Reboot, Reinstall, RedHat

The cure to all of life's little Windows ills. What used to be known as "Service Pack 7.2".

Which is to say, I got my new video card, the Radeon 9250, which I must point out is a considerable downgrade from my old Radeon 9600XT, but is also considerably cheaper. Installed it, which involved rebooting (since my machine had crashed again), uninstalling the drivers, rebooting, reinstalling exactly the same drivers, and rebooting. Three reboots for swapping a video card is actually pretty good going for Windows.

Fired up Sims 2, and used the Pleasants of Pleasantview as my guinea-pigs. Life for the Pleasants soon took a turn for the worse, and within five minutes of coming under my malign neglect they had managed to burn down the kitchen, taking out Mr Pleasant and one of the teenaged daughter Pleasants. Mrs Pleasant came along just as the fire burned itself out and called the fire brigade, who showed up to find no fire and fined her 500 simoleons. Surviving teenage daughter wanders downstairs at this point at makes herself a bowl of Cocoa Pops for breakfast - the fridge being the only part of the kitchen to survive - completely ignoring mother's hysterics.

Cool.

As for the 9250 - it's not the card I'd recommend for playing Sims 2. At 800x600 resolution, it's sort of adequate, but that's a crummy resolution. Judging by the specs it's about half the speed of the 9600XT, and that seems to be reflected by the game. So a 6600GT, which is, again by the specs, twice the speed of the 9600XT, should be just the ticket.

Anyway, I'll just go and cancel out of Pleasant Manor so that they don't have to stay dead, and let it run for a while to see what happens.

Oh, and I spent the day fighting with a koala. More on that later.

Update: It seems to have been the card. No more crashes... Yet.

Update: Sims 2 at 800x600 on a cheap graphics card is better than Sims 2 that crashes every ten minutes. If it doesn't work, it doesn't matter how fast it goes.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:49 PM

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