The Habitrail – Page 30 – The occasional musings of Andy Scheffler

August 10, 2005

Monday: “It’s been a while and my graphic card’s performance is starting to get out of date.”

Tuesday: Go to Fry’s. Buy new video card. Install new video card. Video card sort of works. (Sometimes the screen goes blank and sometimes the sync isn’t working) Video card also doesn’t give any performance increase based on benchmark program. Video card is returned to Fry’s, better video card is purchased. Better video card is installed. Better video card gives a piddly 10% increase, and also has line noise on the DVI port. Better video card is removed, old video card reinstalled.

Wednesday: Second video card is returned to Fry’s. New processor is purchased instead. New processor is installed.

All hell breaks loose. Explorer.exe starts crashing whenever I try to do anything. Might be a BIOS problem. Check BIOS. Nothing there to change. Might be a windows problem. Reinstall Windows. Get the oh-so-fun BSoD during Windows install. (a.k.a. hello, this is a hardware problem, dumbass!)

I skipped a few of the snafus and brainfarts in that last part, but the net result is still the same. I have a computer that worked, put a new processor in, and no longer worked right. And now I have a fresh install of Win2k on a freshly formatted hard drive, and it BSoDed during the install…. and trying again and that’s where I am.

Have I mentioned how much I hate Microsoft?

Update 9:39pm: The install seems to have frozen while trying to “Register components.” The hard drive is making noises like it’s working, but the bar hasn’t budged in 15 minutes. Going to try restarting, reformatting, and reinstalling again.

Update 10:33pm: A likely culprit has been found. Your friend and mine, heat. (The CPU was running at 79C… while sitting on the BIOS screen.) I need to buy thermal paste, and possibly a better cpu fan at Fry’s tomorrow. So no FFXI for me tonight. And no Half Life 2, which was what I did on Monday when I couldn’t play FFXI because of scheduled mantainence. I… don’t know what to do.

I think I’ll go eat dinner.

August 8, 2005

Catching up

Just finished watching season 2 of Dead Like Me. Finished up Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. It’s a maintenance day on FFXI, so I figured I’d try and finish things I hadn’t finished, so I’m firing up Half Life 2…. if the stupid Steam engine would every finish “scanning for game updates”.

Whoever thought of the idea of making a standalone game require online access and jumping through how many levels of menus just go get started…

August 4, 2005

Work is.

Life is.

FFXI is.

I need to clean my room.

July 30, 2005

Dragon Con

I just bought plane tickets, I’m going to Dragon Con for sure now. No more waffling.

I had to fly out of SFO to avoid transferring, but it should be worth it for the peace of mind, especially on the redeye there.

July 19, 2005

I never know the depths of rage, frustration and directed anger until I try to update a FFXI update.

Stupid Square Enix doesn’t understand the concept of beefing up server banks to handle increased load. So now 90% of their users get a stupid POL-1160 error (“the network is busy”) another 9% start downloading but get interrupted and lose all their progress (“we don’t know how to program an updater that saves its progress”) and something like less than 1% actually get through it all and get into the game. (“We sold our souls to the devil.”)

People keep saying they should use some BitTorrent type update. It would certainly be better than this stupid system where nobody can connect because we’re all trying to connect. The last time, it took me more than 24 hours to finally get connected and back in the game. This time doesn’t look like it’s going to be any faster.

I want a fourth button next to “Network Connection Information”, “Retry” and “Exit” labeled “Stab the person at Square Enix who thinks that the current system works and since everyone keeps paying their monthly dues there’s no reason to change anything.” then one next to that that says “Move update servers to North America so the Japanese players that are currently all getting nice quick updates have to sit through this frustration that all the rest of us are feeling.”

Bad user interface to have all that text on a button, but hey, I’d hit that fourth one over and over and over and over and START THE DAMN DOWNLOAD AGAIN YOU STUPID PROGRAM I JUST WANT TO GO TO SLEEP.

July 15, 2005

We are not cool…

… because the air conditioner is out of commision. It was going bad, and the repairman had to take out the parts that weren’t really working, anyway. He said that when we were using it, it wasn’t cooling well (which pretty much fits the behaviour I was seeing) and that it was on the path of breaking down completely. So by Monday, I’ll be out a chunk of money, but have a working a/c again.

For the time being, I went to Fry’s and bought a floor fan, and now we have a breeze in the house. It’d work, except that I really don’t want to have to leave my bedroom door open to get it working.

July 12, 2005

Squeaksqueaksqueak

No, I’m not speaking in my native hamster tongue. It’s the air conditioner. It’s squeaking. It still works, it’s just a wearing belt or needs to be oiled joint or something that’s simple, yet will require a call to an a/c person to fix.

*sigh* Right before summer, too.

July 9, 2005

Falling blocks.

As I mentioned in passing before, I bought Meteos for the Nintendo DS. It’s scarily addictive, and for the entirety of AX, and a bit after, I would see falling blocks whenever I closed my eyes. I’d recommend it to anyone I know who owns a DS. Oh, wait… that’s none of you.

Did a bit of shopping today, ended up at Fry’s and saw someone I knew there. I was also briefly at Sunnyvale Golfland and saw someone I knew there, too. Didn’t see anyone else at the other places though.

After listening to waaaay too much radio advertising, I can officially say that the marketing gimmick of “Verb one, Verb two, Repeat” is now old. I declare it so.

July 5, 2005