Friday, September 9, 2011

Status Report

Hey everyone! I've been meaning to update my blog for a while now. In fact, I'm hoping to do it at least semi-regularly.

Computer Woes

To start things off, if you've been following my Twitter account, you may have seen that I was having trouble with my new video card.

My previous one carped out on me (the Video RAM burnt itself out) a while back. I managed to get it working slightly for a few weeks over the summer, but then it stopped working altogether. I had to wait until I had enough money to buy a new Video Card. Once I had the money, I bought this one. It was the best Graphics Card I could find that would fit in a single slot.

Anyway, I get the card, put it in, and it's working fine. I download the latest drivers (because who trusts the the drivers that come with the hardware) and installed them and the CCC. When I rebooted into Windows, after a few minutes, I started seeing red dots on the screen. Moments later, other graphical corruptions manifested themselves. After a while of that, I got the dreaded BSOD. A few restarts, same thing kept happening. I even managed to remove the old driver but to no avail. Nothing bad happened in safe mode and it worked fine if used the "Standard VGA Adapter" driver, but that would hardly be enough for gaming.

At that point, it was time to do some diagnostics to find out if this was truly a software problem (like it seemed) or if I'd gotten a faulty card. I installed an old hard drive of mine and set up a partition (which it now seems was unnecessary) to install Windows onto. With a fresh install and up-to-date drivers, I found none of the graphical errors that occurred my normal portion. That was the good news.

The bad news was, that meant I had to re-install Windows for real. I backed up all my important files, as well as my Steam Installations, onto an external hard drive (turned out to be unnecessary, but still a good thing to do). Then it was time to do a fresh install. Thankfully, I was able to do a clean install without having to worry that I only had an upgrade copy of Windows 7.

So mostly this past week has been spent re-installing all the software I've been missing. So far, I've installed Firefox, Winamp (for music), VLC player (for video), Photoshop (along with the rest of CS4), Steam (along with all the Steam games I had on my previous installation), and Mass Effect 2, which looks even more awesome than I remember, by the way. I still have to re-install MS Office (will be doing that later tonight), Dragon Age 2 and the Sims 3. Oh, and I also got a free copy of Deus Ex with my Graphics Card. I'll be trying that out soon.

The Job Front

In other news, I started a new job. I'm going to be working for event security for IU home games. It's not much, but it's better than nothing. Hopefully this will lead to more gainful employment.

Unfortunately, this comes on the heels of some other news. I will not be attending college this semester. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get IU all the information they needed in time so now I have to re-apply for the Spring Semester. I also can't attend classes at Ivy Tech due to a "Maximum Timeframe" issue. Apparently, if you don't graduate after attempting a certain number of hours, you lose your financial aid. Had I known that ahead of time, I wouldn't have taken so many electives.

Anyway, that's all I've got for now. Till later!