So Margie got all of City of Heroes and its related patches in and …
… got all sorts of errors about how her video card didn’t support functions X, Y, and Z, meaning she was S, O, and L.
Downloaded the latest driver, which took care of Y and Z (and thus O and L), but didn’t do much for X (and thus S).
Hrm.
So she called me, and I ducked over to Best Buy, the Insidiously Convenient Tech Store Near the Office.
Now, I’ve intentionally stayed away from the whole video card thing, which tends to be focused on gaming fanatics who spend zillions of dollars to get stuff with the highest frame-rate-pixel-DDR-mega-buffer-socket bits and argue over it with a ferocious take-no-prisoners passion usually reserved for theologians and talk show pundits.
Eek.
So I really haven’t dealt with anything having to do with video cards since it was my job to crack open cases at the office and put in dual-head video for the CAD stations. So it was with some trepidation that I approached the video card aisle.
That I approached it “backwards” and started with the expensive $350-500 cards didn’t allay my fears.
I’d picked up a CoH box, so I had the minimum and recommended video configurations. And, of course, I didn’t see any thing that exactly matched.
And so I was reduced to seeking help from one of the passing BB Guys, who, frankly, didn’t seem to know a huge amount more than I did (though he knew enough to point out that, yes, one of the cards on the list was up on the shelf).
And then came the question — did Margie’s Sony Vaio computer have an AGP socket? Or did I need a PCI card?
Well … crap.
(Ponder, ponder, ponder.)
Ended up going with a different card than BB Dude recommended — a PNY nVidia GeForce FX5700LE. I went with AGP because, if the Vaio had it, then I wanted to use that, rather than the PCI. And I could always return it, right?
Got back to the office. First off — what Vaio model do we have. Hrm. No reference to it in the blog. Rats. …
… and then I found a reference to the reference page for the Vaio at Sony’s site — for our model: PCV-RX360DS. Where, in turn, I found a completely worthless Users Guide … and some marketing info that shows … yes … an AGP slot!
(And, yes, though a PIII/866 is close to the minimum specs for CoH, it’s still a scosh above that, and the 512Mb RAM should help … and the GeForce FX5700LE is above the recommended spec just a scosh.
Now, as long as it’s the right kind of AGP slot, I should be relatively home free. (He said, with great optimism.) Though, to be sure, the minimum specs include using (!) a 56k modem. Gads. It looks like it should be, though — found one ref to this Vaio having a 4X AGP slot, and the FX5700LE is referred to as being 4X/8X.
Hmmm. Looks like someone has gone through this (or close enough), but didn’t leave much info. This thread on the other hand seems to be full of people who seem quite certain of what the correct course is when dealing with going from onboard video to a video card … not all of which courses are the same. The Sony site seems to indicate for my model that it should autodetect the video card going into the AGP card, which would be the ideal, for sure …
We shall see. We’re having dinner out so we can go a Kindergarten orientation at Katherine’s pre-school tonight, so I’ll have to screw around with this after we get home. Crossing fingers …
(Now I remember again why I’ve usually avoided the whole video card thing …)
UPDATE: And the card is pretty, and has heat sinks a-plenty, and a fan. On the bright side, this should also resolve a problem that Margie was having with another game (SimRestaurant or something like that) she got a while back. Not that she’ll ever want to play another game …
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***Dave Does the Game
…all of which is why I just got Jackie a new (well, refurb) Dell desktop when her machine went kaputs, after finding out (a) that such initial video negotiations are fairly common and (b) I had utterly dodged that bullet with both my own one-year-old PC *AND* the new laptop, simply because Dell puts compatible stuff in by default. 🙂
We’ve been thinking about taking her old machine and repairing the problems to give to Justin… but at 200+ for a new video card, and about 120+ for (a) more memory and (b) a replacement HDD… well, I can get a refurb Dell desktop.
Which isn’t to say you didn’t do the right thing *in this case* — my strong belief is that processor speed (and, in fact, connection) is far less important than the amount of memory (and, yeah, video card/memory).
My opinion on this comes from the MASSIVE upgrade in performance on my home desktop that I experienced when I upgraded the memory — every part of my machine was well above even the *recommended* specs for the game, except for memory, and the thing still ran DOG SLOW, especially when switching zones, which sometimes took several minutes or more.
Memory upgrade: everything was blazingly fast, as it should be.
My god, I got moved into moderation — what’s the world coming to? 🙂
You (idiomatically) referenced canines by their more common Anglo-Saxon name — which, alas, I have had to put into the send-to-moderation list because some folks send out comment spam referencing prurient materials featuring such critters.
Stan has had the same problem at times in making references to equines.
(Mutter mutter mutter …)
We’ll see how Margie’s machine does … once we get it running. 🙂
I definitely suggest atleast a gig of memory for MMORPGs. It’s amazing how much going from 512 to 1 gig helped.
Got home, dropped in the card, rebooted, all went dismayingly smoothly — just the sort of thing to lull you into a false sense of security re plug-n-play that will seriously screw you next time around. Machine runs the game just fine.
Margie got a bit of a jump on me by building her new account’s first character on my notebook whilst I diddled with her video card. It was only when I ran a new character myself through the Tutorial and couldn’t find her that we realized she’d built it on the wrong server, so she had to go back to it.
Then we teamed up together until after midnight. Fun, indeed. I froze ’em up, she knocked ’em down. More on the characters tomorrow later today.
Heh. Yeah, Best Buy was a lot like this.