Since my last post I was able to get the computer completely up and running.  I installed World of Warcraft on it and it took a few days to get it completely patched up so it would play.  Nevertheless, it worked and everything was happy with that computer.  Now that I had one computer running, I needed to get another one working too.  I didn’t really want to play online games without “Chad” so I would have to figure out a way to get another computer working so we could play together.

My laptop had been able to play games, but I had since messed something up and could no longer get the games to run.  If I wanted to get a game working I would need to format my computer and reinstall everything.  That idea doesn’t thrill me and I only wanted to do that as a last resort.  We did have another computer that we bought for $50 from the university’s refurbished computer sale, but it didn’t have a good graphics card.  I figured it was worth a shot to get it running since I found mention of people running World of Warcraft on it online.  “Chad” installed FreeBSD on it as the operating system and then afterwards I installed all the needed items to get the game working.  Everything installed fine so I fired up the game to see what would happen.  The login screen for the game came up but it is supposed to be animated and have moving graphics and unfortunately this time the graphics moved about once every 15 seconds.  That meant the game was unplayable.

I tried everything I could think of to see if I could get the game to run better, but nothing made a difference.  At that point I decided I would just put in a different graphics card, since I had some from our other dead computers.  I opened the case and was trying to swap things out when I realized that the cards we had wouldn’t work.  They were too old and the computer we had was using newer technology.  Curses, foiled again!

I then came up with another idea.  People seemed to be able to get the game working on Windows with the same graphics card, but we didn’t have another copy of Windows available.  I remembered that the new version of Windows was currently in beta testing and they give it out free to people to test it.  I quickly went to the Microsoft site to get it so I could install it on the computer.  I decided to look at the minimum system requirements and felt a wave of disappontment.  It required a minimum of 1 GB of RAM and the computer only had 512 MB.  Based on my experiences with other software, I assumed I wouldn’t even be able to install Windows 7 with less than the required RAM.  This information now meant that I’d hit another big road block in getting another machine able to play MMORPG games.

At this point, the choices were to buy a new graphics card or get more RAM.  More RAM may even help the graphics problem without having to install a new operating system, so we decided to hit the stores around town.  As we approached the stoplight near our apartment, some guy was holding a sign for Circuit City going out of business.  We figured we’d check it out and see if we could find some good deals.  At the store, we found some RAM that would work in the computer so we bought it for about $30.  Excited about more RAM we went home and put it in the computer and then fired up WoW.  I had my fingers crossed with the hope that the opening screen would be moving around instead of frozen.  Everything loaded up and to my horror, everything looked exactly the same as before.  The RAM made absolutely no difference.

That same day we decided to go to the other stores around town that had computer parts.  To add to the disappointment of the day, while in Best Buy we discovered that the same type of RAM we bought at Circuit City was on sale at Best Buy.  They were selling 2 GB sticks for $39.00 and we had bought a 1 GB stick for $30.00 at Circuit City.  All sales were final at Circuit City, so we couldn’t even take it back.  We browsed video cards at BB, but everything was at least $99 and I didn’t think it was worth it to buy a nice graphics card when we didn’t have a nice computer to go with it.

After all of that, I had one more idea.  Since we found that we had two bad power supplies before, I decided it might be worth it to get a new one and test all of our hardware again to see if it really didn’t work or if it had just been the bad power supply.  We get a new power supply and I hook all of the computer hardware up again.  I plug everything in and press the power button.  Nothing happens.  I sigh and curse the bad luck.  I figured I’d let “Chad” give it one more shot, since he was able to get things working when I couldn’t the last time.  After swapping some things around, we determine that the power supply works and that the motherboard of my old computer is indeed dead.  This discovery pretty much ended any hopes of getting something else working without spending more money.

Throughout all of this difficulty, I have wondered if it was just a sign that I shouldn’t start playing online games again.  Of course, now that I’ve gone through all of this work, I’m taking it as a challenge and I plan on defeating this monster that’s trying to hold me back.