Computers and Games

In the midst of rising interest rates, skyrocketing petrol prices and gross grocery bills, it’s nice when live gives you something to smile about. For starters, publishers have glutted the office with comp copies of new novels, so I’ve been helping out by reading and reviewing some of them. Through this I’ve been introduced to the brilliant work of Scott Lynch; I’ve read both of his novels (so far) in the Gentleman Bastard Sequence, which is fantasy like I’ve never read it – street level, with a Tarantino-esque flair. Not even Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar stories have as much wit as The Lies of Locke Lamora and Red Seas Under Red Skies. Okay, maybe I’m slanging off a master just to get attention, but I really do prefer Locke Lamora and Jean Tannen to Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser.

Continue reading "Good Things Come..." »

Posted by IMAGinES at 09:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, in a bit of an about face from my last big clan-related posting, I decided to quit The Forsaken Ones after all. Karlos got in touch on Saturday; he’d decided to quit the clan for his own reasons. As that meant our ladder team was down to four people, two of whom I couldn’t communicate with due to network conflicts, I decided to pull out as well.

I figured I’d go clanless for a little while – until I started playing some games with a few folks on my XBL Friends list. I’d been keeping an eye on the development of their clan for a little while, and they were friendly, communicated well and didn’t swear – probably because a good portion of them were female.

Continue reading "Forsaking the Forsaken for Water" »

Posted by IMAGinES at 09:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It was a pretty geeky weekend. Friday night saw some of The Forsaken Ones getting together for a training session. Karlos had found some neat cubbyholes in the geometries of the Halo 3 maps Guardian and Construct, so we spent a little time getting to know them before launching into a game of Team Oddball using the AussieXbox.net Team Rumble variant. I go into some more detail here, but suffice to say I found out a few things about how my fellow clan members play, especially those who reckon they despise the objective-based gametypes. I’m hoping we can get some more training in this coming Friday evening, and I want to try and give the session some more structure.

Saturday was busy. My former mentee got back in touch a couple of months ago, and Vickie and I have been hanging out with him and his family lately. Mid-last week he called and asked whether I’d like to go and play some laser tag at Crystal Cascades with him and his stepdad; unfortunately, when we got there for the early morning session no one else showed up, so I wound up driving back home a half an hour later. Kid and his stepdad are pretty cool, though, so I had a good chat with them in the meantime!

Continue reading "Feng Shui Forsaken" »

Posted by IMAGinES at 10:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that Karlos had recruited me into a clan of Halo 3 players, with the intent of competing on a ladder. Well, I went and got all invested in the idea, going so far as to set a Yahoo! Group up and start pestering the others who’d stuck their hands up for the clan idea about getting signed up on the ladder website.

Then we got in touch with another clan, who turned around and challenged us to some 4v4 matches this coming Sunday. Naturally I was all for it, but it’s been a right pain just trying to get not only three other clan members (of nineteen) to put their hands up, but also any kind of training time. Just last night, two of the other three who finally said yes were online at various times; one wound up in a four-person Team Slayer squad of his own, and the other – the clan’s leader and the one who suggested training in the first place – went straight into playing Viva Piñata. If he read the messages I’d sent about training he didn’t bother replying to them.

Continue reading "Tabletop or Online, Gamers Are All The Same" »

Posted by IMAGinES at 08:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dan, you bastard, I know you’re going to be gloating.

As is still occasionally my wont, but with much less frequency than it used to be (at least fifty percent of my recent shopping centre visits have not included a browse), I stopped in at EB Games on the weekend to have a look at what was out and what was coming out. DoW: Soulstorm is now on the shelves, but considering that I’ve not touched Dark Crusade in freaking months, why bother? Same with the Guild Wars expansion, Eye of the North; I’ve not even finished any of the Prophecies, Factions or Nightfall campaigns, so no need for the expansion.

Continue reading "Cheaper on the PC?" »

Posted by IMAGinES at 09:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Okay, here’s some unusual linkage of the moment. Now, as should be obvious from the last post, I’ve been playing a lot of the Halo 3 lately, enough that Vickie’s been feeling a bit slighted, so I know I need to put the brakes on some. Still, at the moment, she’s watching A Touch of Frost on Seven, so I nipped upstairs to bask in the glory of my Halo 3 Service Record, all the more radiant tonight as I achieved a Team Slayer Skill of 20 earlier this evening and got promoted straight from Lieutenant Grade 3 to Captain Grade 3! Yay!

