unable to install. You need to be an admin user to install world of WarCraft.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

WTF? I am using Vista and there is only one user. I started farting around with router settings with no luck. I was not too keen on turning off my virus scanner, but thankfully Google is only one step away. This error message<\/a> is fairly common for Vista users.<\/p>\n

Next up was more installing, patching, and the like. I guess my version of WoW was old enough to warrant 2-3 hours of downloading, including a new installer program. A little after midnight, I gave up for the night with the progress bar at around 61%. I think I started around 9PM, so after three hours of nonsense, I was still not ready to play.<\/p>\n

My youngest son kicked me out of bed around 5:30 this morning, and after another hour of installing stuff, it looked like I was finally ready to make a return to WoW!<\/p>\n

Ah, but nothing can be simple when it comes to PC gaming. I could not get the damn game to start. After signing into the game, I was presented with a blank screen. No buttons. No instructions. Nothing. The only thing I could select was the cancel \u201cbutton\u201d in the lower right hand corner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
\n

\"WoW<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n

What happened to the buttons?<\/em><\/c><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n

Next up was a lot of searching. Much like my experiences with The Hunter<\/em>, it looks like the Dell Inspiron 1525 is just not cut out for gaming. I thought I was at a dead end, but then I came across this UI corruption and GMA 965 chip set<\/a> thread. While my drive update did not go exactly as outlined, this did fix the problem.<\/p>\n

So I was able to get started again in Arathor with Tuldar (Dwarf L15 Hunter), Kaldur (Dwarf L14 Priest), and Faltutin (Gome L39 Mage). I entered the game again with Tuldar, but I really do not remember how in the heck to play the game. Not sure if that is a good or bad thing. I am sure things will come back to me straight away, but I am not considering just starting over with a new character.<\/p>\n

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