Driver Issues

So on Thanksgiving (Black Friday, really) I did something I really probably shouldn't have done, and splurged on games. It was only two games, but the price was still around $100. I bought Hellgate: London and Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance. (As a side note, whoever decides on the titles of games in general needs to learn a thing or two about colon use. And overuse). Anyway, I haven't really played either game yet.

I realize my laptop won't be able to play the newest, coolest games with the best graphics because of the video card (Geforce Go 8600M GS) but it should still be able to cope with what I bought, especially SupCom. My video card meets the minimum system requirements for each game, and I believe it even meets the recommended requirements for SupCom, provided an 8600M GS is better than a Geforce 6800. Despite this, both games were running incredibly slow, even with the graphics settings turned all the way down. My friend Ankit suggested that it was a driver issue.

As primarily a UNIX user - and more specifically, a Linux and Mac user - I'm used to having my updates all in one place. In Fedora all I do is type "sudo yum update" into the command line and it fixes me up with the latest updates. In OS X it does it automatically (I'm sure I could do this in Fedora too, but laziness is a direct contender with efficiency, and it often wins out). With Windows, this apparently isn't the case. I've been regularly running Microsoft updates, but that hasn't updated the video card drivers, which my friend tells me that I'm supposed to update before installing a game.

I then tried the HP update application, which told me that I was missing a critical update: an update to the update application. After spending a few minutes getting my head around that, I ran the update application, which told me that my software and drivers were up to date. What? I ran it again, hoping it would somehow find an update this time (it didn't). Also, at some point I got this error message (luckily, the Internet wasn't busy, so the window loaded quickly. I guess the tubes weren't too clogged).

Finally I decided to download a driver update directly from NVIDIA, which I did. The actual install process was long and confusing, and it took a while for the installer to get between screens. There was a good 15 minutes of the install window just showing a repeating background featuring the NVIDIA logo before anything actually popped up.

It's now almost 2 in the morning and I haven't played either game. Hopefully when I get home tomorrow I'll be able to. Also, for anyone wondering why I vastly prefer OS X and Linux to Windows, you now have one of many reasons.

0 Comments