Great moments in PC gaming are bite-sized celebrations of a few of our favourite gaming reminiscences.
Home windows used to have the structure of 1-ply rest room paper.
“You simply put in a brand new program: higher restart!” Home windows used to say. And this was not an remoted expertise. “Oh, you are letting Home windows Replace set up whereas it is nonetheless gentle outdoors? Higher restart earlier than, throughout, and after!” “Good new mouse firmware you have bought there. Higher restart your entire working system, in case this someway impacts, I do not know, every little thing?” “Did you simply breathe actually exhausting? Yeah, higher res—”
That was the Home windows we lived with for years. I bought used to aggressively telling Home windows no, I did not wish to restart for each minor new program set up, and largely I bought away with it. It turned out Home windows would, for essentially the most half, preserve ticking alongside simply nice regardless of its warnings. However there have been some issues that all the time appeared like they’d require a full reboot. Putting in new graphics card drivers was one in every of them.
What a ache that course of was. You’d go to Nvidia’s or AMD’s web site to seek out the most recent drivers. It’d helpfully let you know it may auto-identify your card for you… nevertheless it solely labored in case you used Web Explorer. Grumbling, you’d discover the correct jumble of numbers from a dropdown menu that represented your graphics card. Obtain the file. Set up it. Restart. Pre-SSDs, this could take a pair minutes. And once you bought again to Home windows your decision would in all probability be set to a fuzzy 800×600.
Graphics driver installs bought smoother through the years, however certainly altering one thing as elementary because the bridge between your laptop {hardware} and the way each pixel is drawn in your display screen would require restarting Home windows. Then Nvidia got here out with GeForce Expertise, eliminating that obnoxious “hunt for the correct driver” step… and in addition making it in order that you might simply preserve carrying on Home windows whereas the recent new driver put in. No extra reboots.
It has been years now, and it nonetheless appears like I am doing the unimaginable each time. I as soon as requested Nvidia how their programmers pulled this off, when Home windows nonetheless needed to restart for therefore many seemingly smaller updates. Nvidia’s reply was, principally: a buttload of labor.
Butts nicely spent. As of late updating graphics drivers is about as simple as updating a sport console—and the latter nonetheless requires a reboot.
