This morning my son, Jamie, asked me for help with his PC. He’d installed FC27, but it kept giving him a graphics driver warning and then refused to connect to the EA servers.<\/p>\n
The graphics driver turned out to be from 2024. Windows insisted it was completely up to date.<\/p>\n
It wasn’t.<\/p>\n
After a fair amount of messing around, I discovered that his GeForce GTX 970 is now old enough that it no longer gets the normal NVIDIA Game Ready drivers. But NVIDIA does still provide security update drivers for it, and fortunately the latest one was exactly the minimum version FC27 wanted.<\/p>\n
Driver updated. Warning gone.<\/p>\n
Still wouldn’t connect to EA.<\/p>\n
So followed an increasingly familiar sequence of IT troubleshooting: clear caches, repair the game, run things as administrator, check the firewall, try a completely different internet connection, swear at it a bit.<\/p>\n
Nothing.<\/p>\n
Eventually we gave up.<\/p>\n
A couple of hours later Jamie came downstairs.<\/p>\n
“It’s working.”<\/p>\n
Of course it is.<\/p>\n
“What did you do?”<\/p>\n
“I uninstalled the EA app and installed it again.”<\/p>\n
Naturally.<\/p>\n
But somewhere during all this faffing around, it struck me just how old Jamie’s PC actually is.<\/p>\n
Because it wasn’t originally his.<\/p>\n
It was my dad’s.<\/p>\n
Dad built it when it was a pretty powerful machine. He was really into Microsoft Flight Simulator and had a fantastic setup – three monitors, flight controls, pedals, the lot. He was also a keen photographer, so the PC got plenty of use processing and editing his photos.<\/p>\n
The GTX 970 that I was trying to coax into running a brand-new football game this morning was once driving three screens of Flight Simulator for Dad.<\/p>\n
Dad died three years ago.<\/p>\n
The PC eventually came to us, and now his grandson uses it for gaming.<\/p>\n
There’s something I really like about that.<\/p>\n
Computers aren’t supposed to get more valuable as they get older. They become obsolete remarkably quickly. CPUs get slower relative to everything else, graphics cards stop being supported and eventually some new piece of software comes along that they simply can’t run.<\/p>\n
And this one is definitely getting there.<\/p>\n
A GTX 970 was a serious graphics card when Dad bought it. More than a decade later, it’s hanging on remarkably well – although FC27 requiring a driver specifically maintained for older NVIDIA cards feels like a fairly substantial hint that retirement isn’t too far away.<\/p>\n
At some point we’ll replace the PC.<\/p>\n
But not today.<\/p>\n
Today it got a new graphics driver. Jamie got FC27 working. And the computer my dad built for Flight Simulator and photography gets to spend a bit longer being used by his grandson.<\/p>\n
I think Dad would have rather liked that.<\/p>\n
Dad died from mesothelioma three years ago. Next April I’m running the London Marathon in his memory, raising money for Marie Curie<\/a>, who were there for him – and for us – towards the end.<\/p>\n So perhaps there was something particularly nice about being reminded of him this morning in such an ordinary, unexpected way.<\/p>\n If you’d like to support my London Marathon fundraising for Marie Curie, you can find my page at:<\/p>\n