tigris

Have I mentioned before how much I hate FRYS Associates? I have? Well, good.

So the motherboard with the malfunctioning center RAM slot went back to Frys last night. They pull out their playwood computer, where they lay down the mobo, plug in video card, processor, power supply, and a ram stick, and turn it on to see if it works. Of course it worked - he was using a GOOD RAM slot, and only one stick, just like I've been doing for the last two weeks. He then told me he had no problems with the board in the same attitude as one would say "You stupid little girl, you are such a filthy liar." I told him to try two sticks, and he'd see the problem I was having. He refused, insisting the board was fine. What a JERK!!!

But we swapped it for a more expensive board that A. had no returns on the shelf, and B. shaunpup suggested to me as being a good one. It's the A-bit NF7. I had had some reservations about the increased price and the fact that I just RETURNED an A-bit, but the ECS in the range I needed was all sold out, and the Shuttle brand boards were the brand I just got DONE with the IDE and everything else dying on. Installed the board, XP couldn't handle the hardware change, so nuked the drive, and reinstalled XP. We'll see how the driver reinstallation goes tonight.

Laundry tonight or tomorrow night. Gone this weekend on the private car trip to Reno. Craving Sushi again, ARGH! Down, down foul sushi cravings!!

No improvement. I was so tired by the time I got home that I wasn't up to even taking up Tanan's offer of going out to dinner, and fiddled with the PC for a while as I chatted with shaunpup over ICQ trying to fix it, came to the conclusion that my brand new ATI video card from a few months ago has gone the way of all the earth, and must be replaced. That's an unanticipated $100 expense, and 3 days (minimum) of downtime for the machine. I am heading to bed early out of frustration.

It's possible that Horizons burned the video card out. I played the game fine for hours on this machine with aayrick last night, switched for the larger monitor so I could use higher resolution, and that's when it started to lock up and BSOD. Put the smaller monitor back on it - lower resolution - and it kept doing it. After that it seems to be have been toasted, because even turning the resolution back down didn't help. The ATI Radeon drivers are up to date, and there are countless forums talking about people having trouble with ATI Radeon video cards and the game. At least that's the best I can figure. Shaun will have to take a look himself on sunday when he comes down. I'm really tight on money so this will have to be a really cheap new video card.

Bed now. Maybe tomorrow my luck will improve. I can only hope. *sob*

My mission this weekend was the try and fix the PC. I just want a machine to play games. Is that so much to ask? I got a new video card - an NVidia GeForce FX 5200 with 128 MB of DDR VRAM on it, and I wanted to use it so much... but the machine refused to work.

New processors to put on chip's board (2 CPUs: Pentium III 1GHz), two heatsinks = $274.96

Still no joy. Locks before the 'start' button appears. Repeatedly. Lots of troubleshooting.

New motherboard to replace chip's board which didn't seem to support the processors = $129.99
(((I think they charged me for other things I didn't buy on that occasion...)))

Still had no luck (windows installs now, but locks up immediately) until I tried loading windows ME, installing the MB drivers, but not installing the video card drivers - using an old old matrox video card for PCI - and patched the HELL out of windows before I tried anything. That finally worked.

Conclusion: I have finally hit the watershed point. The motherboard, processors and everything are pushing the limits of a 5-year old operating system (98se - 3 years in the case of ME) and in order to just play games, I will be forced to do the thing I hate and dread.

Upgrade to Windows XP.

As it currently stands (with ME) I have a working PC, but I can't play games - the video card is too old to support it. I still don't understand why the NVidia card drivers (for both my new and old NVidia AGP cards) cause the OS to become unstable and die. More testing is required. However, one thing is for certain. I've replaced almost all the major components of the machine over this project - Hard drive, CPUs, Motherboard, video card, sound card - so it's essentially a new machine now. I have removed the name 'ARIEL' from it, and was thinking of calling it 'TAK' from Invader Zim, but then I had a revelation. Not 'Tak' - 'Tek', in reference to the queen of the unicorns and Jan's mate from the Firebringer trilogy.

TEK
===
Processor: Pentium III 1GHz (2 CPUs)
Motherboard: TYAN Tiger 2507 running at 133 Clock speed
RAM: 1 GB PC133 SDRAM (in four 256 MB units)
Video Card: Matrox Millenium (TEMPORARY)
HD1: 40 GB IBM
HD2: Zip 100 IDE
Ethernet: DLink 10/100 full duplex
Sound: Soundblaster PCI128
CDROM1: CDROM 52X
CDROM2: CDRW 24x4x
Current OS: Windows ME

Last night I talked to a ex-reporter friend Beth Mitchrony from Martinez about the book Leva and I have been struggling over. She wouldn't even look at it, citing my works from 2-3 years ago, stating I needed a refresher course in style. Needless to say I was hurt. Kenny Mitchroney (comicbooks and storyboarder) says that Leva and I need an agent - that no one will take us seriously until we do. In the meantime his ex-roomie Steve Boyett fired his agent when his agent read Steve's new book and went 'I don't get it...' We won't ask him about agents right now.

