Mad at Microsoft

We have a 2002-vintage Athlon 1800 whitebox running Win2K in the living area that’s used for slide scanning and games; the kid plays Tonka construction games, and he and I both occasionally dip into the Need For Speed series. Nelson Minar wrote a piece on Eve Online that made it sound interesting and different, so I thought I’d take a look. Eve would load but not run, looked like a video driver problem, so I went and got what looked like the latest for the old GeForce 2 Ti from the NVidia site, and by following the instructions precisely, reduced it to 640x480 pure-VGA mode. Lauren (designated Windows hack around here) was able to get it more or less working again but now it runs neither Eve nor Need for Speed. (Yes, we have the latest DirectX and all the Windows updates and all the obvious things). Well... could get a nice new Mac and dual-boot it as a games box. Or could update it to WinXP which would probably come with the right driver-ware by default. Of course, both of these mean buying XP. Off the shelf, the Home upgrade is C$150, but we can’t use that because it only upgrades from 9x and ME. The XP Pro upgrade is C$250. Which is totally, completely, insanely, exorbitant. And I ain’t gonna pay. Goodbye, Need for Speed.