Yesterday I helped my girlfriend upgrade her Toshiba Portege M400 from Windows XP to Windows Vista.  We stuck the Vista CD in the drive and booted up.  The computer recognized the CD and brought us into the setup program.

Unfortunately – Vista did not recognize her RAID driver.  Consequently, it didn’t see her hard drive.  We stopped by Toshiba’s support site and got the file.  Their instructions said to put the file on a USB drive and then point the Vista install to it…we did just that.

Unfortunately – after browsing to the USB drive location Vista failed to find the driver – their instructions were wrong.  We rebooted into Windows XP.  We tried extracting the file by double clicking it.

Unfortunately – it just opened the installer, and tried installing the Vista driver on to Windows XP…not cool.  luckily, Windows XP still worked.  Once we got back into XP we installed WinRar.

Fortunately – Winrar allowed us to extract the files (without launching the installer).  We extracted the driver files onto the USB drive and rebooted into the Vista installer.  Once we pointed the installer to the extracted files everything worked well.

We decided to eliminate the recovery partition since she ordered a recovery disk from Toshiba.  We used the Vista partition manager to delete both partitions that were on the machine.  We then created a single partition with all of the disk – we gained about 7 GB of storage.

To finish off the install we went through all of the driver and utilities that were available on the driver site and then ran Windows Update a few times.  Everything seems to be working as good or better than in XP aside from the fact that it keeps asking us to install Microsoft’s Malicious Software Removal Tool...but that is a battle for another day.

Hopefully this helps someone out there – if you have any questions just leave us a comment!

I received an email this morning regarding Blizzard’s new recruiting program.  The system they had in place before seemed reasonable – a veteran player received a month of free play time for each recruit they referred.  Blizzard just stepped things up to make it ridiculous; veteran players now receive the following benefits:

Free Mount

For each recruit a veteran player recruits they gain a free in game mount.

This is slightly unfair, but definitely the least offensive part of this promotion.  Mounts are so easy to come by these days I don’t think this will get to many people upset.

Summoning Ability (for 90 days):

The veteran player and their recruit will have the ability to summon each other anywhere in Azeroth (below level 60).  It seems this ability will be similar to hearthstones, carrying a one hour cooldown.

This seems like a distinct advantage over ‘normal’ players; if I were still playing I would become upset over this.  There are lots of times that having this ability would have come in handy.  I don’t think it is fair that this ability is only available to those that give Blizzard more money through referrals – as though their 15/month isn’t enough for them already.

Triple Experience (90 days)

While experiencing with your recruit both of you will receive triple experience for both quests and monster kills.  This triple experience can not be stacked with rest exp, or with multiple recruits in the group.

This is an obvious advantage over other players (who don’t recruit people).  Imagine if you were new to WoW and did not recruit anyone.  Even if you played 24/7, you could group with someone one day and they could be 3x your level the next just because they were a recruit.  This would turn me off quickly.

Free Levels (90 days to give)

Literally.  Every two levels the recruit gets, they have the ability to grant a lower level character on the veteran’s account a level.

They literally don’t have to do anything!  It is feasible with this model that a veteran could level up a character to 60 without even leaving their home city.  This is ridiculous!  I don’t know why Blizzard thought this would be a good idea, but it is not.  This will strike up a lot of animosity between ‘normal’ players and people who recruit like crazy.

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I can say one thing for certain – I am happy I quit WoW to return to EQ2 back in early June.  It seems that Blizzard is dead set on making WoW as easy as possible for people. Unfortanetly for them, I think they missed the mark on this one.  I believe this is going to create more ill will between the player base & Blizzard than it will do good.

Why is Blizzard doing this?  Are they sensing that their reign on top of the MMO mountain is coming to an end?  Are they feeling the pressure from the release of WarHammer?  Are they just plan losing it?

I don’t know – but they need to do something to fix this soon.  I will leave you with this thought:

In America each person is created equal, apparently in Azeroth this isn’t the case.  Some people are 3x better off…

I knew when I first created Xailia in Everquest one that I was a straight laced kind of guy. I was not taken in by Dark Elves or by the Gnomes – I wanted my character to look as similar to me in real life as possible. Now, I could have created a human to really go for the affect, but they have no benefits for the Wizard class (back when races in MMOs actually mattered). So, I decided on a High Elf. Throughout the years (and the games) each time I recreated Xailia I always make him a magic casting high elf or whatever is closest. I just can’t break the streak.

Greldor started out as a ranger, than tried a bard – he ultimately went through just about every class EQ had to offer. He ultimately settled on being a Shadowknight – he has been committed to tanking in every game we play. He hasn’t really shown an interest in one race or another though – he will do whatever. He has been anything from a Dark Elf to an Troll.

Landuran has played every type of class and each time we start a new game (or start over) he tries some new combination. He doesn’t seem to be stuck to one type of character or race. Currently he is settled in as a Druid. He has been a Gnome, a High Elf, and everything in between.

So how do you select your character’s look and class for that matter?

I was watching Family Guy the other night; it was the episode where Peter has a segment on the local news: “You Know What Really Grinds My Gears?”.  This post will be the first in a long series.

This got me thinking about the things that grind my gears in MMOs.  I will post them one by one:

Cheaters

Those characters that think everyone else is beneath them.  They have no respect for the game or those around them.  What?  You think you are soooo special because you could solo some raid content? You think you actually earned that awesome gear you are wearing?

Don’t tell me you actually think people respect you or are jealous of you.  You, cheater, are ignorant and worthless.  It really grinds my gears to see you steal a mob at the last moment or to sell 100k on eBay.  I hope that ultra fast horse you are riding kicks you off and leaves you in the middle of the Oasis.

Don’t tell me you actually get a sense of satisfaction from cheating…all you are experiencing is a distorted and misinterpreted sense of guilt.  You are as bad as they come – you grind my gears.

So what grinds your gears in MMOs or anything for that matter?

I have a few plans for Linux tutorials to write out for the site, but before I invested to much time I wanted to get some of your opinions.  So, what would you like to see a tutorial on?

The patch notes are out (EQ2 Flames)!  They have outlined some of the big changes:

• Station Voice is now available!
• Equipment changes have been introduced to improve item progression from levels 1 – 59 worldwide.
• Check out the sections below for details on these highlights and other details of “Storm Break” (GU47).

LIVE EVENTS

• “Storm Break” (GU47): Librarian Feldarn of Freeport’s Academy of Arcane Science and Librarian Dungil of Qeynos’ Concordium are looking for volunteers to help battle the onslaught of darkness from beyond.
• Qeynos and Freeport have broken ground on major construction projects just off of the coast of Antonica and Commonlands respectively. Visit the docks to see the new activity!

STATION VOICE

• A new Voice Bar will appear that provides options and indicates who is currently speaking and when you’re talking. It can be docked with any chat windows.
• A new Voice Users window will show all users in the current channel. This window can be changed to be transparent and show only active speakers if you’d like.
• Group and Raid windows have speaking indicators to show who is currently speaking.
• Voice options are available in the Options Menu under the “Voice Chat” tab.
• If you’re not currently in a voice channel, you will be placed in the first channel that becomes available. Subsequent channels that become available can be selected through a drop down on the Voice Users window, a button on the Voice Bar, or a link that appears in text chat.
• Left Control is the default push-to-talk key. You can change the key in the “Voice Chat” tab of the Options Menu.
• If you need more info, do “/help vchat” in game.

I am excited to log in tonight and see if any of my 1-59 items have increased in value and also to check out the voice chat.  I’ll make a post soon with a review of the voice chat system.