I’ve been playing the Starcraft 2 BETA for the past few weeks, and had seen warnings that some Macs were overheating from playing it. But having never had that as an issue, despite playing with high graphics settings and even recording a few movies in game here and there, I didn’t pay much attention. That is, not until my screen tore like the matrix had opened up on it.
The diagnosis from the Genius Bar, when I took the computer in last week, was my graphics card is fried. That’s right — coming up on the eve of a long weekend, and my gaming machine was toast. So i did what anyone would do, after sulking for an evening of no computer — I dug out my old laptop, which I’d gamed on from vanilla through BC, and started downloading patches. Patches for WoW, for firefox, for everything.
By Saturday, I was ready to see how it handled WotLK. As you can see above, I flew my gnome out to see Bolvar. Notice how much lower resolution this screenshot is compared to my usual ones. What you can’t see there is the 5 FPS and the yellow lag. I hearthed her to Dalaran…and had 1 FPS before lagging out.
Undettered, I hatched a new plan: I would roll anew DK. Their starting area was phased so perhaps the FPS and lag issues would be less horrible there. And thus I rolled myself a new DK, and enrolled in Psynister’s Deathknight Academy for Wayward Casters. My objectives were threefold: 1) get over my fear of melee 2) Create a toon to financially support my future worgen hunter and 3) keep myself from WoW withdrawl.
So far, I have met objectives 1 and 2 pretty well, with #3 only so-so, because my FPS issues out in the real world (including up to a 38k lag bomb that DCd me) mean that after I got out of the starting area I have mostly worked on getting her gathering skills up to Outlounds levels while chatting with the fabulous tweeps (@Psynister @Wowcynwise @fynralyl) on the server. But that nicely supports the building a financial base for the future hunter, so that’s a good thing.
I hope to have my computer back soon, and not miss out on Thursday’s 25-man ICC, but we’ll see what happens. And I think the moral to this story is: when the world hands you lemons, go roll an alt. Or something.
Sorry to hear about your computer. It really sucks when that happens. Mine blew up on me maybe 6-8 weeks ago and I had to go back to the laptop as well.
It’s just not the same when you’re used to .. well, being able to actually MOVE in Dalaran *lol*
I hope you’ll get your computer back soon!
Hehe yeah, even Stormwind is 5FPS. Dal at its best was 1 FPS and not DCing…hence my staying the heck away.
Crossing my fingers they are done with it soon. But so far no update.
Aaargh Matrix screen! I know how that feels – and it is not a good feeling.
My laptop should be back from the shop soon so my husband can get his old wreck of a computer back, but even though I only play on it for raids I have had no WoW withdrawal. Yet, at least.
Hope you get your machine back and running asap!
Thanks! This is the longest I’ve waited for a repair– Apple is usually not so slow. But the holiday weekend on Monday seems to have meant nothing happened until Tuesday this week for anyone.
Unfortunately for me, in this case, my SO and I raid together, so I don’t have a backup computer for raids. It was painful to sit and listen to the raid last night and not be able to go.
🙁