Gaming on Vista 64-bit

It’s a bit of a hit-and-miss afair. I play the majority of my games through Valve’s Steam platform, which makes managing my games pretty easy. However, as all of Valve’s current titles share the same game engine, they’re all susceptible to the same problems. Unfortunately, the Source engine doesn’t play nicely with Vista. This is due in part to a difference in the way Vista handles memory allocation, which is explained here. You’ll notice also some links to download some hotfixes: I sure wish I’d found those links, say, 48 hours ago when I started troubleshooting this issue. In short: I was raging pretty hardcore. But you can solve the “Can’t load dump x, allocation of y bytes failed!” problem by following the instructions here.

Aside from the Source-engined games, Unreal Tournament 3 doesn’t play nice either. It worked fine for a week but now shows me only a splash screen and an empty window. I haven’t any idea how to solve this; nor does anyone else on the web.

World of Warcraft is pretty annoying as well. It’ll randomly crash to desktop and pop up the friendly Blizzard bug reporter for no apparent reason. I’ve become somewhat disiniterested in WoW as of late so it’s not really bothering me, but the few times I have wanted to play and it’s suddenly crashed without warning weren’t times I enjoyed.

All this is really boiling down to something that I simply cannot fathom, something inertly stupid about the PC gaming populace and computer enthusiast crowd: Windows doesn’t “just work”. It never has, never does, and probably never will. I am sick to death of being drawn into Windows vs. OSX or Windows vs. Linux arguments where people will inevitably say things like “windows just works”, “windows is easy to use”, “windows has better support for x, y and z” — it’s rubbish, all of it. Windows has flaws. Many of them are glaring. Many of them are flaws which OS X and Linux do not have. I am not even attempting to draw any comparisons here in terms of which operating system is “better”, I just want to make it clear that I cannot believe that die-hards will not even acknowledge that, yes, Windows has problems too.

Windows doesn’t “just work”; it’s a lie.