No one can nag better than children, I have no idea how they get that annoying feature into an art form. They’re so sweet as they go about it (most of the time, because in our household, if you nag obnoxiously, you just don’t get anything no matter how blue you get in the face!) but it’s like Chinese torture. It might take months to acquiesce to their requests, but acquiesce you shall!
That’s what that jumping, sweet, monkey in the previous post has been doing over the past few months. He wants a new computer which can run Guild Wars, a computer game which he has been continuously going on about that I just got fed up in the end and just gave in; I would buy him a new computer if he would pay half of its price. I would match the other half.
An opportunity presented itself a couple of days ago, we have had to upgrade one of the computers in the office, and its graphics card was no longer required. As the card in question is the good ATI Radeon X850 with 256MB of RAM on it which would comfortably run his most demanding games, I thought I would just get a box, tell one of the assemblers on the island to put quality components in there and deliver it. That was exactly what was done as they delivered it this morning, sans graphics card and optical drive, those I have contributed from old stock we had from demo machines, so the graphics card was accompanied by a Pioneer A06 DVD-RW drive.
Other bits and pieces in the box include 250GB drive, 1GB RAM, floppy (does anyone use those things now?) and a good box with front-access USB etc.
But the problem is they delivered the bloody thing with a pirated Windows XP on it! Now that would give the kid a good sense of right and wrong won’t it? So I called the buggers and got them to deliver a properly legal XP Pro, which I am installing as I type this in my son’s bedroom (pig sty might be a more appropriate term really! but that’s teenagers for you… I’m going to ignore that for the moment.) I wonder how long it will take to install this OS and all the other required updates and upgrades to bring the computer to a status where it is safe to leave in his hands to screw up within a couple of weeks!
That doesn’t matter, let the little twit run his games on this thing and get him off my back. I hope he enjoys it and it doesn’t interfere with his forthcoming studies too much (yeah sure… I have to have a solution for that one too!)
Comments
Correction: No one can nag better than women.
Guess you showed him!
Install Linux?
(runs for cover)
Shachar
So wrong, Cece. Kids do a much better job at it, really. They nag more, for sure. But they nag _better_ because they do it with cuter faces and are better at batting their eyes at you 😉
If you want a good game that can last a while (more then a while infact 😛 – 6 years and I’m not bored of it!) I suggest Half-life (Yes, the original – 2 is good but it lacks good modifications right now).
Mods + Online play = Hours of fun.
ATI X850 , excellent card , there is the pletinum one was the talk of all gamers arround the globe 😉
Yet i beleive Nvidia makes better Cards , less bugs and last longer …
Try Battlefield 2 , Huge 3d Engine that is …
P.S Tell the Kiddo he did a gr8 job on nagging 😉
lol !
Well, good luck finding time with your son, cuz guild wars will take most of his days playing online! Not sure whether he knows World of Warcraft (it’s a game, same idea), these games suck u in and u play for hours and hours on end.
the good thing though in WoW is that you can set ‘timed usage’ so that he doesnt play all night long or switch it on 4am in the morning (which by the way alot of people do with that game)
online gaming is the next step up from going outside with his friends, dont keep him glued to the screen for too long!
WoW is definitely addictive. I haven’t played it myself, but a couple of my friends have… one has been at it for almost a year. He’s recruiting our other friends to it as well… more good men lost to online gaming addiction… productivity suffers… the economy suffers… the EDB hurries up to think of new laws to clamp down on online gaming. “MoI blocks WoW as a result of a significant drop in the country’s GDP.” (Actually, they prolly will not give a reason.)
:O)
@ MooDy
nVidia cards are generally better because they have better OpenGL support then ATI cards.
ATI ditched OpenGL in favor of DirectX – While it doesn’t affect commercial games it does affect programs/open source games that use OpenGL.
IMO nVidia’s the king of GFX cards since their 6 series and before their 5 series to an extent.
Author
And you know why nVidia got to be better? Because a whole host of ex-SGI employees went across town and started it!
Author
Anon:
That’s exactly why I resisted for so long.
The agreement with him is that once school starts, he will do most of his school work at the breakfast table, away from his computer. I’m going to pin him to that, because if I find that he has be tardy, and believe me, his school will let us know especially in their cyclical parent/teacher meetings, he’s toast and so is his computer!
Author
Shachar, no need to duck, that’s what I’m in love with as far as servers are concerned. Desktop and gaming and 13-year-olds and Linux means frustration and chaotic life spent in support, which I simply do not want!
game addiction is a serious thing. The other half is addicted and nothing i do pulls him away, even walking naked infront of him…
…preparing to leave the household because of it.
Author
damn, that’s pretty bad! I’m sorry that it has reached this stage with you. Try to pull the plug or douse the gaming machine with water or slap him silly to wake him up!
The X850 is a pretty good card,
you can spend from $10 to $1000+ just for a good GPU,
an SLI setup can make you droll, but few people will benefit from ultra high res., AA and AF…
BTW, alot of people look at the GPU memory first, which is wrong, there are 10000+ other factors to look at…
good luck fining good hardware in this country, i get all my goodies from Dubai 😉
Author
This is the worst computer I have ever bought, and Mars Technology is the worst computer reseller on the island whom I shall have the pleasure of never dealing with them again.
3 power supplies have been changed, the first they charged me BD10 for, the remaining two I got another shop to do, at BD2.5 each for the same product.
the computer is still shutting down now and again. I think the motherboard is buggered.
I removed the ATI card and replaced it with an Nvidia 5500 because I thought the ATI was pulling far too much juice, not the case, the computer is still misbehaving even with the Nvidia in there.
I have spent hours trying to fix the bloody thing, and taken it back and fore to the shop, the amount of money that I have lost physically and time-spent would have been better spent buying Arif a G5 or an HP xW8200 with the best graphics.
If he comes and complains to me again that it doesn’t work, I’m going to throw the bloody thing in the pool, from the upstairs window and shoot a video while having that particular pleasure.
Bastards.
I told them what I wanted to use it for from the start, I told them the peripherals I wanted in it, and they assured me that all would be okay and compatible.
My big, bloated, festering, toe.
Don’t deal with Mars Crapology ever again!
Bastards.
If it keeps shutting down it’s probably a poor power supply.
Head to Saudi and get a quality power supply from there, eh?
This is why you should never buy hardware straight inside Bahrain.
I got lucky however, I got my pre-built from Nooh Infotech and it never faced problems even with my additions of extra RAM and a G5500.
The only downside is it’s 40 GB HDD which has forced me to keep everything extremely organized but even then – I have no breathing room lol.
I bought an extra HDD in Bahrain and after a month it somehow got Effed.
Same with my 2nd HDD.
Bah for crappy hardware.
On a sidenote – Macs SUCK for gaming.
Author
But there must be at least one shop here that sells decent parts, right? Come on, help me out, where do I get a good quality power supply for an ATX chassis (and don’t dare tell me to go to Mars!)
http://www.extreme.outervision.com/psucalculator.jsp
Helpful link ^ :).
‘Afraid not any that I know of.
I suppose I DO could help you with brands however.
I had a list somewhere but I lost it =(.
Mine’s a 300W Mercury – no problems at all, been running for 5 years now.
Comp specs :
2.4 GHZ Intel P4 Codename Northwood
1024 MB RAM (PC 3200 – 2x 512)
nVidia GeForce 5500 FX
Seagate 3400 40GB
4.1 Creative Speakers
Sound Blaster Audigy 2
Not quite the best but certainly better then 90% of CPUs in all of Bahrain =P.
I’m saving for a monster machine in 2007 right now.