Calgon, Take Me Away!!!

As previously mentioned on The South 40, I have some issues with the one and only game I play, Aces High. My faithfull old Dell died last year and I decided to replace it with a gaming computer just so I could play AH better than I could with the old generic Dell.

Fate is a fickle beast.

I bought an iBuypower 501 Gamer from Newegg with twice the power, RAM and video than I had before. It wouldn't run the game. It made me warp (jump from position to position) and had the other players accusing me of trying to cheat. The latter really pissed me off because I had just dropped a considerable amount of money to upgrade what was a system that ran the sim just fine.

After several months of working with the game's Tech Support and chasing software and configuration dead ends I finally decided to throw even more money at the problem and upgraded my system's memory and video. Mind you they were already a huge upgrade from my original system that ran the game smoothly to begin with.

Anyhoo, I buy $100 worth of new RAM and a new $120 video card ( + shipping)from a major online retailer that I've done lots of business with before. Other retailers has the card I wanted (Radeon 4770) for much less, but they were out of stock. This retailer had them in stock, but for $30 more than all their competetion. Probably the reason they had them in stock. So I bite the bullett and order the card. I even pony up the extra bucks for overnight delivery. I made the order last Thursday at 11am. It arrived Tuesday at 3pm.

Overnight my ass!

To add insult to injury, after installing the new video card, it will not work without an external power cable. A little fact left out of all the online documentation and the installation manual in the box. The cable does not come with the card, I learned after spending 2 hours on hold with their technical support.

Good news is they are sending me the required cable free of charge. Bad news is it will take 8 - 10 business days. Now they didn't say if it was 8-10 days shipping or 8-10 days to fill the order then ship.

When it absolutely, positively, has to be there overnight.

Meanwhile, while waiting for all this stuff to arrive after I've ordered it, I finally find a tweaked driver for my original card that gets the game to run almost as smooth as it did with my old system.

That's $250 that could have been spent on whiskey, women or other vices. Guess that's why I stay out of trouble these days.