Misadventures in Streaming

So, I wrote Monday that we were going to be trying to stream some things, and it's definitely been an adventure. 

We spent a week preparing. We tested all the things. We had a secondary monitor set up to connect with my laptop. Everything worked. When we got to Thursday afternoon, we decided to connect my older laptop because it has a larger monitor, and it should have been fine for what we needed. We tested it, and everything seemed to be working. Well, we got to 7 o'clock, and the audio wasn't working right, and the video started freezing. So, we switched to my newer laptop.

I don't generally use this laptop for gaming, so I didn't even have Steam installed. So, installed that and Doki Doki Literature Club, which honestly didn't take too long. Still, it was a nuisance. Things should have gone well from there. I had the streaming software installed and configured because I intend to stream art from here. But then we connected this laptop to the second monitor. It was a little wonky to start with, and somehow the second monitor got set as the primary. Fixed that, but then the game screen was only the size of a thumb nail. I couldn't read anything on the screen, which makes this game, in particular, functionally difficult to play. I didn't want to bother trying to figure out how to fix that since we were already supposed to be streaming the game at that point.

Take 3. We got my husband's laptop, which is a Mac. T_T It has streaming software, but it isn't the software I was using, so the configuration was different; it also wasn't connected to the Twitch account because we hadn't planned on using it at all, so I had to fix that. Whatever, it at least worked, but it was frustrating not being able to see the chat log. I solved that problem by using my laptop logged into Twitch and just tried to periodically check the chat. 

I think we'll be using the Mac to finish the Doki Doki Literature Club play through, but I'm hoping we can figure out what's wrong with my gaming laptop for future games because the specs should be more than enough to handle streaming-- I mean it has better hardware for that than this laptop, which I use primarily because it is more portable and I can draw on the screen. Hoping for no problems when I try to stream art next week. I mean there weren't any problems streaming that from this laptop when we were testing, but that doesn't seem to be any indication of whether things will actually work or not.