Computing

>What I’ve been occupied with.

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I’ve upgraded my video card. Now I’ll be able to release L4D videos once again. Fraps works even better now. But the best part? When a Charger attacks I won’t lag! Everytime a Charger started to charge I would freeze for 4 seconds, then awaken to a friend or me being beaten to death. After getting tired of this I mostly played on my notebook since performance was flawless. But with this ATi Saphire HD 3850 it clears up that problem quite nicely!

I did run into some other problems though. 3 capacitors on my motherboard are about to pop. The good news is I found another motherboard for dirt cheap. It also looks like the latest drivers randomly cause the system to die. Not in game either mind you, only when I’m surfing the net. At first I thought maybe it was either the drivers or the new .NET framework. But uninstalling that caused the next lockup to generate a BSOD rather than just a black screen followed by a restart. I’ve rolled back 2 versions and so far everything is smooth.

I’d better get some sleep. I have gifts to mail to Princess Barbie before the post office closes this afternoon. Then I can finally email her about it. The weather plus work has done a good job of preventing me from getting much done…

>The Great Computer War of 2010

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Well it turns out the Hard Drive doesn’t have any problems on that laptop. Doing a reinstall over that XP install did the trick. But other weird instances happened last night while I was working on it. For starters my father’s motherboard died when I put my USB key into it to give it a new anti-virus definition. Turns out that type of mobo isn’t shielded properly if you use front USB, in fact one case was reported where plugging a USB key in caused smoke to come out of the tower! O_O

Oh, and it gets better! My laptop decided that it didn’t want to start up the anti-virus program properly! Though that was an easy fix. I just had to remove a packet program I installed a long time ago, for some reason changing the service for it under services made it go ape shit.

Yeah… I guess I should get some sleep now.

>Open Thread

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Lets see, last night I went to bed at about 6 am… Woke up at 3:11 this afternoon, got a call from work asking if I could work a shift today at 4. So I took it and came home at 8. Tore into a laptop someone gave me to work on (they wanted it wiped and reinstalled), I ran the install last night after formatting the Hard Drive, did some tweaks to it today and found out that not all of the data for windows installed properly. All sorts of shit was missing like Internut Exploder, windoze update, defrag.exe… And services won’t execute properly or remember what values I enter.I must say this is an interesting puzzle I have. I’m guessing either the hard drive is going bad, or there is a boot sector virus.

So then I decided to take a break and finish portal (again) to see the new ending that was just added today. It’s real… Interesting. I have a feeling it will either be a sequel to portal, HL2 E3, or a crossover of the two.

>It lives!

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And the computer is behaving like a computer once again! I’m currently building all the partitions. Then when I’m done I’m going to go over to the DOS side and build my non RAID windows install. So far everything has been going smoothly though. Especially seamonkey. All I had to do was copy the contents of my old install into it and it remembered all of my addons, emails and passwords without having to import them!