Anyway, I also checked the Bungie.net news feed, and at the top of the list was “MLG ESPN Saturday Night Rebroadcast Available Now”. For those of you who, like me, don’t live in the US, the acronyms might need a little explaining. ESPN is, as I understand it, North America’s largest pay-TV sports provider (if the URL is an indicator, they're part of Disney's media conglomerate). While I don’t think I’ve ever known exactly what ESPN stands for (I think I’m safe in assuming the S is for “sport” and the N is for “network”), I do know what MLG stands for: Major League Gaming. That’s right, a major media outlet has dedicated a portion of its resources to covering (and hosting) video game tournaments.

Continue reading "36 Rounds - 2 Grenades - 25 Kills - HIKE!" »

Posted by IMAGinES at 11:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

It’s hard to believe that just a scant few months ago, Karlos was of the belief that online play just wasn’t his bag. I’d mentioned Xbox Live to him a few times last year, but he usually responded to any suggestions in the negative. He only had dial up Internet access and wasn’t interested in the extra monthly expense of broadband, and the yearly Xbox Live fee of $89.00 seemed an extravagance.

Continue reading "I’ve created a monster…" »

Posted by IMAGinES at 09:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Yesterday was a busy one. I finally caught up with Karlos for some Halo 3 in the morning, and managed to get my Team Slayer ranking up to 12. He’s been putting some serious hours in lately, cranking his Team Slayer rank up to 22. We played for a couple of hours before I want to the local pub to help the Lions Club with a raffle draw. We didn’t have much luck; since the pub converted most of its lounge area into a restaurant, there’s little room for people to sit and relax, so midday custom has dropped drastically.

After that, Deena, Chooks and I went out for the grand final of our soccer league. Our team won 13 to 10, and we each got a trophy for it! I’m pretty sure it’s the first ever trophy I’ve earned for a sporting event! Ater that, it was straight out to Barlow Park to help out on the Lions Club food van for a couple of hours, raising money for the club through sales of chips, hot dogs and steak burgers to the crowd who'd arrived to spectate the Cowboys vs. Titans charity match.

Posted by IMAGinES at 12:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

After months of the both of us complaining about our dodgy phone line and Internet connection – the phone crackles regularly and our Internet is prone to intermittent dropouts – Vickie finally gave up on waiting for me to call Telstra and gave them a ring herself a week and a bit ago. The contractor came over on Friday to check our connections, and after crawling under the house, replacing some joins and checking as much as he could, he narrowed the problem down to the ADSL filter / splitter attached to our phone line. He didn’t have one himself, so he couldn’t test it, but he was positive he’d eliminated all the other possibilities; nothing else could be causing the fault.

Continue reading "Line Trouble" »

Posted by IMAGinES at 12:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The rebuild went okay. My system is, I think, quite a bit more streamlined. I’ve installed almost everything I want to put on it, save Transformers: The Game and Guild Wars, the former because I want to find the USB receiver which allows me to connect my wireless Xbox 360 controller to my PC and the latter because we’re at three quarters of our monthly bandwidth limit and updating the client might take a gig or two. Spyware Doctor is working again, thankfully, and I’m browsing the web with little trouble.

There’s one hitch; it’s not bothersome at the moment but it’s something I’d like to fix when the next rebuild comes around. For some odd reason, Windows XP is now insistent that my Seagate Barracuda 320GB SATA hard disk drive possesses only 130GB. The BIOS disagrees with Windows, of course, reporting the full size on its settings screen. But, apparently, the BIOS is a pitiful moron compared to XP’s all-knowing wisdom, even though the last build recognised the drive’s full size. I have the feeling it has something to do with the SATA drivers I used and that I perhaps plugged the drive into the SATA ports controlled by the Intel controller instead of the Gigabyte controller like last time.

Continue reading "Some Good News for February" »

Posted by IMAGinES at 09:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Oh, and I broke the 2,000 Gamerscore barrier! Like I figured, it was by earning the Sniper Expert Achievement in Mass Effect.

