I downloaded the demo for Just Cause 2 last week, and Friday night when I came home from a Basketball game, I decided to give it a whirl. I clicked on the Steam icon and was immediately blasted by an error message I had never seen before. “This is not compatible with your version of Windows.” Say whaaaaa? I hopped on the interwebs and found that it was true; Just Cause 2 required either Windows Vista or 7 to play. I was disgruntled for a moment, but then realized that hey, maybe this is just the prod I needed to install the upgrade to Windows 7 that I’ve had sitting on my desk since it was released in October. I had been holding off on doing so because XP had never let me down. My rig was running like a champ and just like Grandma always used to say: “If it ain’t broke, don’t dick around with it” My gaming brain overtook my logic brain that moment though. I really wanted to play that demo, and I figured that it was going to be the first of many to require me to leave behind Windows XP.

So Sunday morning, as the wife took my son with her to the store and my daughter was enamored with playing on her mother’s laptop, I began installing Windows XP again. Say whaaaaa? Yes, I had to reinstall XP because at the time, I was using a 32 bit version of it, and it turns out that the only way to upgrade to the 64 bit version of Windows 7 was to already have XP 64 or Vista 64 on your system. So I dug up a disk I had of XP 64, and got cracking. After all was said and done, Windows went for the final reboot before loading the OS, and on the rebound it blue screened and immediately reboot itself again. Double-you Tee Eff? It did it again a few more times as I sat there stunned. Okay, maybe something was screwy with the install. So I did it again. It went down the last stretch to the operating system load screen and BOOM, blue screen and another immediate reboot. I was seriously at a loss. Not only because there was something obviously wrong with my install disk, but because the only 3.5” floppy I owned, the one that used to have the 32 bit drivers that Windows needed for my SATA RAID array, had been written over with the 64 bit drivers. I was boned. I had no way of replacing the files because mine was the only PC in the house that had a floppy.

Then my wife, and her huge brain, said, “Why don’t you go to your parents and use theirs?” I really didn’t feel like driving across town for 1M of info. But it was the only choice I had. So I drove over, used their PC to get the right drivers so I could get back up and running at least on XP, and explained my sob story to them. Then my mother asked if a full version would fix the problem. I said, “Probably”, and she suggested that it could be an early birthday gift if I so desired. Sold!

We ran out and got a copy, and within the hour of me getting home, I was up and running with the 64 bit version of Windows 7. No muss, no fuss, and was probably the nicest experience I had ever had installing an OS. It was damn near as easy as installing any game. You click a few times, type in the CD Key, let it run, it reboots, asks you a few more questions, reboots again, and that’s it; You’re in Windows 7. *fist pump*

And yes, I did end up getting to play the Just Cause 2 demo, but, as I’ve already typed more than intended, I’ll save my thoughts on it for my next post. You’ll have to wait.