I shouldn't have said anything; God, I just couldn't keep my fucking mouth shut.
Of course, as soon as I gave voice to the great things Vista is, it betrayed me. Fortunately, I have not had to re-install it (yet), but as I just broke down and ordered that 1TB internal drive, it's only a matter of time.
Yesterday, I left the Cylon running to see how it fared with BitTorrent. It went to sleep--and did not wake up. Okay, so we turn off the auto-sleep feature. I've still got my manual sleep, which is cool, because now I can finish all those programs that don't take too well to Leoben's narcolepsy, and give him a controlled dose of valium myself. Which I did at the end of the night as I went to bed.
When I woke up, I wanted my Cylon buddy with me, so I again attempted ressucitation. This time, he awoke, but seemed very sluggish and confused. So much so that my previously lauded sidebar crashed and would not restart. Then Windows Explorer crashed, and although it claims to have restarted, nothing I was clicking on was doing anything, and the task manager would not present itself, despite my vain attempts.
*sigh* We were doing so well, Leoben.
I assume the new thing that is causing the sleep function to not work properly is the anti-virus and spy ware. Avast and Spybot like to run system monitoring processes all the time, if you let them, and I bet this, "Wait! We're stopping everything for minute!" concept doesn't jive well with them. I'll have to play around and see if I can get it worked out.
I also received The Witcher: Enhanced Edition in the mail yesterday. I was so excited I locked my keys in my car--with the engine running. As it turns out, The Witcher is completely surrounded by disfunctionality, and I had merely moved into it's aura of influence.
While I bought it on eBay, for cheap, the buyer claims it was new and it had all the usual seals that mark software as such (though having worked in the games industry, I know all too well how to circumvent and re-inscribe these). Upon opening the case, I immediately saw that the design of the interior plastic had mauled my manual. Nothing too drastic, but it has cuts through most of the pages on three sides. This is "enhanced"? Okay, no biggie. I'll probably read it once, then put it away forever anyway. As I began reading it, I discovered it is not a manual at all, but a brick of a strategy guide, complete with spoiler warnings. Also included is the obligatory "put the DVD in your PC" document, as well as a brief excerpt from one of the Witcher books, which is so horribly edited that whatever atmosphere they were trying to create was shattered after the 12th mis-hyphenated word and improperly placed punctuation. I know we're going for gobal guys, but pay a local who is well versed to look things over.
In anticipation of the many technical problems I had heard of, I ran up the official website to see if there was a newer patch, and sure enough, version 1.4 is ready to go. The website redirects to a native Polish website (as CD Projekt is a Polish dev team) which has rough English and poor navigation, but I eventually found the download. Low and behold, the patch is a mighty 989MB (!) and even at the impressive 300k/sec rate they were pushing it out, it still took me over 30 minutes to get the whole damn thing.
As space was starting to become a premium on the Vista partition, I started poking around to figure out WTF was taking up so much space. Apparently, 8GB of RAM was not enough and the system had allocated another 8GB from the drive for a swap file. Christ, if I ever need that much memory, I'm betting my PC is having more problems than simply needing a swap file. I was tempted to turn it off, but all the warnings made me nervous, so I gave it a gig, but now I finally had adequate space to install the game.
Upon installing, I chose "Custom" to discover that the game wants to install voice-overs for every single one of nine the languages. Untoggling these almost halved the install size down to just shy of 9GB (though the box claims 8) and away we go. Once installed, I fired up the patch to discover it only needed 3.44MB of space. Then it dawned on me that the link only leads you to a site hosting the entire "Enhanced" package (which I already installed) for download with the most recent patch. I almost feel sorry for the guy looking at the bandwidth bills when he simply could have given me an English site with two different patches, one of which would cost him a few cents per download.
And by then, it was time for me to go to work, so I haven't even fired the game up yet. >_<
Game revision production FAIL.