Computers fail in packs: must be a cosmic rule.

[elfs]

Earlier this week, I started upgrading two of my computers: my laptop, and my colo. The colo never failed, thank the gods, but my laptop started to experience the worst kind of failures: random packages would fail for no apparent reason. I tracked this down to a "feature": GCC 4.1 has a different C++ ABI than GCC 3.4, one they say is more in line with the specification, but one which unfortunately breaks many C++ programs.

I spent two days letting the laptop churn through the updates, and then other things mysteriously started failing. No idea why, but they were important things: my PDF viewer, and my editor. When Emacs won't start, programmers panic.

I tracked it down: I had motif version 2.1 and 2.2 on my system, and during the upgrade 2.1 had mysteriously vanished, but many things were still trying to link against it. It took three days, but my laptop is running fine. Actually, I never lost that much functionality on it: Emacs was only down for a day, and I can still use VI.

But last night I had a jonesing to play something other than an ID game. I had acquired a copy of BloodRayne 2 for $4 (twice the price I paid for Daikatana, and probably not worth it), so I tried installing it. It wouldn't run. Neither would Tron, Half-Life 2, Warcraft III, or any game that required 3D. I checked: My video card is an eVGA GeForce FX 5500 w/256MB RAM, I have the right drivers, all of those games are rated for Windows 98, and Win98 says the driver is for the GeForce. WTF? I tried a number of different re-installs, but nothing seemed to give.

Sigh. Maybe I should upgrade GameOS to XP.

Comments

[sarienpalth.livejournal.com]

... or you could upgrade your OS to Windows 2000 if you want something a little more streamlined with lower overhead from bells and whistles. At first I was skepical when my boss said that Windows 2000 was a little more efficient from a resources perspective than Windows XP. I ran 2000 for a while, and I think he's right.

Just figured I'd toss that out there.

Pondering Sar

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

Do these games use OpenGL?

I hit a problem (with XP) where Windows was saying I had the latest driver, but it was a really old version of OpenGL that was supported. And stuff wasn't working properly.

Like you, GeForce hardware. I went to the nvidia site and downloaded the latest driver from there.

[(Anonymous)]

Sadly many pre-XP games that weren't designed to run on win 2k fail under XP, and dos games are out the window.

The ideal system is multiple boots with 98/XP, trouble is before long you might have to add Vista to the list though.