When my daughter and I did the final anniversary raid boss of Ragnaros, the fight glitched and sent her troll rogue out of the instance when she used a certain talent. I lost track of how many times our group wiped trying to beat Ragnaros and my blood elf hunter was long dead when it happened, but we did eventually succeed. My daughter ended up having to go again with a different group because she didn’t get credit, but we both eventually got our Obsidian Worldbreaker mounts.
I thought our trials were over now that we had the cool-looking mount, but I was wrong. You see, when I was purchasing my new laptop a few years ago, I decided it was also time I buy my oldest daughter her own laptop as well. She’d been using my hand-me-down laptops whenever I upgraded and the last one I’d given her wasn’t doing so well. Plus, I knew she’d be headed off to college in a few years, so a new laptop for her seemed like a good investment.
My previous laptop was a Toshiba, but every laptop before that had been a Dell and so I decided to go back to Dell. The Toshiba served me well, but it had some reliability issues and I just felt more comfortable with Dells. However, I’d also heard that Acers were decent and had never purchased one, so I decided to buy my daughter an Acer laptop. In hindsight, I wish I’d bought her a Dell.
My daughter’s Acer laptop has served her reasonably well but it has far too frequent glitches where it won’t load properly and the fan sounds like the machine is about to take off. Plus, it had been trying to do the latest Windows 10 update for months and kept getting so bogged down I had to find the tricky way to make it stop trying to update. The Acer always seemed to struggle with updates and then finally, shortly after we got our anniversary mounts, it hit its limit.
When my daughter’s laptop glitched out trying to update Warcraft, I suggested she try running the Windows updates that needed to be done. Wow did I feel guilty about saying that because her machine didn’t finish the updates properly and got stuck in a boot loop where the repair option wouldn’t work. After trying all the online suggestions to get the Acer to boot, we decided it had to be wiped and Windows reinstalled.
Fortunately, my much wiser than I daughter saves absolutely everything important online and the only thing she was going to lose was the few Warcraft screenshots she’d taken. So after purchasing a flash drive to put Windows on, we followed the online directions, downloaded windows to the flash drive and plugged it into her laptop. It took a few tries, but she finally got the laptop to begin installing the latest version of Windows.
We let the install run that afternoon and evening, I’d check on it periodically to make sure it was still doing stuff and it was. My daughter had a volunteer obligation that night and before I left to pick her up from school, I checked her laptop and found it on the loading screen with what seemed to be the spinning thing of death and the words “Getting things ready.” I was dismayed thinking that the fix hadn’t worked.
Upon returning home from picking up my daughter, we had just entered the living room when we heard a female voice talking from down the hall. It was Cortana! We were so happy to hear that annoying helper’s voice! She was prompting Jordan to do something and much to my relief, Windows had been installed successfully!
During the time her laptop was out of commission, my daughter and I hadn’t been able to play Warcraft together and I missed that time immensely. I let her play Warcraft on my laptop when she wanted so she could get her “fix” as she called it, but neither of us knew how long it would be before we could play again.
I am very relieved that my daughter’s Acer is working properly again and that it now has the latest version of Windows so that it’s not trying to download it constantly. It took a couple days to install Warcraft on it but I got it all on there and the past couple nights we’ve been enjoying teaming up on our characters.
I think I’ll still be getting my daughter a new laptop before she heads off to college next fall, but I’m crossing my fingers that her Acer hangs in there for as long as necessary. At least longer than either of our characters did during those anniversary raid boss fights.
Srinity 