Good hardware, bad brainware

On February 9, barely a week ago, the video card stopped working on my XP machine. When I pulled the plug on it to fix it, I accidentally broke the power supply to my Vista machine, which runs The Sims 3.  I had to use Ubuntu Linux to get it up and running again at all, and then Vista spent some time repairing itself, restarting once or twice.  When it finally worked again, it would not play several of my Sims 3 savegames, including the latest. I don’t grieve overlong over little computer people, so I started a new game, which I have been chronicling briefly in my Sims journal.

Today I got the package with the new video card. It was cheap, being only a mid-range card after all, but even so it is easily the best I have had. It seems that even though computers have not made much progress these last three years, video cards have.

Me, I have not even made progress in a week.  When I unplugged the computer to put in the new and better card… yes. I accidentally pulled the plug on the Vista computer. I had to use Ubuntu to get it running, then it spent a while repairing itself. And as I suspected: When I started Sims 3, it had no idea how to run the latest savegames.  Or their backups. I have the same software, running on the same computer under the same operating system, but it has no idea how to run the same saved games it ran last night. Good job!

If I for some reason have to take apart the main computer again, I will probably crash the Vista computer again. These things are not very high on my list of things to remember, I’m afraid.

Actually, I should probably not be afraid of that. There are more fearful things in life (and afterlife, presumably) than that.

But at least I think this brings home my lack of perfection, eh?

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