As graphically indicated earlier, I have acquired Total War: Shogun 2. This is probably not a good idea. If I take the time to get into the game, I will love it and there will several missing days and many late nights as a consequence. If I don’t take the time, then it will join others in the Total War series that have failed to inspire me and become yet another game I bought but never played (and there are several).
But I gave much of my life to the first Shogun game, some ten years ago, and the reviews for this one are glowing, so I better give it a go. Just have to install it on Windows.
And there’s the problem. One of the disks in my Mac was given over to a Windows XP install. It coughed along for a while but expired several months ago with the always beguiling blue screen of death. What the hell, I had Xbox games, Ipad games, and even some games on the Mac; so I could live without Windows. But now I have the need.
Not wishing to live with XP again, it was off down to Tuk Com for Windows 7.
Hello, I would like Windows 7 please.
Here you are, 100 baht.
No, not a copy, I want an original.
Uh?
Original.
Uh?
O-R-I-G-I-N-A-L. No have.
Eventually I found it, although of course it had to be the faintly illegal OEM version.
Back home and I boot up the Mac, tell it where I want it to install Windows, and away we go. Except we don’t.
Windows tells me it can’t do the install and provides me with a summary of the problem and a bullet point list of how to resolve the issue. Sorry, that was a joke, of course it doesn’t do that. It says Error 0x80075677783805, or something similar. Bastard, just like the old days.
Back to the Mac and I play hunt the error message. Eventually I find something, on a Mac forum, which explains that nobody understands what the error code actually means, but if I remove some of the hard drives from my computer, it might stop spitting out that message. I have five hard drives in my Mac, and I told the Windows installer which one to use, which coincidentally was the only one formatted for Windows. You would think it would just get one with it, but no. I don’t like those other hard drives watching me while I install, I get embarrassed. It’s all too confusing, I just can’t cope. Here, have an error message.
So, off with the side panel and I slide out three hard drives, leaving the my boot drive and, hopefully, the Windows drive.
It’s around this time (about 2200) that she who must be obeyed calls. She is with her family attending to the death of a grandfather who wasn’t really a grandfather but she has to go anyway. She is surrounded by relatives and very bored. I am surrounded by hard drives and a little worried as to the outcome. I confirm that I am going to bed really soon because yes I need my sleep and I have to go take photos in the morning and yes I have fed the cats and yes that thing I am drinking is water and not my third gin and tonic and goodbye talk to you in the morning.
OK, back to the job in hand and this time Windows 7 plays nice and installs in about 30 minutes. Then I stick all the drives back in and make sure everything is as it should be, and by now it is getting on for 2300 and indeed I am a little weary and could install Shogun tomorrow.
But “could” is such a flexible word and it is sometime after 0200 when I crawl off to bed. I think Shogun 2 is going to be epic.