The Sims 3 CRC Installation Error

File this one under total weirdness.  I went out and bought The Sims 3 as a celebration for getting a job; I have been a fan of Sims games since the beginning.  Mostly I don't play the game a lot.  I enjoy designing the houses and living spaces and then watching the people mill around in their perfect little word, filled with resources, like it's a digital ant farm or aquarium--very soothing.

When I bought the game, I tried to install it on my desktop that evening after spending all day backing up my laptop.  Mr. Borealis had been on me for a while to let him upgrade the system on my Dell Studio 15 from Vista to Win7, so I figured I wanted this done before installing my new game.  The problem was, while Mr. B worked on formatting my laptop and installing the new OS, I could not get Sims 3 to install on my Desktop due to a recurrent CRC error that stated the .exe file on the disk did not match the .cab file, and that the disk must be corrupted, and to contact the software vendor.

I started looking online to find that many, many unfortunate game owners have had this problem, and EA Games either can't or won't fix it satisfactorily with a patch.  Their offered solution is to defrag your disk (which, let's face it, never works), to check for system updates, etc., etc.--"It must be user error, because we here at EA Games are gods."  There were more helpful solutions online from other users, and after trying it the EA Games way and failing to install 5 times, I was willing to try everything.  I tried installing as admin, popping the disc in and out repeatedly, clicking to ignore the error (resulted in a disk authentication error), copying the disk to the hard drive and attempting install from there--all to no avail.

Eventually, I begain to notice that the .exe file it was complaining about was not for the game itself, but for the EA Media Downloader.  So when the disc complained again, I opened up the install file and just deleted the contents of the Media Downloader folder because I hadn't planned to spend more money online.  I just wanted to play the game I had payed $50 to play.  TADA!!!!  After deleting that file, the game installs and plays perfectly.

Oddly enough, the game produced no errors when I tried to install it on my laptop.  Both machines were running Win7 at the time of installation, and both had well above the game requirements.  Several other users in online forums have reported similar anomalies, where the game seems to "like" certain machines and "not like" others for no apparent reason.

EA, get your act together.  Based on the input I read from other highly dissatisfied customers, your inability to patch this has led others to give the game horrible reviews, alter the game in ways that has affected the game performance to get it to even play, and even pirate the game to get what they paid for.  Is this the type of press you really want?

Alula

Blogger was down?

All,

Something was going on with Blogger at some point this week.  It deleted my most recent post (Pictures from my Illness) so I reposted it; it had posted before, as evidenced by the fact that it through on my feed reader.  It also deleted a comment that Fuzzy left somewhere--the comment was emailed to me but then mysteriously never appeared on the blog, and when I tried to go to moderate the comment I got a message that Blogger was running in "read only" mode for maintenance.

Bottom line--if anyone posted anything and it went missing, please repost it.  It was not maliciously removed; Blogger was just having some issues.

Alula

Kindle Library Lending

Amazon just posted this notice today.

Fuzzy, it looks like you'll be able to start checking out ebooks on your Kindle later this year!  WOOHOO!  They don't list the specific libraries they have "partnered" with anywhere, but I'm suspecting that this is actually a partnership with Overdrive (which already has partnered with the libraries).  If that is the case, then you'll have to come down here and grab library cards to our local libraries with this service to get in on the action.  Hopefully you'll have the same level of access on the Kindle that is available on the Nook; how sweet would it be in your remote location to still be able to browse and check out books to read for free from the library?  I bet you could put audiobooks from the libraries on your new MP3 player, too.

A suggestion for the Barnes & Noble Nook

Recently I have found myself having a specific desire for my Nook that is going unfilled.  I couldn't find a specific venue on the Barnes & Noble site where I could submit this suggestion, so I am throwing it into the universe in hopes that my wish comes true.

Here's my situation: I find myself in locations where I do not have a wifi connection wishing that I could check in on all of the blogs that I subscribe to.  I tend to read the news online, but my blogs are starting to serve as a personalized magazine or newspaper subscription--I sit down to them to get the latest news and gossip, and I would like this experience to be on-the-go with me without an internet or 3g signal required (like a real magazine).

Here is what I want from Barnes & Noble:  I would like a way to tie RSS feeds to my Barnes & Noble Nook account.  Ideally, this service will collect all of the posts from blogs I have subscribed to and turn them into discrete chunks that are sent to my device like a subscription (kind of like like listserv messages getting collected into a "digest" before they reach my inbox).  I figure the size of each "magazine" could be picked by the user (i.e., daily, weekly, monthly).  The digest will be updated and added to my device along with regular syncing and checking for new material, and that way, I have an easy access to my stuff on my Nook.  I realize this probably creates some problems with formating and possibly with storage capacity (i.e., if whatever you subscribe to has a lot of images in the text), but why not set up the "send to Nook digest" with settings to just exclude images (or use the provided alt text) or understand that the images might be a little wanky in the feed if you choose to include them (in some feed readers they already are)?

