The extra external HD certainly will have other uses (such as an additional drive to back up to), so it's not lost money. Also, external hard drives are quite cheap now.
Responding to everyone in general, yeah, EA should have known, perhaps should have told everyone, but software development is much, much more complex than I think most of you realize. What would have happened if they told everyone it wouldn't work and people stopped buying the software (or delayed) and then NVidia, at the last minute, got it fixed in the final release?
Then they would have been in the position of having to explain to shareholders why they took a hit in sales for crying wolf. Every software program is incredibly complex, with millions (perhaps even billions) of lines of code that have to work perfectly with every OS, video card, etc. Even if EA had betas of Lion, a beta is not final software, and it could be that they had it working fine in the beta and a last-minute change in code on the golden master broke things.
There are just so many possible permutations that it's a good reminder to have Time Machine backups and use them when needed to make your life less stressful.
Hope that all of you will be Simming soon.
SQ
