Only one of these goals was achieved. I’ll let you guess which one.<\/p>\n
It started off so well…<\/h3>\n
As luck would have it, Forza Motorsport 6: Apex<\/a> is free. There are actually two Forza games coming out right now: Apex, and Forza Horizon 3. I don’t understand why we have the same branding used on two different series with different numbers. I don’t know enough about the racing genre to understand the complex lineages at work here, but who cares? Apex is free, which is an ideal price-point for me. If it works out, maybe I’ll buy Forza Horizon 3<\/em>.<\/p>\n As an aside: If you get Forza Horizions 3 Ultimate edition for ONE HUNDRED AMERICAN MONEY-DOLLARS, you get to experience the rare privilege of pre-loading the game and playing four days before all those filthy scrubs with more brains than money. Except, people’s downloads keep getting reset<\/a>, preventing them from downloading the game. It’s 49GB in size, so I imagine having it get 80% of the way done and then mysteriously reset is pretty horrible. I think a download that size would run me $10USD. That’s probably more a complaint about my internet provider than the Windows store, but it’s not like I’m the only person in the world with a horrible internet provider. <\/p>\n The point is, if you charge someone a huge markup for exclusive early access, then you better be able to deliver, because that’s not something you can fix later. So while this problem doesn’t impact me, I just want to point out that there’s more than one way for things to go wrong for you in the Windows 10 Store. Anyway, back to the task at hand…<\/p>\n I go to the Forza Apex page in the Windows 10 Store. Right away things are a little scary:<\/p>\n The game requires the “Windows Anniversary Update”. I don’t know what’s in it. I don’t even know what anniversary we’re supposedly celebrating. The release of the first version of Windows? The release of Windows 10? The birthday of Bill Gates’ dog? I suppose I could look it up, but I don’t care. Whatever this thing does, you can’t play (or even download!) the game without it. <\/p>\n Okay, I KNOW this is a stupid idea. I can’t remember the last time I updated Windows and found my life had been improved by it. 95% of all updates are all mysterious undocumented changes, and the last 5% break your workflow, cause problems, or otherwise waste your time. The only reason I’m doing this is because I know that if something goes wrong I’ll have something to write about. The fact that you’re reading this probably gives you a clue as to how things turned out.<\/p>\n Well, better to install this update now on a slow Tuesday afternoon rather than being ambushed by a surprise update when I’m up against a deadline. Let’s get to it.<\/p>\n I should add that the URL I circled isn’t a clickable link. If you wanted to visit that page you’d have to open up a browser and type it in manually. You might think you could route around Microsoft’s horrible interface shortcomings by highlighting the text so you can copy & paste it, but the saboteurs at Microsoft are way ahead of you. If you click anywhere in that part of the window, the text vanishes and is replaced with a scroll box containing the back-of-the-box sales pitch.<\/p>\n I download the update. Since this is the latest version of Windows, it has all the latest features. For example: Microsoft has removed all progress bars so that you never have any idea how long an update will take or even if the process is still working. It’s just got this twee little spinning icon of mystery. When can you have your computer back? Ten more seconds? Two hours? Is it downloading things in the background and eating up your bandwidth and data usage? Is it stuck? Makes you feel sorry for those poor sods in 1993 who had the ability to know what their computer was doing when things were being installed. We’ve come so far.<\/p>\n Not to spoil the surprise for you, but it takes about twenty minutes to apply the update. That’s kind of amazing. I’m running Windows 10 off an SSD. I think twenty minutes is how long it took to install Windows 10 in the first place. It’s actually really hard to keep an operating system busy for that long, particularly when it has exclusive access to all of the machine’s resources and everything is stored on an SSD.<\/p>\n Afterwards I install the game and everything is fine and of course I’m lying. Instead, I get this…<\/p>\n I’m no dummy. Well, okay, I voluntarily installed a Windows update so I’m clearly not a genius. But I was at least smart enough to make sure I met the minimum specifications before I installed the Windows Anniversary Update. Before I started, all of these points were green except for the first. But now that I have the update, it claims I no longer have enough memory and my graphics card isn’t up to snuff.<\/p>\n I actually have 16GB of memory, and it correctly identified it as such before the update. So one of the new features of the Anniversary update is that it throws away half your memory and downgrades your graphics card?<\/p>\n I don’t know. Let’s open up the system information screen and see what the reported memory is. I’ll just… Hm. They system is really sluggish now. It’s taking forever to open individual windows. In fact… yeah. The system is hosed. The mouse pointer moves, but literally every window is giving the “waiting” icon when I mouse over it. I can’t even properly shut down the system. Okay. Let’s reset any try again…<\/p>\n The system locks up even faster this time. Last time I got to use the machine for about three minutes before it died, but this time it was grinding to a halt after just thirty seconds. Reboot again.<\/p>\n This time I get fifteen seconds of useful activity before the machine petrifies itself. I can’t even open up the control panel to roll back the update. <\/p>\n
<\/div>Happy Anniversary!<\/h3>\n
<\/div>We’ve Upgraded Your Computer By Breaking It!<\/h3>\n
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