Posted by IMAGinES at 09:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I’m planning a complete rebuild of my PC this weekend. I think I have some sort of Trojan lurking on my system somewhere. My web-browsing performance has been spotty over the last few months, even when I’m the only person on the network and I’m not downloading anything. A file I sent to Vickie a few days ago got a virus warning. My firewall software switches itself off randomly at startup, forcing me to restart it manually. My anti-spyware software has flat-out not worked in ages. Finally, a safe link I clicked on yesterday was redirected to a URL with a very unsavoury name (thankfully I got a “Page Not Found”). So on Friday night I’ll start backing my vital files up onto DVD-ROM, with the aim of reformatting my hard drive on Saturday morning. I’ll have to get a spare floppy disk drive out, as the setup utility on the Windows XP disc doesn’t natively recognise Serial ATA drives. Once I get the system rebuilt to my preferences, I’ll do a thorough virus scan on my backups before re-copying the data over.

Continue reading "New Year's Rebuilding" »

Posted by IMAGinES at 09:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

It’s been a great ten days off work. Vickie, thankfully, cracked the whip and got me cleaning and tidying up before the arrival of the Cazman and his lovely lady Linda, and we got the spare room looking great for them. Although we weren’t able to spend much time with them as we’d hoped, we just appreciated their company the more. I didn’t know, for example, that Linda was part Chinese, nor that she has a hilarious, trash-talking competitive streak, which came out during a few games of Uno! Speaking of which, I’m starting to think Uno is more fun than Chez Geek.

I fully intend to do a better job of keeping up with these two (ideally using Skype a lot to cut down on those pesky phone bills) and I’m sure Vickie does also. We also (yeah, yeah, I know, but it reads better than “in addition”) must get back in regular touch with Caz’s Mum and Dad. We got a great Christmas letter from them!

Continue reading "Ten Fantastic Days" »

Posted by IMAGinES at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Around this time of year, people start thinking about things like resolutions and such. Like most, I have some trouble fulfilling my resolutions, so my first and main resolution for this year is to improve my skill at goal-setting. This has been a problem for me ever since the last year of primary school, especially when it came to assignments. I’d get told to make this big thing in this amount of time, and I got so intimidated that I just shut it out of my mind until it was too late. I need to get good at recognising how to break this huge thing into discrete, easy-to-accomplish chunks and then processing those chunks while still managing my overall progress.

There are a few goals I want to set myself to; paying off the mortgage, determining my ideal job, take Vickie on a trip to Cambodia, play more RPGs, etc. Those sorts of goals, though, are large, long term and / or require someone else to make an opportunity available (not the Vickie to Cambodia one, the job one). I want to get some practice at goal setting with something familiar (so I know whether the goal I’m setting for myself is achievable), something easy to measure, something that requires no additional investment beyond time and effort.

Continue reading "Goal-Setting and Planning: 4,000 Gamerscore" »

Posted by IMAGinES at 04:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The renovation of the spare room has gone much better than we thought. Vickie especially was dreading the removal of not just the wallpaper but also the carpeting. When we did the other rooms, we had a hard time with the glue paper that went between the wall and the paper, and the removal of the carpeting in the computer room revealed a foamy substance (I know it has a proper carpeting name, I just can’t think of it right now) that we had to buy huge scrapers to deal with. That was a nightmare.

In the spare room, though, the carpet came up with no trouble, and the nail strips holding it down came up with just a little chisel-work. The glue-paper was a dream, too; a good spray of water and it just came off in long strips with a razor-blade scraper. Karl undercoated the room and primed over the nastier stains, but he and I shared a lot of the work; puttying holes, putting the top-coats on the walls, sanding after each coat and cleaning up the dust from the sanding. I took to the skirting board, door- and window-frames with the enamel paint. An electrician has taken the old wall lamp fittings over the bed head off and installed the new ones we bought. All that’s left is to clean and sand the floor, then cover it with vinyl tiles. Oh, and move all the bedroom furniture back in from where we have it stacked in our dining room.

Continue reading "Watching Paint Dry" »

Posted by IMAGinES at 03:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It’s been an interesting past couple of days for computers. On the upside, I managed to fix a problem that’s been plaguing Vickie’s PC for about a week; the external LCD monitor for her laptop would go into some sort of power-saving mode after five minutes of inactivity, and nothing short of resetting the laptop would get it to work. Some fiddling with the screen saver and power saving settings in Vista got it back up and working properly, though.

