My Excruciating Wait

[Shadow8]

March 4th,the day after Empire Total War came out, and i picked my preorder of it up at EB games, my new computer, ordered to play ETW, arrived. i was in glee a brand spanking new pc: Radeon 4870 512mb, AMD Athalon 2x 3.0ghz, 4gb ram, and a new 29' HD AOC monitor to view it on. saturday night i put the machine together, only to find my hard disk refused to format with windows XP. 5 days later (after testing bootable disks and floppies that wouldn't work) i bought windows VISTA ( i wanted Dx10 anyways). my drive formats and after a little work, friday night i install ETW and get six hours of orgasmic imperialsm in. the next morning i played for a while before having to leave for a relatives party.
upon returning home my first instinct was "Kick Prussia's BUM!" and i turn my computer on, after about 20 minuets however, it just shuts down. to no avail i attempted to boot it for three hours, finally being forced to reset the CMOS. only ten minuets later to find it again crashes. "hmm" i thought, "what could be the problem now, i didnt change anything, and it ran for around six streight hours last night..." i took the computer to my work table downstairs to see what i could see. after a little while i booted it, and it ran for nearly four hours. so i thought "hmm ok just maybe an odd error or somthing i'll take it back up and see what happens" at this point i had started to pay attention to my little LED heat readout on my case, noticing that eveyrtime the PC hit around 32' C. it crashed. bringing the PC upstairs set the heat off and it bailed again. "aha!" "it makes sense, the night i ran it for six hours i had my windows and the case open, it was 32' F outside so my room was brick cold, so was the PC, thats why it ran, the next day it was warm around 62 F out, so the computer heated quickly and crashed. in my basement its around 10' cooler than the upstairs, so heat is not much of a problem". despite my efforts to keep the PC cool however, the crashes began occuring at lower tempuratures and more frequently. i saw my chances of colonizing India slipping away, along with POST....
Finally i called Tiger Direct, and had my motherboard replaced. i saw no other explanation. and today yes, today, march 23rd 2009 my replacement has arrived and tonight, tonight, the sun will never set on the british empire

if anyone else has harrowing tales of their excruciating struggle to play this fantastic game (though partially flawed) feel free to share them.

[Evil_Dane]

My old computer crashed completly when i was playing ETW a blue screen came up and said it would save everything on the computer, and ofcourse i ignored that and rebooted it and bauuuuum... When you were getting to the Windows XP loading screen it kept rebooting automaticly. So i stayed with a very laggy computer for around 2 weeks and tomorrow (tuesday 4/23) my ultimate gamer arrives and my 25.5" scream already have arrived and its wonderful!

[DMC-Ice]

I bought it off steam the minute it was released and played for 6 hours straight, no waits hehe ;D And still enjoying it btw tho I don't play as long in one session anymore as I find the issues the game has are easier to live with if u don't see them so much.

[Groove74]

Well my story like many others is:

1. built the best PC I could afford.

2. Bought Empire

3 Got home installed it and that took like 2 hours

4. loaded the game and it crashed like 10 times inside of 1 hour

5 searched fourms for fix while admireing my really nice PC build and thinking it can't possably be my new PC.

6 suddenly realized the game is broke. So not wanting to get bored waiting on the patch I loaded up medievil TW 2.

7 found It just dose not appeal to me right now I really want Empires to work

8 did research to find my GPU really Sucks.

9. Buying a new GPU this week

and finally like many here I am hoping for a fix this week as I am so bored and really want to play ETW