As you may have divined from the lack of an exultant post yesterday, the PC still doesn’t work. At this point I have no options other than to take it in and let Micro Center look at it… which, of course, I cannot afford. Looks like I’m out of business for more weeks. Investigating other solutions right now.
November 23, 2009
The new motherboard is supposed to arrive tomorrow. I picked up a tube of thermal compound today to remount the heat sink with. Cross your fingers – if this doesn’t work I’m going to have to take it into to Micro Center and have them figure it out.
Finished Abercrombie’s The Blade Itself, and was very satisfied; I’d have picked up the next book in the series already except that I’m saving that money for what I hope will be MMO subscriptions.
Started R. Scott Bakker’s The Darkness That Comes Before. I’m only about 60 pages in but so far I’m finding it fairly tedious. As a counterpoint I’m re-reading Steven Brust’s Jhereg series, which is anything but boring, at least for the first couple.
November 20, 2009
Replacement motherboard shipped yesterday from EVGA. It ought to arrive… I’m guessing Tuesday. Cross your fingers.
Meanwhile, I finished up Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn, and was very pleased with it. There are some weaknesses in the setting but the characters were sympathetic and the plot crisp and very well-paced. Most satisfyingly, even though it’s book one of a trilogy, and even though the story’s as big as they come, there’s real closure to the ending. One gets the impression that some authors would have padded it out into a trilogy or three. The twist at the end… I saw most of it coming, but as I’d hoped it twisted farther than I’d expected, and Sanderson played the hand very cleanly.
I have obtained The Well of Ascension, which is the second in the sequence, and will be starting in on that in due course. But next up is Joe Abercrombie’s The Blade Itself, also first of a trilogy about which I’m hearing good things. I’m a little under halfway through.
The writing is sharp and witty, the dialogue is snappy, and it’s laugh-out-loud funny in places. The characters are vivid, novel and compelling. Well, the main characters, anyway; the book suffers from Secondary Character Retard Syndrome, where everybody except the protagonists seem to be some variety of imbecile. Aside from that, I’m enjoying it. Should have it finished in short order. I have a stack of new books awaiting and I’m not sure what I’ll tackle next.
November 17, 2009
After talking to EVGA and some folks more tech-savvy than myself, seems to be that it’s probably the motherboard. The RMA just cleared with EVGA today, and I’d expect them to ship out the replacement within the next couple of days. So hopefully the loyal readers will not have to put up with too many more digressions like this before I get back to the business of PC gaming.
Meanwhile, I’ve been doing a lot of reading.
At one point I was a pretty big fan of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time. The first four books or so were really solid, and the fifth had some good stuff in it as well. But with the fifth book, the pace of the story, always fairly leisurely, started to slow down. By the end of book 7 it had become glacial, and it became apparent to me that Jordan had lost his way and had no idea how to move the story to its already-written conclusion. I abandoned reading them at that point, although I still bought the next couple, intending to eventually get around to reading them. The consensus at this point is that there’s about one piece of significant plot progress in books 7-11, all quarter-million-plus word doorstops. I don’t have the patience for that.
I used to keep up with fantasy literature fairly avidly, but I slipped out of it after a while as other things came up to command my attention (even before MMOs.) So maybe it’s not surprising that I’d never heard of Brandon Sanderson when Jordan up and died and he was selected to finish the series. Maybe not surprising, but I also doubt I was alone. But Sanderson wasn’t an unknown, already having published the Mistborn trilogy and a stand-alone or two by that point.
The first of Sanderson’s posthumous collaborations with Jordan is now out: The Gathering Storm, the first of three volumes intended to finish the series. There seems to be a consensus that it’s the best Wheel of Time book in a good long while, and the reviews have been very positive. I’m now tempted to pick the series back up, at least once it’s finally finished. But that appears to now be in sight.
And in the meantime, I figured I’d sample some of Sanderson’s own work, so I picked up Mistborn the other day, and am about halfway through it.
It’s pretty good. Pure world-building is not Sanderson’s strongest suit, but he does manage to make the setting fairly engaging, and in any event, in the case of The Wheel of Time, where the world has already been built up by Jordan (who was good at it,) I doubt this will be a liability. It’s almost not even in Mistborn, where I have questioned aspects of the setting in a couple of places, but which has some really neat twists as well. I think I see where Sanderson is going with the story (thanks to the spoilertastic back cover blurb,) but I really want to see how he plays it at the end. And there’s two more books after that.