I am bound and determined to print this book, even if collecting reject letters becomes a hobby.

In good news, we signed for the new car yesterday.

In the meantime, there's newer MV writing getting posted (still very rough and mostly dialog).

I'm now a paid honest livejournal user now.

I'm off to work now, making $200 less money a week than I was at Brocade...

While in the middle of doing something, the PC starts having problem accessing the hard drive. In frustration, I pulled out one of the three optical drives, and moved everything onto the PCI expansion IDE controller card in the PC to try and keep that stupid piece of crap alive.

It was able to boot from the hard drive once on the PCI IDE card, but now I had a whole series of unexplainable lockups. I only use the PC for gaming, and now it looks like none of the games will work because they lock up during loading. So, once again, I am incensed and infuriated at the stupid PC, and have turned it off to let it sit neglected and unwanted for a while as I attempt to calm down and be less angry at it.

It just knows that I’m biding my time before I get my dream mac tower — a machine fast enough to run windows emulation software under Mac OS X, so I’ll be able to play windows games on the mac and never need the PC ever again. *KICKS THE STUPID PC!!!*

I know I'm beating a dead horse about this, but the saga with the PC continues. I boot up the PC this morning, and it's unable to find the hard drive - and this is with the new drive! I threw out the old drive! I think it was actually perfectly good! I'm thinking the motherboard is bad. Which means I may just let the PC die here and now. I am so tired of spending hours and and hours making the damn thing work. The only reason I keep it is for gaming, but Alice I got the mac-only version which works out pretty well.

I what know C-mage's first comment will be: "If you were running XP this wouldn't happen." Well, no, it would still happen because this is a hardware-level problem. XP is software. If it can't find the hard drive, how is XP going to have anything to do with it?

Anyhow, if it is a motherboard issue, I can't afford to replace the MB right now. The one I have uses PC133 RAM, and all the new stuff uses DDR RAM.

New Motherboard: $100
New Processor: $200-300
New RAM: $200
Total: $500-$600 that I don't have.

In other news, I saw Erin from Brocade last night. She seemed pretty social and the fact that Brocade were being blockheads never came up - I was good and never brought it up. However, she still didn't have my recommendation letter she promised. I'm starting to think that I never will get it. We'll see what happens Thursday.

I sent messages to all the FC staff mailing list management addresses that I wanted to be unsubscribed from all the FC mailing lists, and either the lists have all gone quiet, or they've finally (two weeks later) taken me off them. I still don't want to be a part of FC next year, because I'm sick of being their unappreciated secretary. I felt unappreciated at Brocade, and at FC - I'm no longer at Brocade, well I don't want to be a part of FC anymore. The only person who thanked me for all the time I put into FC last year - getting up early on saturday mornings and sitting in meetings that lasted all day long until 5 at night - was ChipUni. And he wasn't in charge of anything last year - except FCTV. I'll attend the firing party on saturday - to stick it out until the end - but I will be very honest about how I felt. I'll certainly attend FC in the future - I've never been to AnthroCon or ConFurence, but FC is the better of the cons I've been to. I won't go to ConFurence - not after Darrel Exline's recent stupidity on the newsgroups. I'd like to go to AC, but the reason I don't go to AC is the same reason I can't go to Gargcon this year (which I really really really really really wanna go to!), in that it's on the east coast. I just can't afford to fly out there.

Playing Alice easy difficulty through several times to get more practice in, because on normal difficulty I start getting clobbered right around the Pool of Tears. I'm amazed how much better I've gotten at the game. I can play all forty levels through in a day (8 hours). I've perfected my rope climbing and steam gliding skills. Just working on melee combat. That's where I seem to get weak. The jackbomb doesn't really work like I want it to, but the Eyestaff toy is surprisingly effective for it's will cost. But you don't get that until late in the game, meaning the jackbomb and jacks are my main toys.

I've been looking for ICQ/AIM alternatives for Mac OS X and haven't had any luck so far. Crissa suggested Trillian (PC only), GAIM (can't find the Mac OS X download), and FINK (directly conflicts with the antivirus software). Having them in one program would be nice, so I'm not running iChat and ICQ on the mac at once. iChat is really really flaky software, because it keeps disconnecting in the middle of a conversation. I've been looking for an iChat feedback page, but haven't found one yet.