Sheesh!

[firstfrost]

So, it turns out I haven't run Windows Update on my home machine for a while. So I did that, and installed an embarrassing number of updates. Then it rebooted, and maliciously set the display to 16 colors, 640x480. And insisted that it couldn't do any better than that. Many many reboots and assorted thrashings later, it was still stuck in fingerpaint mode, which I have to imagine tirinian wouldn't have appreciated for Starcraft, or even Zuma. On the bright side, I had bought myself a fancier graphics card just before no-buying-yourself-stuff month, and not gotten around to installing it. Ahah, I figured - that must have graphics drivers on the disk. So I took the old card out, put the new one in, and rebooted again. Yay! It was back to 16-bit color! I ran the driver installation program, which basically said "click 'next' a lot" - but it was still in 640x480, so the "next" button was off the bottom of the screen. Sheesh. (Okay, that was fixable). But "Buy New Hardware" is not really an acceptable side effect of installing security bugfixes.

Factoid One Shouldn't Know of the Day: the keyboard cable fits in the ethernet port, if you push a little. The ethernet cable does not fit in the modem port, or I would never have figured it out. It's kind of dim behind the computer.

Sadly, I can't give plusses to Apple, either, as the indirect instigator (*) of all of this was the fact that I can't get itunes to see the new ipod without reboots, either.

*: "Well, if I have to punt tirinian to reboot anyway, I might as well do more housekeeping..."

Comments

[pekmez.livejournal.com]

640x480 wouldn't hurt Kingdom Of Loathing much, and it would still be funny.
Not so much strategy, though.

[psychohist.livejournal.com]

Sadly, Apple's Windows programming is little better than other companies' Windows programming.

This is one of the reasons why I view Apple's switch to Intel processors with trepidation.