Barnes & Noble, please consider providing this service through your device.  It would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

Alula

Amazon Cloud Player

Today I stumbled upon Amazon's new service, the Amazon Cloud Player.  This service allows you to upload all of your music files to a free online cloud storage locker hosted by Amazon.  The first 5GB are free, and your music purchases from Amazon don't count toward the storage limit.  You can buy more storage space for a very reasonable yearly rate if you need it, though I have just discovered that my current library of music sits at just about 4.8GB, and I could probably prune down the files I want online if I had to.  In the past I have traditionally used MP3 downloads from Amazon because the prices were better than iTunes, but more recently the prices from most services have more or less leveled out.  Oh, I should probably also mention that the Amazon Cloud Player, while being designed for music, can also store other file types.

The reason this service is a big deal is that digital licenses aren't required to upload your music, which that (if you're anything like me) the old files you had copied from CDs you purchased that don't have digital licenses attached can be uploaded to a place where they are stored and protected (YAY!).  And from the cloud storage, your songs can be streamed to any compatible device, and downloaded to your computer or device.  I note the downloading feature for Mr. Q, who recently went over to the dark side by purchasing a Mac.  At least for now, it appears that Amazon is taking a cheap shot at iOS by purposely making the streaming features of the service *not* work on iOS devices (there is, however, a download for Android).  I found another review where someone confirmed that this is not a Flash issue; however, a possible work around is that while you can't stream, downloading to iOS systems still works.

Of course, this awesome system does not come without its troubles.  The music industry is peeved that Amazon dare offer a streaming service where people can play the music that they have rightfully purchased and own, and will likely bring a lawsuit concerning digital licenses (read more about this issue here).  Obviously there is potential for abuse here, though I don't see how it could be any greater than any other cloud storage system, and those exist in abundance.  Personally, I think the music industry will end up having to let this one go or lose their case--it's overstepping the copyright to say that I can't store files I own in a legitimate cloud service.  If I were using it for criminal purposes instead of solely for personal use, then they would have a case, and I'm betting that existing anti-filesharing efforts would already net these culprits (i.e., when your ISP or Amazon notices that your IP address or Cloud account is seeing 50GB worth of downloading music files every day, something is probably up).

So, I encourage you all to check out this great service--this is a fantastic way to archive your music files to be sure you don't lose them when your computer dies and takes iTunes with it or your MP3 player get dropped in a bath tub.

Alula

From 0... to 100!!!

As some of you may know, the laptop that I've had for approximately 3 years has been giving up on my for the past 6 months. Luckily, thanks to my family and generous husband I've been able to upgrade form my old Toshiba Satellite to a custom beauty and it all started with this one sleek piece.

Before you is a Black Widow SopranoRS Case from my brother, and the other piece you can view is a Rocketfish 500 Watt ATX gaming power supply (it glows blue!).

Then we have our mother board and CPU. The motherboard is a real beauty, an Asus EVO, complete with artfully crafted blue heat-sinks over many of the capacitors to keep the entire thing running cool as a cucumber. The CPU happens to be an AMD Phenom II X4 965, 3.4GHz. Processor gets a Windows rating of 7.4 and uses all 4 cores to the max!

Now let's show the last few components. We have a 1TB hard drive (the only piece of this new beast I should have looked into more fully as it pulls my Windows rating down to a sad 5.9), an ATI Radeon 5750 graphics card (Windows rating of 7.2), and an LG 24x DVD drive. The operating system is Windows 7 Home premium, and I had to make sure that I got Office 2010 right away so that I could actually open my files again (2007 was accidentally removed from my laptop when I reformatted it, and I couldn't find my disk).

Munchkin 2 has some amazing power, and shouldn't have to be upgraded for at least a couple of years, unless I want my Windows rating to jump into the 7's with a solid state hard drive. The final pics are of the beautiful monitor I procured courtesy of Craigslist,and the tower lit up for the first time. Just to make it painfully clear to everyone who thought I could play WoW on my old laptop, I most certainly could not. I never realized that you could actually see the rain that everyone spoke of, I thought it was an exercise in imagination. My first time logging into WoW with Munchkin 2 I was swimming with my Goblin in the ocean, and crystal clear raindrops were bouncing off the water around me. It truly was a 0 to 100 moment!

~Munchkin