Has this ever happened to you

Tuesday, June 12, 2007 »

So I get home from a particularly long day at work and palidor wants to play some Battlefield 2142 for an hour, so I'm all for it. I start it up on the PC and as the map loads, I switch over to the Mac via my KVM switch to say that I've found a server. In case you're not familiar with how a KVM works, it connects one set of peripherals to multiple computers. In my case, I use it to alternately work on my Mac and PC using one keyboard, monitor, and mouse. So when I hit the button on the KVM, to the computer it effectively looked like I had unplugged the keyboard and mouse.

SO, I switched back to the PC to find the map had finished loading. I tried moving the mouse down to the "OK" button and nothing happened. All right, I thought. Sometimes it takes a few moments after KVM switching for the computer to rediscover the USB signal. After a few more moments without hearing the "device found" chime, I hit escape a couple times to cancel loading. (Sometimes it'll find the keyboard but not the mouse.) No luck. So basically, by unplugging a couple USB devices during this critical map loading operation, I superfroze the computer.

After a painful hard reset, I began loading the same map on the same server and noticed that the progress bar stopped at around 70%. After letting it sit there for about five or six minutes, I tried the standard escape, followed by alt-tab, followed by ctrl-alt-del, which were all ineffective. And, having learned my lesson, I hadn't even touched the KVM switch.

So now Battlefield was now pretty much bricked. (Not much to do if you can't load a map.) I thought, OK, I don't mind spending another half an hour on this tonight if it means everything will be working again tomorrow. I figured I'd do a quick reinstall to eliminate whatever horrible file atrocities occurred when I unplugged the mouse. Well, the installer made it part of the way through before erroring out and leaving half the files still on the drive. This had two other effects: 1) It made the Windows Add/Remove Programs tool refuse to cooperate, and 2) it stopped everything on the 2142 disc from running.

So after four hours of Googling successively esoteric error messages and trying various system restores, I'm wondering whether I should even bother spending any more time on this tomorrow or just waiting a month for 2142 to come out for OS X. I already can't believe I've spent this much time troubleshooting on a problem that arose from something as unconventional and hazardous as trying to play a game.