On the downside, the wireless transceiver for my rather expensive mouse was broken – definitely not due to a fault in the manufacturing, so not a warranty replacement – and I went out and got another one. Well, a different model, but a Logitech still. Also, as mentioned in the prior post, Karl’s Xbox 360 Elite decided to shuffle off to Buffalo in a blizzard of screen distortion.

Continue reading "Crash Party on the 360" »

Posted by IMAGinES at 03:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Vickie and I are making progress in getting the garden in better shape. This weekend was intended to be a big blitz, but soaring temperatures at midday gave us baking afternoons, so we've had to get as much done in the morning and evening as we could. That's been quite a bit, thankfully; we've dug up some roots that were interrupting our sewage line, turned the soil in the vege patch over, cleared away a lot of debris (Vickie especially went gangbusters on the fallen leaves).

Of course, I had fewer diversions to distract me. My Xbox 360 has finally packed it in; on Friday night, whilst playing Mass Effect, it froze up, and when I powered it off and on again, the dreaded Red Ring of Death appeared on its front panel. Repeated attempts to resurrect it on Saturday were fruitless, so I called Customer Support this morning and am waiting on the e-mail from them so I can send it in. Actually, if the e-mail doesn't turn up by tomorrow morning I can probably get away with sending it in early; I have the form from last time and the current call log number. Still, best to wait; Microsoft might've changed its contracted repairer in the meantime.

The latest really annoying thing was that today is Karl's birthday, and I was planning to take my 360 over his place, network it to his Elite and have some multiplayer Halo 3 and Burnout Revenge action. So much for that.

Continue reading "Weekend In The Garden" »

Posted by IMAGinES at 09:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My Xbox 360 suddenly deciding to recommence regular operation just as mysteriously as it crapped out, that's what. Late last night, after trying the Xbox twice only to be greeted with the same flashing-power-light problem and calling Customer Support again to no avail (whatever issue had their systems down on Tuesday night was still affecting them last night), my Xbox suddenly decided to work properly, and I got another good hour of Mass Effect in before going to bed. I tried it again this morning, and it still worked fine.

I've decided to take the bastard back to Harvey Norman anyway. I don't want to be waiting for it to stuff up again every time I play, especially if I'm playing online. If I can return it for credit I'm going to fork out a little extra for an Xbox 360 Elite, for two main reasons: One, Microsoft made some changes to the manufacturing process for the Elite which made it a little more heat and crash resistant, and two (Vickie's going to live this), it comes with an HDMI cable, which will eliminate at least one cable from the rat's nest behind the entertainment unit. The bigger hard drive and extra headset are just gravy.

Continue reading "But Do You Know What Really, Really, REALLY Annoys Me?" »

Posted by IMAGinES at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is frustrating, folks. I got my Xbox 360 back from Customer Support mid-last week, and aside from a reset incident after I first plugged it in everything seemed to work fine - it's certainly not argued during the many games of Halo 3 I've played since. Yesterday I picked my pre-ordered copy of Mass Effect up (my local EB told me they got it in a little early) - and after ten minutes of play, my repaired Xbox reset itself, stopped recognising the Mass Effect disc and refused to open the drive tray. Same trouble as last time.

Now, in the hope that this might be an overheating issue, I switched the Xbox off at the power point and left it alone for ten minutes, and even put a pedestal fan to circulate air behind the entertainment unit just in case it did turn out to be a heating issue. When I switched it back on, everything worked, and I had an hour of smooth Mass Effect play before I switched it off and let the family have the TV for the rest of the evening, satisfied that I'd found a solution to my console's problems - it must've just been overheating.

Continue reading "Just When I Thought It Was Safe..." »

Posted by IMAGinES at 07:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

It’s been a pretty damned good month so far. Quite a bit of stuff’s been going on; I’ve just not got around to blogging about it yet. An exhausting weekend of garden work and Halo 3 has cleared enough junk out of the way of the writing urge. Let's kick this off with some gaming.

To start off with, I’m GMing a roleplaying campaign. If you’ve been keeping up with my RPG-related posts over the past few years, you’ll have read about my increasing interest in independently-published RPGs and my desire to run titles like Dogs in the Vineyard, Primetime Adventures and Burning Empires.

