tekHedd – the blog

So I rereinstalled. This time I got impatient and installed NWN while Service Pack 2 was downloading. Don’t do this! Installing software during the service pack download confused the installer; this caused errors in the update of some components, and as far as I can tell there’s no way to back out the service pack and try again.

However, the good news is that with a reinstall that does not use nForce RAID, the system is stable like it was before I went to RAID. The moral of the story seems to be “don’t use nForce RAID”. I am instead using the Windows XP Pro RAID (striped) with no problems. Benchmarks suggest that it should give similar performance, although I haven’t tested it yet.

It’s sad to lose two or three days of free time that could be spent gaming or something. It’s not like I wouldn’t have wasted that time anyway, but I didn’t want to spend all this time installing. Anyway, learn from my mistakes, don’t use the nForce onboard RAID. If you ignore my advice and do it anyway, make backups, even if it’s a mirror.

The Reason (Enemy Of Faith Mix).mp3

You can tell somebody has been listening to a lot of drum and bass, but it’s really just downtempo trance gone horribly wrong.

By dint of considerable sacrifice of time and bandwidth, I now have three (3) games on my computer (not including Minesweeper and friends). Of these three, only two are playable at this time, as I have not run the AoC updater yet. And anyway, I’m not in a hurry to get back into AoC, because it crashes and that’s boring.

In fact, TR still crashes too. And, sure, no game is perfect, but I think the culprit is XFire. It tends to crash if I use XFire while I am zoning, or if I use XFire at the menu screen. And XFire can mess up the mouse pointer, and cause the menus to get stuck and… you know there’s a point where it can’t just be coincidence that “doing things with XFire” and “cold booting the computer” go together so often.

None of this is helped by my computer’s strange behavior when rebooting. Ever since I rebuilt the system, it sits there for about 30 seconds doing nothing before it powers off, where it used to just shut down. Sometimes it never reboots, it just sits there. Maybe my computer has allergies too.

Oh well. Nothing is happening here. Now I have to write another depressing song, and I’m running out of depressing life experiences… NOT! I got a million of ’em. Damn, that’s kind of a sad thought isn’t it? I need coffee now.

Peace out.>