thistlechaser | No more weekends like this, please! (RL, FFXI)

Sometimes you don't realize how much you use something until it's gone.

Friday night: On-game there was a Besieged coming, so I rebooted my machine. (I always do that, to try to reduce lag.) When it came back up, rows of wavy lines were going up my screen. As I sat there peering at them, my machine rebooted. This couldn't be good!

When it came up, it did the same thing. Seven or eight times in a row, then it just stopped rebooting. >< Hit the power button, fan came on, but no other noises and nothing happened. Black monitor (power light blinking on it, nothing getting through to it). Off/on, off/on, off/on. Wouldn't boot up. So I went to bed.

In the morning it booted up just fine! Logged on, talked to

kelen, and we both thought it was overheating, so I shut down so I could take the housing off. (Only second time I ever did that ever in my life!) Plugged everything back in... wouldn't boot up. ><

I had to use a phone book to look up computer places! A phone book! I might have well as sent smoke signals to them! At first I was going to get it repaired, but I've been wanting to replace it anyway, so I decided to do that.

(Luckily I back up my data once a month. Unluckiy it's on the first of the month, so I'm about as far from that as you can be!)

If given the choice, I had wanted to get my next computer from a smaller shop -- one which would put together the machine I wanted. But since I couldn't research anything (no computer~) I went to a chain store. Best Buy. Blech.

All their machines have Vista on them. >< No way, Jose. Thankfully they found me an older one with XP. Yay a new computer being old. :/ But I got the best video card in the store put into it, which should help.

Then came the hard part: Trying to get it set up with no access to my old machine. My plan had been to just copy the whole backup over to the new machine, but quickly found that wouldn't work. Oh, for text files and pictures that worked fine, but not for programs. None of them worked. All were missing assorted .dlls and such. :/ I feel so lost; so much missing stuff, so many programs gone, all my bookmarks gone! It feels like a lesser form of my house burning down.

Basically all I got working was FFXI, my net connection, virus scanner, and a few other little things. But that's enough for now!

FFXI was a trip to do: I installed it from CD (all seven of them...), then copied over from the backup (to keep it from having to do one gig of downloads!). Upon starting POL, it went through the 'check file' thing. 16,738 files. x.x It had to do a few downloads, but it wasn't as bad as it could have been.

<3

kelen gave me that regedit link, so now my graphics look nice and pretty! And the zones which had been "unplayable" due to lag before? Jugner, Ronf, Thickets, anything with lots of trees/leaves? Beautiful and smooth! Tomorrow I have to go mining to see if that tabbing=crashing bug is maybe gone!

Oddly BRD songs freeze me up now, when on my old poor video card they had been fine. I'll need to look into that later.

Smoothie: Best Smoothie Ever. But then it should be, because this one wasn't as healthy as the others. I semi-plan to go grocery shopping tomorrow, so I wanted to finish up the frozen yogurt so I could get a new container. Must have used 2-3 servings tonight. Add in 1 serving of pineapple, a half banana, and 1 serving of some pineapple-orange juice and you get MMMMMMM. More like a milkshake than a smoothie, but oh my god, so good.

I'm not going to the farmer's market tomorrow. I would have gone grocery shopping tomorrow for sure if all this crap hadn't happened today. Not sure now, I really need a day off. So tired. zzzz

And what the heck is up with stores opening at 10 AM! That's the middle of the day! I got to Best Buy at 9 AM, figuring they would have already been open for an hour. Sheesh. 10 AM. Insane.

---

FFXI: Thanks old computer, you made me miss TWO Besiegeds! Oh well, good excuse I suppose.

When I logged on I headed out to the Dunes to party on COR.

barahir_ffxi, COR in a party is 38475093175401470 times better than soloing! COR feels so strange though, it's kind of like BRD with one arm tied behind my back. I kept looking for ways to debuff the mob. ('What? I can buff the party but do nothing to the mob besides melee? No, that's got to be wrong...' *checks the list again*) But soon I'll have a gun! Soon! Then it'll be COR > *

COR 15 -> 18 in 2.5 hours (an amazingly effective party, with PL of course). Then jumped into a LS skillup party. Cleared my dagger of trials! Capped string (so singing, wind, and string all capped!). Got to dagger 137 (140 cap).

Very good (FFXI) day, but exhausted. zzzzz