Tuesday 20 July 2004

Pic of the day: All that for this? (Badly mangled screenshot from City of Heroes.)

Gritting (blue)teeth

So I bought another Bluetooth adapter, this time for the portable. It took some time installing it, because the install program crashed with a cryptic error message. I tried to install again, this time to another folder. But when I tried to change folder, it crashed again, with the same error. I have to wonder how normal humans fare when pitted against such forces. I don't think there is much risk of the "multimedia PC" replacing the stereo and the TV anytime soon ...

I found another file on the CD eventually that worked. I later tried on another portable PC from the same manufacturer (HP) and with the same operating system, and then it worked fine right off the bat. And yes, HP is one of the main contenders to replace your stereo with a PC. I don't know if they'll use bluetooth to communicate within the house, though. Probably not. But I do.

It worked well enough, but running City of Heroes on the portable was not such a success. Oh, it kinda worked. But all things were dark, some things were transparent, as a lot of textures did not show up at all and the rest were in black and white. Black and black, except in bright daylight. The text still was in color, though, and some of the power effects that light up the night.

I am not very surprised. CoH is supposed to work only with NVIDIA and ATI graphics card, and this machine has a built-in intel graphics processor. It is more than good enough for PowerPoint presentations, and even some games. But DAoC really stressed it, and this is a couple years later. Time for another portable, I guess.