Sims and Driver hassle

D - While C was on an early shift at a private hospital today, I took A up the City to buy her the webcam and microphone I promised her yesterday. Like A herself, a fair few of her schoolmates use MSN Messenger in the evenings and weekends to carry on the days gossip (Or whatever it is 11 year olds talk about) and one of them was using a microphone last night.
Having used Messenger myself a fair bit a few years ago, I know that using a webcam and microphone is far more preferential to typing text (Although only with those you want to talk to of course), so it wasn't a case of 'Keeping up with the Jones'es' but rather me getting a bit excited at being able to buy more techie shit.

As it happened, Tezco wasn't open at the time so we wandered into one of the Game stores and the entire shopping trip was turned on its head by the sight of The Sims 2: Open For Business.
The webcam and microphone was soon put to bed, even though we'd already seen one combined cam that A wanted, and we trawled the shops looking for the best price. No joy on that front since the game has only been out recently but it was a nice morning for the two of us to spend together. We even sat down by the fountain in Queens Court, had a good chat and laugh while relaxing in the sun and getting our shoes wet.

Anyway, it was once we'd got the game back home (Along with a couple of pressies I bought C) and A installed the game that the problems began. Well, in actual fact the problems had been occuring with the Sims 2 for some time.....A had to always be moving the mouse around when playing or the monitor would turn itself off and never come back on unless the PC was rebooted.
It took about an hour for us to solve the problem by reinstalling the graphic card drivers, sending reports to Microsoft and updating crap with them, re-updating the drivers again and rebooting the PC countless times.
Once the game started up with none of the problems she'd experienced and battled with previously, A thanked me profusely.
It was all a bit of a relief really 'cos I was totally winging it..