Thus, it may come as some surprise that I'm running Star Wars: Saga Edition, a game about as un-indie as I can get (it's from the same company that publishes the venerable Dungeons & Dragons). I played it at Spring Revel Down Under at the beginning of October and thoroughly enjoyed myself. I’d like to say that I enjoyed the session so much I bought the rulebook except I caved into my gamer-geek urges and bought the bloody thing the day before.

Continue reading "Star Wars: A New Campaign" »

Posted by IMAGinES at 08:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My Xbox 360 has finally decided it's actually having serious problems instead of the odd recurring glitch. On Monday morning I tried playing some Halo 3 online, only to have the console restart itself during matchmaking. On top of that, it refused to open the DVD tray (no matter whether I used the face panel button or the "Open Tray" item on the Dashboard), so I couldn't get the disc out again, nor would the console actually read the disc. Then it started resetting itself repeatedly, as often as once every few seconds; the startup animation would barely commence before the screen went blank again.

Continue reading "360 to 0 in 6 Months" »

Posted by IMAGinES at 08:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I read a couple of posts online recently that helped me put into words some thinking I’ve occasionally kicked around my brainspace in the last year or so.

Via the Burning Wheel forum, I came to a post on the web log of a fellow named James Wallis (the name rings a bell, but I’m not sure from where). Anyway, in this posting James discusses heroism and how both computer/video games and tabletop RPGs treat it. Please, go and read it, even though I’m going to tell you the gist of it, which is that computer/video games have made failure uninteresting and dull, and that the best, most meaningful way to reverse that is to give the player “actual challenge”, which Wallis basically defines as the consequences of risk to more than just the character’s life, to what the character holds dear outside of personal survival.

Continue reading "Heroism in Digital and Tabletop Gaming" »

Posted by IMAGinES at 04:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I need some help from the IMAGinES readership. I’ve listened to Wil Wheaton’s keynote address to the guests of the Penny Arcade Expo ’07 a couple of times now. By even asking this, I’m probably torpedoing my gaming cred, but I’m absolutely curious – and I’d just prefer to throw it out to the community rather than going to Google. So if any of you know these references, can you whack them into a comment on this post, please?

Okay, here we go:

Continue reading "What's My Line? Gaming Edition" »

Posted by IMAGinES at 08:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I mentioned a while ago that while reviews of the Transformers movie were generally positive, the same couldn't be said of the video game tie-in. Still, of the various versions of the product, the PC version seems to have come in slightly ahead of the others, mainly due to slightly more responsive controls.

A few days ago, I discovered a downloadable demo for the PC version, and naturally downloaded it. I suppose I wanted to find out whether the game was really as mediocre as the reviewers all seemed to hold. I've played through it at least once, and discovered something interesting while I was at it - much like my experience with Grand Theft Auto III, driving a car around is pretty awkward using the keyboard (where touching the keys mapped for "steer left" and "steer right" sends the car into full lock), but if you plug an Xbox 360 controller in (or use a wireless connection device, much as I do), the game suddenly becomes a lot easier to control in either mode (robot or car). The graphics aren't fantastic, but they do the job and they run nicely and smoothly on my rig. Admittedly, the demo only comes with the low-resolution textures, but I didn't find that off-putting - I'm only even more interested to see what the Transformer models look like with hi-res textures.

Continue reading "Okay, Maybe That Does All Fit Down..." »

Posted by IMAGinES at 12:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I’ve been sampling the wonderment that is an iPod nano for the past couple of months now. Young Brook’s hand-me-down is now full of Steely Dan, Def Leppard, The War of the Worlds, Flogging Molly and assorted other musics (yeah, okay, fine, including John Farnham). Bu the really great thing about it, especially combined with its iTunes master application, is podcasts. The iTunes service will track podcast feeds via XML and RSS and will automatically download the latest shows of any podcasts I subscribe to. I can take them with me in the iPod and catch up on subjects of interest during my lunch hour, all without bothering Vickie with any annoying voices or accents.

So what am I subscribed to?

Continue reading "Podcast Preferences" »

Posted by IMAGinES at 11:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hi folks! Well, my the PC is working once again. I’m enjoying the smoothness that the GeForce 8800GTS is bringing to some of my classic games – except Republic Commando, which has been struck down by what some forum threads claim is a driver conflict.

