It’s not Lupus, it’s Acute Viral Rhinopharyngitis! Oh yeah, it’s that time of the year, time to be ill again.
This seems to be a recurring theme of mine, sometimes it happens during Winter and other times it just happens whenever it likes. I get bed ridden for a week and addicted to Beecham’s All-In-One medicine, this stuff is like a temporary cure I swear. It makes me feel like I’m almost healthy again for about an hour or two then it’s back to being dead.
It’s not even like I’m sleeping either, I’m just lying there sweating and playing video games in my mind. It’s annoying because I’m not tired enough to sleep but I don’t quite have the energy to get up and play some real games, I can’t concentrate and just give up.
Not to mention the huge annoyance of always getting a cold during my days off work. This one has been some kind of law for the past three years or so, I think I probably catch the infection on my last day of work, but it doesn’t kick in until I get home. Then I have to feel like a diseased bag of phloem and snot for the entirety of my time off, then it’s back to work again.
.. Complaining seems to be another side effect of this virus too, since that’s all I’ve done all day. Ah well, guess it’s back to endlessly browsing game news websites with the futile hope of reading something about Half-Life 2 Episode 3 or perhaps Duke Nukem Forever.
Alright, I’ve upgraded. I’m all up to date now! Windows 7 here I am and.. wait, what’s all this? Why is everything different?! Where’s my quick launch? WHY ARE YOU HIBERNATING AFTER THIRTY MINUTES?!
Oh man, so much is different yet it all seems so.. familiar. It’s like somebody wearing a mask of your good friend. Sure it looks like them, but when you take them out for their favourite ice cream, they tell you that they don’t like that flavour. You know something’s up, and you don’t like it one bit.
So uh, yeah. I’m using all the classic themes, trying to get it back to XP as much as possible with all the performance “advantages” of Windows 7. Direct X 11 is pretty cool, I guess. It supports that red & blue 3D on lots of games, so I’ll have to try and get a pair of those from somewhere.
Using the new Skype and Windows Live Messenger can be annoying at times but at least I have Bad Company 2 back!
I don’t care if virii is incorrect, “viruses” just looks childish to me when I read it. Anyway, my PC got owned by some new virus that nobody has found a real cure for.
It’s a strange one, spawns fake processes and launches several iexplore.exe’s. Seems textbook, right? Yeah, except that it also mutes the wave function of my volume control randomly. Now that, is very annoying indeed.
Funnily enough after all the praise I gave to Avast!, it didn’t detect a thing, even with the latest virus definition updates. A piece of software called “Malware Bytes” managed to find and remove a rootkit, which seemed to have fixed it for a while, but then it returned in full force.
I’ve decided that enough is enough and I’m done with Windows XP. I can’t be bothered with problems like these every few months, it’s time to (reluctantly) upgrade to the latest model. Windows.. 7. Well, at least I skipped Vista, eh?
Oh and by the way, if you’re reading this and you make viruses for PC’s, I hate you. What kind of job is that? You sad joke, I hope you hate your life.
So me and Jez made a song, I played eight chords in a loop and he sung some lyrics. To be honest, I hadn’t planned it at all I was just messing with my guitar and sent a recording to him.
The Tim Song is the result of this. The lyrics imply that he is a homosexual. This is all, of course, purely satire and Tim is as straight as it gets. All in good fun, you see.
Alright, now we’re making progress. After much torment from Tim (enjoy your unfinished blog), I decided to have a proper look at my PC and try to figure out what exactly was wrong with the processor. I unclipped the peg things from what I can only assume is the gigantic heatsink and tried to remove it.
Unfortunately, which ever kind soul built my machine, made the lovely gesture of threading the fan’s power cable underneath the motherboard so I couldn’t remove it completely. I did my best to remove as much dust as I could then reattached it properly, with all four pegs securely fastened in.
Booted it up and my monitor refused to turn on (this bloody Samsung has given me problems before), but after a while I managed to convince it and I saw that my PC was running a lot cooler now indeed. Core 1 is 16°C and Core 2 is apparently 36°C.. why is one core more than twice as warm? Who knows, I’m not paid to know this kind of stuff. Stupid illogical computer box.
Well anyway, as I’ve been sat here typing this, the temperature has creeped up a bit. Core 1 is now 26°C and Core 2 is 40°C and that’s fine by me. Anything less than 95°C is an improvement.
Yeah, you know what? I’ve had enough of this computer, what a piece of junk. I was happily playing Left 4 Dead 2 when all of a sudden it crashes briefly then there’s a bunch of broken textures everywhere, Rochelle’s face was plastered on the wall and lots of other things were colours that they really shouldn’t have been.
So, I started swearing a lot, thinking that my brand new graphics card had burnt out already. I closed the game and booted up some temperature software and it gave me a warning saying that the CPU was at 95°c.
I thought this was a little odd so I opened up the PC and saw that the heatsink / cooling fan or whatever the hell it is was loose. After having looked at that, I plugged the cables back in and booted it up. To my sheer joy, all of the text on the screen and in the BIOS was distorted and blurred.
Again, my thoughts turned to the graphics card so I opened up the PC again and put the 8400GS I bought earlier in, but the results were exactly the same. So if that’s a side effect of a burnt out processor then I guess that’s what I have. Brilliant.
What’s next? Is the hard drive going to explode? The power supply going to melt? I’m so sick of this box of junk. I’m going to try and get a hold of PC Specialist tomorrow, the people who built it and see if I’m still in some kind of warranty coverage. Probably not, knowing my luck. I’ll most likely end up just buying a new sodding computer.
..Save for the graphics card, hard drive and DVD drive anyway. Just a motherboard and case will be fine. Then again, I can’t really be bothered any more. PC gaming is too much hard work when this type of thing keeps going wrong. Maybe those legions of console playing sheep are on to something.. wait, what am I saying?!
Got an Nvidia GeForce GT 240 1GB made by Palit to replace the dead 8800GTS 512MB by ASUS. It’s a decent card, not much different actually. Got a 59.87fps average on the Source stress test running max settings at 1680×1050 and a constant average of 30fps during gameplay on Left 4 Dead 2 using the same settings.
Alright, I got a £20 8400GS 256 to use in the meantime. It works, and it’s confirmed that it’s definitely the old card that fried and not the PCI-e slot or something else on the motherboard.
Shame that it can’t run any games. At all. This junk barely got 15fps running all low settings 640×480 on Source. Oh well, can’t say I was too surprised, what can you expect from a budget card?
Still looking for a proper replacement but so far everything I’ve found is worse than my 8800GTS 512, the core speed or whatever always seems to be slower. I might have to skip right over the GeForce 9 series and jump right into the newer 200 series.
So yeah, my Nvidia Geforce 8800GTS 512 overheated and died. Unfortunately my PC doesn’t have an onboard graphics card so it’s completely useless. Pretty much just a box that beeps now.
I’m looking for a new card to replace it, probably something from the Geforce 9 series. In the meantime, I went out and bought a netbook, the Compaq Mini 110c.
I’m actually quite surprised at how good it is, I was fully expecting it to be sluggish and struggle with things like flash based websites but it’s perfectly fine. Currently running Google Chrome for Internet browsing, VLC for a media player and Spotify for music.
