After many many cursewords and much pulling of hair, yesterday actually turned out pretty cool.
My first challenge for the day was to actually get Morrowind running on my computer. Now, this may not sound like a very lofty goal, but I've been trying to get that damn thing to run since I got it, and due to various incomprehensible factors I could never get that accursed game to work. So I started at about 8:30am with a reinstall of the program, moving it from my SATA drive to my IDE data drive.
And in the midst of this, the phone rings. Calling me is a fellow I've been doing some IT for, and he's totally baffled about some things he's seeing in a version of Mac OS X he's just installed on one of his computers at the office. So I abandon Morrowind for the time being, and head off to San Jose. When I arrive I realize that his main problem is that suddenly he can't see the internet from this machine, and after staring at the Apple site for a few minutes I realize what the problem is. After disabling IPv6 and setting a static IP for the machine, the internet returns, just as glorious and bountiful as he remembered it. From there I turned my attention to his hardware firewall, enabling DHCP with a modest scope of 10 IPs on his subnet (no NAT configuration necessary, mind you) which allows his daughter's laptop to see the internet as well.
Basking in triumph, I return home to struggle with Morrowind some more. After 4 crashes, each of which required a hard reset, I decided it was time for a massive driver update. And so, I ran through updates for my Sound Card, Video card, motherboard chipset and BIOS. New soundcard drivers allowed me to set the hardware acceleration to a level that Morrowind could deal with, and it finally ran!
Never one to quit while I'm ahead, I decided to take on the most deadly challenge of all. A few months ago, when I built my computer, I bought 2 RAM sticks--my motherboard boasted 4 DIMMs and claimed to be Double Data Rate capable. And yet, with both sticks installed the computer wouldn't boot right. It would either grind to a halt in an unfathomable stop screen before entering windows, or just restart endlessly of it's own volition. Well, since I had a new BIOS version and a new Chipset driver installed, I decided it was time to take control. So, I reconfigured the memory controllers with the new driver information, restarted, and set the RAM speed to 400 MHz in the BIOS. I unplugged the computer and arranged the 2 RAM sticks in DIMMs 1 and 3. I plugged the machine back in, and threw the switch. Right at the first screen after the RAM verification I saw the words "DUAL DATA RATE ENABLED" flash across the screen in bright white letters. I stared in shock as the machine booted into Windows. After months of waiting around for updated Memory Controller drivers, I had finally enabled my gig of dual channel RAM. And after moving the page file off my OS drive and distributing the virtual memory load across my SATA and data drives, my computer is now screamingly fast.
Now all these events mixed together and self-baked into a pretty delicious cake, but the icing was yet to come. Once I was sure that my computer mods were successful I stepped outside to stretch my legs. On the porch was a white package which apparently had arrived via USPS a few hours earlier.
About a month ago, my dear dear friend Billenium told me that he'd gotten the complete second season of Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex and the complete Macross Zero off of eBay. He told me that he'd get our friend Matt to burn copies of the DVDs which he'd send to me. Sure enough, the white mystery parcel contained said copies, which would have already been sufficient cause for jubilation, but in addition, there were 3 PS2 games and a copy of Colorful! I wasn't really aware that humans had been infused with that kind of capacity for generosity......
So yeah.
I'm going to have to review my files to see where it ranks exactly, but yesterday was absolutely one of the best days EVER!
My first challenge for the day was to actually get Morrowind running on my computer. Now, this may not sound like a very lofty goal, but I've been trying to get that damn thing to run since I got it, and due to various incomprehensible factors I could never get that accursed game to work. So I started at about 8:30am with a reinstall of the program, moving it from my SATA drive to my IDE data drive.
And in the midst of this, the phone rings. Calling me is a fellow I've been doing some IT for, and he's totally baffled about some things he's seeing in a version of Mac OS X he's just installed on one of his computers at the office. So I abandon Morrowind for the time being, and head off to San Jose. When I arrive I realize that his main problem is that suddenly he can't see the internet from this machine, and after staring at the Apple site for a few minutes I realize what the problem is. After disabling IPv6 and setting a static IP for the machine, the internet returns, just as glorious and bountiful as he remembered it. From there I turned my attention to his hardware firewall, enabling DHCP with a modest scope of 10 IPs on his subnet (no NAT configuration necessary, mind you) which allows his daughter's laptop to see the internet as well.
Basking in triumph, I return home to struggle with Morrowind some more. After 4 crashes, each of which required a hard reset, I decided it was time for a massive driver update. And so, I ran through updates for my Sound Card, Video card, motherboard chipset and BIOS. New soundcard drivers allowed me to set the hardware acceleration to a level that Morrowind could deal with, and it finally ran!
Never one to quit while I'm ahead, I decided to take on the most deadly challenge of all. A few months ago, when I built my computer, I bought 2 RAM sticks--my motherboard boasted 4 DIMMs and claimed to be Double Data Rate capable. And yet, with both sticks installed the computer wouldn't boot right. It would either grind to a halt in an unfathomable stop screen before entering windows, or just restart endlessly of it's own volition. Well, since I had a new BIOS version and a new Chipset driver installed, I decided it was time to take control. So, I reconfigured the memory controllers with the new driver information, restarted, and set the RAM speed to 400 MHz in the BIOS. I unplugged the computer and arranged the 2 RAM sticks in DIMMs 1 and 3. I plugged the machine back in, and threw the switch. Right at the first screen after the RAM verification I saw the words "DUAL DATA RATE ENABLED" flash across the screen in bright white letters. I stared in shock as the machine booted into Windows. After months of waiting around for updated Memory Controller drivers, I had finally enabled my gig of dual channel RAM. And after moving the page file off my OS drive and distributing the virtual memory load across my SATA and data drives, my computer is now screamingly fast.
Now all these events mixed together and self-baked into a pretty delicious cake, but the icing was yet to come. Once I was sure that my computer mods were successful I stepped outside to stretch my legs. On the porch was a white package which apparently had arrived via USPS a few hours earlier.
About a month ago, my dear dear friend Billenium told me that he'd gotten the complete second season of Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex and the complete Macross Zero off of eBay. He told me that he'd get our friend Matt to burn copies of the DVDs which he'd send to me. Sure enough, the white mystery parcel contained said copies, which would have already been sufficient cause for jubilation, but in addition, there were 3 PS2 games and a copy of Colorful! I wasn't really aware that humans had been infused with that kind of capacity for generosity......
So yeah.
I'm going to have to review my files to see where it ranks exactly, but yesterday was absolutely one of the best days EVER!
VIEW 6 of 6 COMMENTS
thanks.