Why Gamers Buy Consoles

My desktop system is underwhelming to begin with but I have had some frustration lately that affected my gaming choices. My obsolete discrete video card died but due to the installed apu I postponed getting another card. I was halfway through Assassin’s Creed Black Flag at the time. Much of my library became unplayable. So I went looking for appealing titles with low system requirements. I had missed the popular Mass Effect series so nabbed that when a bundle of the first two games went on sale.

I did finally get a new and powerful video card and erroneously believed that I could now play newer games. I could run games with higher system requirements but nothing released after 2015 thanks to a lack of RAM and the under powered apu. Within the limited titles I would actually like to play, I discovered that I already had PS4 versions of some of them. On the Linux side things were even worse. I still hadn’t upgraded Ubuntu 14.04 and there was no driver available beyond a very basic VGA driver for my card.

The path was clear here. I needed to upgrade Ubuntu and add RAM. There was another issue. I could not burn ISO files to DVD. I blamed the noisy DVD burner. I could and did create bootable flash drives for Windows 10 and Ubuntu 18.04. Santa brought me a gift certificate for a local computer store and I acquired an 8gb stick of RAM and a new burner.

You would think after years of upgrading and tinkering these things would go smoothly for me. But I am constantly behind the curve and I never think of everything. It’s always an epic learning experience that I have less and less enthusiasm for. I was anxious to do the Ubuntu upgrade so I started with that, first backing up important files. When I changed the boot order in the bios I noticed that the USB was labeled UEFI. “That could be a problem”, I thought at the time. Did that stop me? Of course not. Rather than install the new burner and try burning a DVD I tried to install from the flash drive anyway.

My Windows install has been upgraded twice from an OEM Windows 7 version installed from DVD. Well it was cheaper than a retail version. Is there a pattern here?

Grub was expecting a UEFI Windows install and couldn’t find the partition for it so my install was borked and I couldn’t start Windows or Ubuntu from the hard drives. For some reason it occurred to me for the very first time to try out my blank DVDs in another computer. Yeah I should have thought of that before seeing that the DVDs didn’t work there either. It might not have been the burner after all. Apparently buying stacks of DVDs is fine if you use about 100 per week but over years they can become defective as that whole darn stack had. At least I believe that is the case.

So off to the store to buy a handful of DVDs in plastic cases. My plan was to install a non UEFI version of Ubuntu. I was able to burn an ISO on the other PC but for some reason it was corrupted and would not load in a live version of Ubuntu. By this time I wasn’t really trusting anything. Multiple rebooting and trying different things wasn’t getting me anywhere until I rebooted with both the DVD and the USB stick in and with the DVD drive set first in the load order. This was purely by accident not by design. The installer vainly tried to load the live DVD in and then discovered the USB drive and loaded in Ubuntu from there. I thought perhaps if it didn’t boot off the USB then maybe it will install the old way. To my shock that worked. Both Windows 10 and the new Ubuntu install were accessible.

This escapade is short to describe but went on over a couple of exhausting days. I had absolutely no desire to begin renovating the desktop. I did buy a couple of games from the Steam Christmas Sale but decided to get Assassin’s Creed Origins for the PS4 and have been playing that instead. The Steam New Year’s sale finally prodded me to action. It is impossible for me to open a case and work on a system without bleeding on it but I managed to otherwise successfully install RAM and replace the burner and a case fan. For all that, things are marginally better. Sigh. At least the fan and the burner are quiet now.