I’m still waiting until all the Wheel of Time books are out to start in on that monster again, and I dread the 5-book slog I know I’ll have to put up with to get to the good stuff again, although I also expect the climax of Winter’s Heart to make up for quite a lot.
November 13, 2009
God DAMN it.
New motherboard en route from EVGA. Probably arrive late next week. Meanwhile, replacement PS is getting returned to Micro Center.
October 30, 2009
Regular readers here may recall me mentioning that, every six months or so, I tend to take a month or two off from MMOs. It’s never planned that way – I just end up needing a break after a while, and I usually return to something different than I left.
This time around, whether the break was involuntary or not, I was probably overdue. On the plus side, I’m doing a lot of reading, plenty of stuff around the house, and getting some things accomplished on my disparate writing and game design projects (loyal readers may recall that I’m designing – slowly – a tabletop RPG.) As an aside, blogging has helped me bone up on some HTML basics that are now helping me redesign my web page.
When I do get back to MMOs, I have a hankering to play some EQ2, which I’ve stayed away from for a while. I may not feel that way when it actually happens, but it’s a game I plan to get back to eventually, and the timing may work out so that the next expansion (which I really haven’t kept up on,) will be out shortly thereafter.
On the other hand, I was really getting into EVE until my PC took a dump. It’s the game I’ve wanted to be into the most, but have always failed at. (I missed a couple of wardecs against our corp as soon as I bailed.)
On the gripping hand, there’s school coming up, which I will need to pay a great deal of attention to. WoW works well with limited time invested, and I really probably should poke around the endgame for a bit before it gets overhauled.
We’ll see what happens.
October 29, 2009
PC Status: Still not working. I’m hoping in another two or three weeks I’ll have enough for a power supply. To be honest, I have higher priorities.
Other Status: I found out today that my petition for reinstatement to Ohio State has been approved. Apparently I should be getting an official written notification of this some time soon. It’s been about a month since I submitted the petition, and even though they told me it would probably be okayed, I was starting to sweat it a bit.
I’ll be limited to 10 hours the first quarter back, which really isn’t all that onerous. There may or may not be other conditions, but I’ll have to wait for the official notice to know.
October 13, 2009
Soooo… I haven’t posted in a while. That’s because the third video card that EVGA sent me also doesn’t work. I think it can safely be said at this point that it’s the power supply, since the motherboard appears to work just fine with another video card that requires less power.
I don’t have the money to replace a power supply right now. What with this laptop being junk for gaming, that means I’m out of the MMO scene for… well, I don’t know how long. I’ll be back… eventually. And I may well have blog posts in the meantime, but they likely won’t be about PC gaming.
September 30, 2009
Okay, couple of things:
My reinstatement appointment went pretty well, and the advisor I’m in contact with says he doubts there will be a problem with getting back in. I don’t want to jinx it, but it’s looking positive. I’m hoping to hear back within a week or so.
As mentioned yesterday, the replacement graphics card is a bust. I called EVGA again this morning and asked whether the replacement cards are new cards or refurbished ones, and it’s the latter. I expected this. What I did not necessarily expect was for the EVGA customer service ep to offer to send me a different card instead of another possibly-bad 8800 Ultra.
So it looks like I have a GTX 260 coming instead. This is good – while nowhere near the top-of-the-line GeForce card right now, it should give me performance very similar to, if not better than in some cases, the 8800 Ultra.
I’m not willing to sing EVGA’s praises quite yet – not until I have a working computer sitting on my desk (my motherboard doesn’t have integrated graphics and the only extra video card in the house is the one in Mrs. Ardwulf’s computer, so this thing is a boat anchor right now,) but I can’t really complain much so far.
September 29, 2009
The PC Grief Continues!
Posted by Ardwulf under Commentary[2] Comments
The replacement video card arrived today. It doesn’t work either. FUCK.
UPDATE: I called EVGA and they’re willing to cross-ship me another new card. After I got off the phone I thought to myself, “what the hell am I doing? I should try to troubleshoot this thing myself.” So I did, and to the limits of my PC troubleshooting ability, I’m pretty sure it is indeed the video card. I can’t really fault EVGA for their customer support – they’ve been very responsive. But their tech support seems limited to “ship the thing back to us,” from what I’ve seen thus far. Well and good, but my PC is down for probably another week.
I think that, this being the case, I’ll stop by te local Micro Center for some bits tomorrow, and disassemble the whole thing, cleaning every piece, and then put it back together so it’s ready when replacement card #2 arrives.