4x dead. PC games dying. Gave away PC. :(

[DeadZone]

Wow Hugh, I take it you have had some bad problems in the past
Ive never had any of these problems ever (Some EA games excluded, and Ubisoft sometimes)

For my PC: Power up: Rarely longer than 20seconds, place CD in tray, I have auto run disabled by pref., so hit exe. and thats it, I play until Im bored or wants/needs to do something else
IF I do need a patch, well, its a perfect excuse to do some house work/something else for a few minutes
And plus, like instar said, XBox is also using patches, and they wont take any longer to d/l cos they are on the same connection after all

As long as your OS is configured properly and is 2k or XP, you tend to be fine (Yes its microsoft, so I will agree that it can be a big pain in the rear at times)

And anyway I was referring to playing different games, not the same one over

[Instar]

My PC boots up in less than 10 seconds. A 10k RPM SATA hard drive can do that. Well, that and a gigabyte of RAM. And a 2.4C P4.
One PC I had took longer than 5 minutes to get all the services fully running (I was running DB software, the 3 server packages needed for a complete install of a product I was developing against, and everything else needed) I could go get coffee in less time.
Edit:
Oh, my PC can probably boot in about 5s or so. It is pretty quick.

[Kamog]

One of my coworkers has a PC that sometimes takes half an hour to boot up, because it often starts up with a blue screen of death and he has to keep shutting it down and powering it back up until it works. Then it runs scandisk which takes a few minutes. It's a Compaq running Windows 98. The computer tech guy has given up trying to fix it.

[mottlee]

sounds like time to replace the PC, has he tryed to reinstall windows????

[Baron Munchausen]

Kamog said:
One of my coworkers has a PC that sometimes takes half an hour to boot up, because it often starts up with a blue screen of death and he has to keep shutting it down and powering it back up until it works. Then it runs scandisk which takes a few minutes. It's a Compaq running Windows 98. The computer tech guy has given up trying to fix it.

If you change the settings when it's up and running to NOT boot the GUI, you can probably get it functioning faster. Lots of minor hardware glitches that are invisible at the command prompt will turn up when Windows tries to load the protected mode drivers. The cause of the problems might well be a 'marginal' component that needs to warm up a bit in order to respond properly to the protected mode drivers. So, if the machine is set to only load the underlying DOS you will possibly be able to get it to boot up to that point with no problems. Then you can let it sit and 'warm up' for a few minutes beffore trying to start the GUI/protected mode shell.