Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Onlive (#2)

I'll have more about OnLive tomorrow (your e-mails), but here's an example of why someone is going to print money when they are able to actually get a service like this to work at an acceptable level.

Remember that I love King's Bounty, but can't play it because it keeps crashing in 64-bit Vista? That's with a GeForce GTX 260.

I downloaded some new drivers for the card about a week ago, but hadn't installed them yet. Why? Because dicking around with drivers often seems to turn into some kind of encounter with a dark overlord.

Case in point.

I install the latest drivers, the system reboots, and when I walk back in two minutes later, the screen is flashing at me incoherently at high speed. Nothing of my desktop was actually visible, except maybe the 1/2 inch at the top.

Which is really lucky, because at least 90% of the work I do in Windows is done in the top 1/2" of the screen. Or not.

So I reboot in safe mode, uninstall the drivers from there--oh, except the PhysX drivers (installed as part of the Nvidia package) won't uninstall because of some problem.

Well, this is no surprise, because I don't think I've EVER had anything involving a PhysX driver go right in the last two years (on two different systems). I don't think I've ever had a game use them successfully. For me, they've been nothing but PosX.

I go ahead and uninstall what I can--the separate Nvidia drivers--and reboot into Windows. Now, I seem to be able to uninstall the PosX drivers, AND there's another Nvidia driver listing to uninstall. So I do that and reboot.

Vista, of course, wants me to let them automatically install a driver, which I try to cancel out of, but when I try to run the Nvidia driver package (that I originally tried to install), it tells me that Windows is installing drivers and I'll have to reboot to let it finish.

So I do. I'm so pissed off at this point that I don't even want to screw with trying to install the latest driver, and maybe Vista used it anyway. So I check. No, I'm now using a driver from November, which is one version PREVIOUS to what I was using when all this bullshit started.

If anything thinks OnLive wouldn't absolutely rule if it works, then they're crazy. It would absolutely rule, because it would end us having to go through this b.s. just to play games. The question is whether it will actually work.

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