A Matter of Priorities
I love plonq, I really do. Our friends accuse us of having a psychic connection, too, which is why they won't let us play on the same Pictionary team. But sometimes our wires get a bit crossed.
I have two computers: my desktop and my laptop. About six months ago I started having some overheating issues with my desktop. At the same time, WoW started doing some spectacular crashes: the video would seize up, the sound would start spazzing, and then everything would just shut off, requiring a hard reset. Everything else was working fine, and a reinstall of the game didn't fix it. The (quick) conclusion that we came to was that my hard drive was also overheating (since my case is really too small for the hardware I have in it), and it had developed some errors. Another concern is that my Windows installation, which mostly rock-solid, was going on six years old. XP had been installed in late 2001, and it had been ghosted over to a new harddrive in 2003 or so. It had had to deal with new motherboards, two new video cards, a few sound card, lots of networking changes, and untold quantities of installed/removed programs. The registry had gotten a bit messy, and we decided it was time to start over with a fresh installation.
To that end, Plonq bought a new hard drive, and on Saturday we installed XP on it. The plan was to have the machine boot up from the new hard drive, import my Firefox/Thunderbird profiles from the old hard drive, and then reinstall all my programs on the new drive, using the old one for music/movie/misc storage. Things should have been pretty smooth, but there were a few hitches. We couldn't find my motherboard disk to tell XP how to deal with RAID. Then we'd made some BIOS changes that needed to be reversed. Once we got that working, we were having read/write issues moving *some* things from the old drive to the new one. That turned out to be a permissions issue, which we found a hack for.
Mind you, I'm saying "we" when it was mostly Plonq. I also tended not to be in the room much, because I stress out a lot when my computer isn't working right. Instead of standing over Plonq stressing, I've found it's easier to just go hide in another room and wait for him to fix it. (I think it's easier on him, too.)
Well, after we got all that resolved, I installed WoW, got it all patched up, installed some mods, and fired up the game in preparation for our guild Ony run last night. I was really excited to be playing WoW on "the big screen" after playing on my laptop for so long. Well, I was in game for all of five minutes when the sound locked up, the video crashed, and the comptuer went kablooee.
Curses!
I was fairly sure it was some hardware problem. Something wasn't talking to something, or something was talking too much. I waved my hands, told Plonq about the crash, and booted up my laptop.
Plonq made some adjustments to the BIOS only to find that the computer wouldn't boot at all. :( I put my head down and concentrated on the game for a while to forget about my computer's problems.
Later, Plonq was messing around with settings again. I stayed out of his way, because I was already stressed out about it not working, and I didn't want to stress him out too. I heard the Windows boot up, but it was followed by a lot of tapping and sighing. Never a good sign. I imagined that he'd fixed the BIOS, but now something else wasn't working. Networking? The other drive? Maybe he could only get it to boot in safe mode. Finally, I couldn't stand it anymore and went into the comptuer room to see what was going on.
The computer was running, and Plonq had a screen full of text and a dialogue box up. I sidled up and asked, "So, how's it going?"
"Ok, I guess," Plonq said, slightly despondent.
"What's wrong?" I asked, fearing the answer.
"Well, I can't get it to sync the time with the remote time servers."
"...what?" I asked.
"Your clock is wrong," he said, "and I'm trying to fix it."
This was followed by a long discussion me ranting about the difference between a serious problem, and the clock being wrong.
On the plus side, Plonq thinks he knows what was wrong with my audio, so I'll try firing up the game again tonight to see if it works. :)
I have two computers: my desktop and my laptop. About six months ago I started having some overheating issues with my desktop. At the same time, WoW started doing some spectacular crashes: the video would seize up, the sound would start spazzing, and then everything would just shut off, requiring a hard reset. Everything else was working fine, and a reinstall of the game didn't fix it. The (quick) conclusion that we came to was that my hard drive was also overheating (since my case is really too small for the hardware I have in it), and it had developed some errors. Another concern is that my Windows installation, which mostly rock-solid, was going on six years old. XP had been installed in late 2001, and it had been ghosted over to a new harddrive in 2003 or so. It had had to deal with new motherboards, two new video cards, a few sound card, lots of networking changes, and untold quantities of installed/removed programs. The registry had gotten a bit messy, and we decided it was time to start over with a fresh installation.
To that end, Plonq bought a new hard drive, and on Saturday we installed XP on it. The plan was to have the machine boot up from the new hard drive, import my Firefox/Thunderbird profiles from the old hard drive, and then reinstall all my programs on the new drive, using the old one for music/movie/misc storage. Things should have been pretty smooth, but there were a few hitches. We couldn't find my motherboard disk to tell XP how to deal with RAID. Then we'd made some BIOS changes that needed to be reversed. Once we got that working, we were having read/write issues moving *some* things from the old drive to the new one. That turned out to be a permissions issue, which we found a hack for.
Mind you, I'm saying "we" when it was mostly Plonq. I also tended not to be in the room much, because I stress out a lot when my computer isn't working right. Instead of standing over Plonq stressing, I've found it's easier to just go hide in another room and wait for him to fix it. (I think it's easier on him, too.)
Well, after we got all that resolved, I installed WoW, got it all patched up, installed some mods, and fired up the game in preparation for our guild Ony run last night. I was really excited to be playing WoW on "the big screen" after playing on my laptop for so long. Well, I was in game for all of five minutes when the sound locked up, the video crashed, and the comptuer went kablooee.
Curses!
I was fairly sure it was some hardware problem. Something wasn't talking to something, or something was talking too much. I waved my hands, told Plonq about the crash, and booted up my laptop.
Plonq made some adjustments to the BIOS only to find that the computer wouldn't boot at all. :( I put my head down and concentrated on the game for a while to forget about my computer's problems.
Later, Plonq was messing around with settings again. I stayed out of his way, because I was already stressed out about it not working, and I didn't want to stress him out too. I heard the Windows boot up, but it was followed by a lot of tapping and sighing. Never a good sign. I imagined that he'd fixed the BIOS, but now something else wasn't working. Networking? The other drive? Maybe he could only get it to boot in safe mode. Finally, I couldn't stand it anymore and went into the comptuer room to see what was going on.
The computer was running, and Plonq had a screen full of text and a dialogue box up. I sidled up and asked, "So, how's it going?"
"Ok, I guess," Plonq said, slightly despondent.
"What's wrong?" I asked, fearing the answer.
"Well, I can't get it to sync the time with the remote time servers."
"...what?" I asked.
"Your clock is wrong," he said, "and I'm trying to fix it."
This was followed by a long discussion me ranting about the difference between a serious problem, and the clock being wrong.
On the plus side, Plonq thinks he knows what was wrong with my audio, so I'll try firing up the game again tonight to see if it works. :)