Category : Articles

Sub Category : Science and Technology

I must explain what started all this ...I love pc games,Mass Effect series,Doom 3,Dead Space ..and most of all Fallout 4..Ive beaten the game more than once ,but once I figured out how to aquire all the DLCs there became so much more to accomplish.Not to mention the 180-some mods I had installed.I was just finishing up the Nuka World dlc when big bad rent-a-center had to insist I give up my gaming laptop..might have been all the missed payments lol.Anyway since then Ive been on a neverending quest to get back to my game. My better half found a computer being given away free so he brought it home and we fixed it up.Brave little pc runs great ...but with an intel i3 processor and low end graphics hardware it can barely run Mass Effect 2.Then I find out Microsoft Azure is offering 12 months free to try out their cloud platform ..and they were giving $200 in credits to spend,the trial would end if the credits were exceeded or the 12 months..whichever came first.First thing I thought was ..cloud computer -fallout.So I googled such a feat and found some tutorials,before I knew it I had logged on to my first virtual machine.Its much more difficult than say paying for a service like Liquid Sky or my personal favorite ,Shadow.But Im broke eternally and desperate so figured its worth a try.My first attempt at this was about two weeks ago..and within 2 hours I was ready to throw my desktop off our balcony. I had signed up for azure free tier with the $200 credit,then upgraded to pay as you go ( which surprisingly accepted my fundless debit card- unlike stupid google cloud or IBM which shut me down within a day for lack of funds.thumbs up to azure for honoring the meaning of "free trial".then it was time to set up my VM .I made a new resource ,gave the VM a name ,picked my OS and chose my size..that was hard at first because I wanted the NV series and specifically the N6 with Nvidias tesla M60 gpu ,then I added another disk ,left the network page set at defaults mostly as the tutorial said,and skipped tags for the time being,then I deployed my VM.the first few deploys failed because I really hadnt been paying attention to what I was doing ,.too anxious to get on it already and play my game.but once I read several tutorials and watched a video or two,I successfully deployed my VM.then once logged in via Remote desktop I had to set up some server features and download the nvidia drivers,as well as audio drivers and google Chrome.Steam came next.Now almost every tutorial had instructions for setting up parsec or Steam in home streaming..I didnt understand how to do this or why I should have to ...powerful cloud gpu should suffice I thought..It didnt.Fallout 4 wouldn't run.I went  to "can you run it.com" and indeed I could not...not yet.