Smart enough, but not quite
I hate being tech-savvy enough to know that the Best Buy Geeks are wrong, but not tech-saavy enough to know what the RIGHT answer is.
My laptop will soon reach the end of its 12-month manufacturer's warranty. It has, since I purchased it, had an overheating issue. Generally the overheating issue is mild, and putting it on a chillmat has resolved it.
Except if we're playing Zoo Tycoon. If we're playing Zoo Tycoon, it goes NUTS, even if we're sitting in an air-conditioned room, with the laptop sitting on the chill mat. It once overheated so badly while Quinn was playing that it smelled like something was burning. Usually it just spontaneously shuts off. No warning, nothing. Just shuts off.
Naturally, it doesn't ALWAYS do this. Sometimes we can play for hours and it just hovers around the critical temp but doesn't do anything dramatic.
The Geeks say there's nothing wrong with the laptop. That it's just overheating because I'm not being careful enough with it. That they put it through a stress-test and it passed with flying colors. I asked them if they tried running Zoo Tycoon on it for an hour or two during the stress test and they laughed awkwardly at me.
The other symptom, by the way, is that it refuses to play DVDs at full-speed. I rarely use it for watching DVDs, but once I was obligated to watch a few disks of ALIAS on it, and they always sounded like a 45 playing at 33 on the turntable.
So my theory is that something is up with the video card, or something. But I have never bothered to make myself smart in the sound-and-video card world, because Zoo Tycoon is the first graphics-heavy game I've ever cared to play on a computer, so it never seemed all that important.
But try putting all of the symptoms and performance information out for the guys in orange, and they look at you like you're a raving lunatic. Or that mom who brings her kid to the ER every time it has the sniffles. If the problem is a hardward flaw, I want them to fix it before my warranty is up goddammit! But I can't figure out how to prove that something's wrong.
My laptop will soon reach the end of its 12-month manufacturer's warranty. It has, since I purchased it, had an overheating issue. Generally the overheating issue is mild, and putting it on a chillmat has resolved it.
Except if we're playing Zoo Tycoon. If we're playing Zoo Tycoon, it goes NUTS, even if we're sitting in an air-conditioned room, with the laptop sitting on the chill mat. It once overheated so badly while Quinn was playing that it smelled like something was burning. Usually it just spontaneously shuts off. No warning, nothing. Just shuts off.
Naturally, it doesn't ALWAYS do this. Sometimes we can play for hours and it just hovers around the critical temp but doesn't do anything dramatic.
The Geeks say there's nothing wrong with the laptop. That it's just overheating because I'm not being careful enough with it. That they put it through a stress-test and it passed with flying colors. I asked them if they tried running Zoo Tycoon on it for an hour or two during the stress test and they laughed awkwardly at me.
The other symptom, by the way, is that it refuses to play DVDs at full-speed. I rarely use it for watching DVDs, but once I was obligated to watch a few disks of ALIAS on it, and they always sounded like a 45 playing at 33 on the turntable.
So my theory is that something is up with the video card, or something. But I have never bothered to make myself smart in the sound-and-video card world, because Zoo Tycoon is the first graphics-heavy game I've ever cared to play on a computer, so it never seemed all that important.
But try putting all of the symptoms and performance information out for the guys in orange, and they look at you like you're a raving lunatic. Or that mom who brings her kid to the ER every time it has the sniffles. If the problem is a hardward flaw, I want them to fix it before my warranty is up goddammit! But I can't figure out how to prove that something's wrong.