Worked checklist

The readiness checklist, to run before a large download

Nearly everything on the symptom pages of this site could have been avoided by twenty minutes of checking beforehand. This is that twenty minutes, written as a list you can work through once and keep.

Storage, which is the one people get wrong

The published size of a game is the size it occupies once installed. The process of installing it frequently needs room for the compressed download and the expanded files at the same time, which is close to double. A machine with exactly enough space for the finished game can still fail at ninety per cent.

• Confirm free space against roughly twice the advertised installation size, not once.
• Check where the installer intends to put the files. A default location on a small primary drive is a common cause of a failure that a second drive would have avoided.
• Leave headroom for growth. Games in this category expand with content updates, and an installation sized exactly today will be short within the year.
• Note that a drive with very little free space also slows down, which shows up later as the intermittent stutter described on our performance page.

The machine itself

You do not need to know your hardware in detail, but you do need to be able to find two things, because every support conversation begins with them.

• The operating system and its version, written down somewhere rather than looked up in a panic.
• The graphics hardware, by name, and where its driver came from — the hardware maker's own site, or a general system update. The distinction matters, because the version supplied through a general update can be older than the one the maker publishes.
• How much working memory the machine has, and how much is typically already in use before the game starts. A browser with many tabs open is usually the largest single consumer.

Power and display, particularly on a laptop

A laptop is capable of running well and choosing not to, which produces a performance complaint with no technical fault behind it at all.

• Check the power profile while plugged in, and again on battery. Many machines reduce performance substantially on battery by design.
• Confirm which graphics device the game will use where a machine has both integrated and discrete hardware. The default is not always the faster one.
• Make sure the machine has clearance underneath for air, and that the vents are not blocked by a soft surface. This costs nothing and prevents the gradual slowdown described on our performance page.
• Note the display's refresh rate, so that a frame rate cap can be set to something the machine can hold rather than left uncapped.

The connection

Two things are worth establishing before you start rather than during a difficult session.

• Whether a wired connection is available at all, even temporarily. It is the single most useful diagnostic step later, and knowing in advance that it is impossible saves suggesting it.
• Whether the game offers a choice of server region, and whether there is one near Australia. Where there is not, the baseline delay explained on our connection page is simply a feature of playing that title from here.
• Whether anything else in the household transfers large amounts of data on a schedule — backups, console updates, security scans — since these produce intermittent problems that look like faults.

The account decision, made before the account exists

This is the item most often skipped and the one with the longest tail. How you sign in on day one determines how recovery works years later, and it cannot easily be changed afterwards.

• Decide whether to create the account directly with an email address or through a platform or social login, and write down which you chose. Our account page explains why recovery so often fails at exactly this point.
• Use an email address you expect to keep. An address tied to an internet provider, an employer or a school is a recovery route with an expiry date on it.
• Use a password not used anywhere else. Credential reuse is the most common route by which game accounts are lost, and it is entirely preventable.
• Turn on a second sign-in factor if the publisher offers one, at the point of creating the account rather than after something has happened.
• Keep the confirmation email. It records the address and the creation date, which is what support channels ask for.

The household decisions

Where a machine is shared, or where young people use it, a few decisions are much easier to make in advance than to unwind after a statement arrives.

• Decide whether a payment method will be stored on the machine or on the game account at all.
• If it will, set up whatever purchase approval the platform or operating system provides, before the game is installed.
• Find out whether the game sells items as a chance at an outcome rather than the outcome itself, and if it does, treat that as a conversation to have rather than a setting to configure.
• Check the classification for the title in the published record of the Australian Classification Board, which is the authoritative source for Australian classifications and the consumer advice recorded with them.

What not to do while preparing

Two habits cause more damage than the problems they are meant to prevent. The first is installing optimisers, cleaners or booster utilities in advance of a game that has not yet been shown to run badly — this grants broad access to a machine to solve a problem that does not exist yet. The second is obtaining an installer from anywhere other than the publisher's own site or a distribution platform you already use, which is the route by which most bad software arrives voluntarily.

The short version

If you do nothing else on this page, do these five things, in this order: check double the space, check where the graphics driver came from, check the power profile, decide the sign-in method and write it down, and decide whether a payment method is stored on the machine. That sequence prevents most of what the rest of this site exists to diagnose.