My Hubby is having a problem with the game. It crashes about every 10 minutes. He has a ATI Radeon 9800 pro game card and people keep telling him to update his drivers, but we cannot figure out how. Does anyone know?
You need to go to ATI’s site for their latest drivers (Drivers & Software on the top nav bar).
Or, try the Omega drivers. These are the ATI drivers ‘tweaked’ for better performance. I use them with my 9700Pro & they work fine.
This sounds intriguing enough to try, but where can I find the 14 day free trial? On the Eve Online site, the only way to sign up is by paying $19.95 for the first 30 days. It doesn’t sound that intriguing. 
Thanks. Now to try it out.
Thanks to this thread, I am about halfway through the 14 day trial.
And the game is fun. But I don’t know how long-term fun it would be.
I’m not interested in trying to make online money for the sake of making money. So the fact that it’s clearly a good market simulator means little to me. The combat can be exciting (after a completely meandering and pointless first character, I deleted him and began a fighter once I learned a bit about the game mechanics), but between a combination of my video card and relatively low RAM creating some excrutiatingly slow redraws in the middle of battle (not to mention outright crashes from it overwhelming my computer once every few hours), and the seeming simplicity of the battle system, it seems like only a slightly more thrilling form of drilling (only, I’ve gotten a ship with 4 high power slots, three of which are two missle launchers and a turret, so it’s big-boom drilling).
I have yet to really have any interaction with other players other than on the market upgrading my equipment and selling the bits of swag I’ve gotten off battles, and because the game is so massively huge, it’s easy to not even see anybody else going to dock in a station. I’m sure that if I actually sought a corp or even just another player to putz around the game with, it’d be a little more thrilling, but I’m just not compelled to do so right now when all my gaming is in 0.7 space or higher.
Other than “try teaming up with other players,” what else is there to compel me to keep playing?
Not much. Eve is pretty boring as a single-player game. If you’re not interested in doing stuff with (or against) other players, this probably isn’t the game for you.
It’s not that I wouldn’t want to do so if I started paying. But taking seven days to build up a decent character, leaving only seven days to play with others, there’s not much reason to try during the trial.
Okay, so what you’re really asking is how to amuse yourself for the second half of a trial period? I’d suggest exploring some complexes (1/10, 2/10, or possibly 3/10 if you don’t mind a decent chance of being blown up by rats), but most of the low level ones are run so often that they’re usually empty. You could try locating some in less populated regions (Amarr space is emptier than Gallente or Caldari) using the database at wiki.grismar.net. Alternatively you could try some combat missions from an agent, though the lvl 1 agents you’d be able to access don’t hand out very interesting missions.