Vickie’s the PC – well, the laptop – is also now her official home of computeryness. I will say that she is fighting a battle with Windows Vista at the moment, the prize of which is her sanity. There was a lot of talk about making Vista more secure in the face of modern digital threats, but I didn’t really realise what that meant until I observed it in use for an extended period. That OS is paranoid, folks. It double-checks almost every program that you execute, just to make sure that it is indeed you, Joe or Jane User, what is using the laptop and not L4rr3 t3h H4x0r down the road. It’s also a bit prickly with the running of some apps, too. I’m definitely hoping to see a service pack that irons out some of the kinks released soon.

Continue reading "Generally Good, Computer-Wise" »

Posted by IMAGinES at 09:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Today is the first day of the Cairns Show Long Weekend. I've been saving a particular venture for this particular block of time off. This venture is the nigh complete overhaul of the computers of myself, Vickie and Brook, as well as creating an additional PC for Brook's mum, Gemma.

This is a four phase operation:

Continue reading "A Highly Complex Endeavour" »

Posted by IMAGinES at 09:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I will say this: Insomnia is pretty good for blogging. Last night I was thinking of writing a post, but just didn’t feel in the mood. I suddenly woke up an hour ago and my brain refused to switch itself off again. I listened to Paul Tevis’ latest Have Games Will Travel podcast for about an hour, then decided the hell with it; I’ll get that post written.

It’s five past five AM as I start this, by the way.

Okay, then. What’s been going on?

Firstly, and most recently, I went on that big computer stuff splurge that’s been in the offing. I had to get some stuff done on the north side of the city on Saturday morning, and stopped off at the local branch of The Good Guys on the way home. I wound up taking advantage of their June stocktake sale, walking out with a Toshiba Satellite A100, an LG Flatron 20.1” widescreen LCD monitor and a 4GB iPod Nano for Brook, as hers had suddenly packed it in. As Brook hadn’t got a decent eighteenth birthday present from us, I figured I’d get her a new, green one (Brook’s favourite colour) at the sale. It turned out that all her old one needed was an update from Apple – so after we cleared all her music files off of it, I inherited it.

Continue reading "The Upgrade Square Dance" »

Posted by IMAGinES at 05:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I got my PC back from my IT-business mate today, and he was able to confirm that the problem is graphics-card related. He's tested it in other machines and the same problem happens. I need a replacement and I don't want to lose any grunt. My current graphics card, and the motherboard it goes into, are two or three generations behind, so to maintain performance I don't have much choice but to replace them - which means replacing the CPU also.

I discussed some plans, which also included 2GB RAM and a new hard drive, in my last posting. FamiliaGTX, who weighed in about my horrid luck with PCs, sent me a list of parts for around $250 cheaper than I was originally planning. Vickie also pointed out that I can get a 19" flat screen for around $350 from Big W nowadays, which is also tempting; I'd like to be able to get in closer to my rther cramped desk, and the huge 19" CRT screen I have right now keeps me at an arm-tiring distance.

Continue reading "Upgrading and Networking: Help Required" »

Posted by IMAGinES at 11:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Computers are really starting to give me the gyp lately, if you'll pardon the expression. My PC is still giving me the not-enough-power-to-the-graphics-card warning messages. Vickie's keyboard packed it in sometime between last night and this morning, and Brook's semi-flaky junkyard spec PC (often unwilling to start first time) hung in the middle of a game of The Sims this evening.

It's getting very tempting to put a few grand of the loan towards some new hardware. I'm going to put my PC in with a friend from soccer who runs his own PC business, in the hope that, at the very least, he'll be able to identify which of my parts is faulty, power-wise. I have the feeling it's the motherboard, and that episode with the overheated PSU did more damage than it first seemed, but if that's the case, I'll need not just a new mobo, but a new CPU, a new, PCI-Express graphics card and maybe even new RAM.

Continue reading "Gremlins in the Circuitry" »

Posted by IMAGinES at 10:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

As my PC's been a bit flaky lately, what with the power warnings and such, I start fiddling with the Xbox 360 more often. I mean, console hardware, nothing's gonna go wrong there, right?

Fucker freezes on me. Twice in two, maybe three days. Both times playing Burnout: Revenge.

Continue reading "Nowhere to Hide" »

Posted by IMAGinES at 09:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)