Honor's Code

My next task was to run Memtest86 and Check Disk. Both utilities reported no issues. That was the first bit of good news I had had from the computer in a while. At that point, the issue was narrowed down to either the video card or the motherboard. I ran down to a local 'chop shop' (that's what I call a store that sells computers and used computer parts). For $20, I was able to get both fans and a cheap video card (RADEON 4600 512MB). I replaced the rear exhaust fan, but had some trouble getting the case off to access the front fan. I left that for later and kept the case open with a regular desk fan blowing in it. I replaced the video card, fired her up and installed the drivers. Word came up without an issue. Okay. I tried GiMP. No problems. No crashes, no blue screens. That was already an improvement over what I had been getting. I took a deep breath and started testing my games. I started small with Hearthstone which should be less taxing on the video card than anyt...

I was merrily doing my Garrison chores one fine evening when the screen changed to this wonderful technicolor display. The sound froze and then the screen turned blue and filled with a bunch of computerese. I recognized from the file name that one of my ATI RADEON dlls was the culprit. I shut down and restarted and everything came up fine. I chalked it up to a glitch and after a few moments started up WoW again. When the blue screen returned, I knew I was in trouble. I dove into trying to figure out what was going on starting with the video card drivers. The card I have is a RADEON 6800 series and they stopped supporting it back in March, but I tried every driver available for it on the ATI website, even the beta ones. No driver I tried made any difference. My next thought was to see if maybe, somehow the video card had become loose in the PCIe slot. I didn't how that could happen, but at that point, my main goal was "what", not "how". As soon as I touche...

Sorry for the lack of updates this week, my WoW time has been somewhat limited. It’s a little bit frustrating because I’m sitting like half a bubble from 77, and I can’t wait to fire up the engines in the ole Gyrocopter again! I got a reminder that I play on a PVP server Tuesday as the Horde were out and feeling quite scrappy. One Death Knight really had it in for me. He must have attacked me 6 different times. I think I killed him about 4 times and he killed me about 2. Looking back, I didn’t use my cooldowns well when he got me, or I might have been able to pull those out. I’m dang hard to kill that last 20% if you don’t have some sort of burst attack like Execute or Hammer or Wrath. The basic strategy I’ve developed for Death Knights to start with Turn Evil on their pet if they have it out. I’ll get my Seal up if it wasn’t already and get a couple of hits on him while I keep cleansing off any debuffs, most likely diseases, that he puts on me. Since I took Improved Hammer of Just...

Life has a funny way of throwing you a curve ball when you least expect it or in my case want it. My "day job" is in IT, computer programming to be precise, but my department is also tasked with the hardware side of the business as well. This is what I thought RAID was before I started WoW. This RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Drives. I'd be shocked to find a server on the planet that didn't use it. Well last night as we were wrapping up our day, one of our RAID drives failed. This is usually not a big deal. You "hot swap" out the failed drive for a new one and it rebuilds the array and you go on your merry business. Oh, but not last night. Something really odd happened with the rebuild and the drive letters got all mixed up. We had running processes that were writing files to the wrong drives and it was a mess. So instead of raiding Gruul's Lair, I was spending my evening with an epic hard drive. By the time we got everything sorte...