Ok, I originally posted this at Gamefaqs, but of course this got lost in the shuffle.
Ok, sorry to have to bore you with a bit of a story, but I might leave something out if I don't explain.
*Story* Ok, so back in August when my old computer died, I decided to purchase a new one (Dell Dimension 5100). I had hopes that when buying this, it would be adequate for games such as this (and *technically* it should be; 512 Ram, 2.9Ghz processor, and what I assumed to be a *decent* graphics card). Now, after I had bought it, I recently hopped on to Microsoft XP Game Adivsor to go see how my system faired. Half Life 2...World of Warcraft...both these games said I was in the range where I could run the games with some success, while Doom 3 still failed (complaining about my graphics card, which is a "Generic VGA." Right. Later about that though.) I was curious about it, but decided not to push it.
Anyways, fast foward 3 months or so and I'm here sitting where I am now. Since Christmas is nearby, I thought of getting CS:S around that time, and so I decided to test my computer's aptitude again. I tried it, yet the game advisor said I had some issue:
"Unfortunately we were unable to identify some hardware components of your system, and therefore it is not possible to provide accurate performance analysis. We are constantly updating our hardware component database, and this issue should be resolved soon. "
Perplexed, yet decided not to investigate. Instead, I decided to try and tinker with some of my display settings. I went into the Device Manager and hit "update my drivers", whereas I let it search windows XP advisor and automatically install any updates that they find. It found some, and installed them. I then rebooted my computer.
Now, when I checked the device manager, I was a bit confused as to why the new updates dated back to 4/15/2005, while my other one dated at 7/29/05, but whatever. I know not much about computers so I'm happy to accept the fact that it changed. Anyways, I went on to the game adivsor again and decided to give it another roll. It still was not able to scan my computer, but something else also happened.
When I selected some games from the list, almost all of them said I couldn't run them, including Half Life 2 + World of Warcraft and the like, when I had been deemed able to a few months ago.
Thoughts?
