D'BLOG

The Blog of Dabido (the Baka one). Everything in this blog is copyrighted. Copyright 2004, 2005, 2006 by D. Stevenson.

16 December, 2005

Problem Solved

I put in a problem to Activision regarding an issue with Medieval - Total War. The reply came back that basically they couldn't solve the issue. Even though they list my graphics card as one which runs the game, they basically wrote back saying that they can't get it to work. Today, I received an e-mail, which basically said, 'Because you haven't contacted us, we have changed the status of your issue to - SOLVED' Um, great, they count that as SOLVED, 'We can't fix it, therefore, Ipso Facto, it must be SOLVED.' Like, what am I supposed to do, they send me an e-mail saying they can't fix it, then send me another one saying that because I didn't reply the problem is therefore solved. Like, what did they expect me to do, write back and say, 'That works ... by sitting on my friggin' hands and staring at the screen it automatically solved the issue, oh thank you,thank you for telling me friggin' NOTHING!!!!!' I really get p***ed off by the stupid games suport. It's not just activision, it's other companies. I bought Dungeon Keeper II years and years ago, and it just didn't run. I e-,ailed support ... I waited ... and waited, and never ever received a reply. So, after about a month or more, I sent another e-mail ... and waited ... eventually I got a reply telling me to take it back to the shop I bought it from and get another copy. The shop didn't (and still doesn't) accept returns on items where the product has been opened (in case you burned a copy), so I was caught between a rock and a hard place. I've lost count of the amount of games I own that I just can't get to work with the hardware I have. In the case of Dungeon Keeper, apparently I wasn't the only one. I searched for a solution on some of the 'support' chat sites, and found other people had a similar issue, but no one had a solution. Of course, it wasn't as bad as the support I received from Microsoft back when I tried loading Win95. I loaded it on a machine which used to run Win 3.1 and Linux. Both ran okay on the machine, but I wanted to update to Win95. I removed Linux altogether, and loaded Win95 on a clean Hard Drive. After installing it, it kept having problems. As soon as I tried to run it, it had an error. I phoned the MS help line, and the guy told me I had a virus. BULLSTUFF!!! He then said I was running illegal software and that was were the Virus had come from. BULLSTUFF!!!!! I told him it was brand new Win95 and nothing else was loaded. He then told me it was my hardware. My hardware was cheap and nasty and I needed to replace it. I told him my CPU was 100% Intel Pentium and the rest of the hardward was all name brand stuff, like my Soundblaster sound card. He then told me that Win95 needed the best hardware to run on, so I had to go out and buy a new PC with only the most expensive hardware. Now, that's what I call 100% BULLSTUFF!!! I wonder what Bill Gates would have said if he heard that sort of non-sense coming out of the mouth of his support staff. It's people like that guy who turn people onto Linux. I ended up running Win95 (after loading and reloading half a million times), and eventually also loaded Linux back on the machine. The Win95 ended up over running the Linux partition (which p*$$3d me off no end). I don't think there was a time I ran Win95 without it crashing. I often wonder if it was something really simple which could have been fixed, but the support guy was just too stupid to help fix it. I hope his superiors listened to the call and sacked him ... but alas, probably no such luck. To this day, I've had less problems with Linux than I have had with MS products. The only reasons I run MS, is simply because of the games ... but I'm tempted to load a linux partition on this machine, but the hard drive is so friggin' small! Well, it's 100GB ... but that's so darn small!!!! :-)