The One with the Thoughts of Frans

Some more annoyances

The Battlefield 2, Battle for Middle Earth and various other patches require a certain amount of space on your C drive, a drive which I use as a designated Windows drive which is as small as possible (still meaning close to 6GB, Windows seems to require a lot).

WinRAR extracts things to your temp directory first. This is somewhat more normal than the above, but still an annnoyance in case you had some other stuff on the partition you have the temp directory. 7-zip directly extracts to the place you wish to extract to, making it at the very least faster because it doesn’t have to move things afterwards, but also less annoying.

In the end the message is, if I wish to do something to my I drive where I have 30GB free, then do it there and not on my C drive with 500MB free or my E drive with 2GB free. The latter is still 100% acceptable however as I pointed my temp directory there myself, but whoever thought of doing the first should be shot or something.

Also, copy protections and stupid stuff with inserting CD’s which shouldn’t be required sucks. Everybody buy Quake 3 and other games which do not have such ridiculous demands. Games like Age of Empires 2 and Starcraft where you can multiplayer with like 8 people by having one CD inserted are also acceptible, even if you have to insert your CD to play.

Yes publishers, it’s definitely piracy which made me purchase less games and not the fact that it’s just more of the same enhanced with stupid copy protections.

Actually if you think about it, pirated games are more user-friendly on each front: you don’t have to insert a CD every time you wish to play and you don’t install some copy protection which might break your computer. Then they say that if you install a pirated game you can’t know if your computer will break from it, but if you read the average EULA you’ll see that the companies who made or distributed the game aren’t responsible anyway, so it’s hardly more or less risk.

Perhaps there should be an open-source equivalent to Battlefield 2, that might be interesting…

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