Saturday 10 July 2010

Gaming Rig Dead and how I killed heroic professor on my lappy

So last week was the week from hell. I had high hopes for July after the rough June I had, but after a quick air dust of the inside my main gaming rig strange things started happening.
First I had a Blue Screen of Death, no issue I thought and reset the machine. This resulted in basically the whole system not posting and then after me prodding various things to see if they were tight and nothing had come loose it posted and booted up windows/ ran well for several hours.
After shutting down and doing something else (gardening) the system would again not post and this degenerated into a spiral of me pulling various components to see what the issue was and I basically got nowhere apart from narrowing it down to the motherboard, CPU or PSU none of which I have spares for to test. So as the rig is 5+ years old and consulting various people who know a lot more than me I am now saving for a new PC as the cost of trying various components is probably not worth it. The down side of this is for the rig I want (middle of the road machine) I think September is the earliest I can get it.


Enter Zetter laptop raider! Yep I do have a plan B which is my Asus lappy with at least a Gforce video card in it. All I can say is thank god Cata isnt out yet as if they boost the graphics any more I think my lappy wouldnt cope. For all you out there raiding on old machines at low detail levels with no effects tuned on to keep the frame rates up my hat is well and truely tipped.
For me I can only think its similar to going from driving an Audi TT to a 15 year old Nissan Micra they both do the same job sort of but you do notice the difference.

Still even squinting at a smaller screen and the fire on the floor being shall we say not so sharp Kingdom of Rust finally managed to get a raid team together to down heroic Professor Putricide. I can say personally for me it was not easy a lot of my oh so nice add ons crowded the screen making it harder to have good raid awareness but I am proud to say I think I only caused a couple of wipes but dieing at inappropriate moments.
We got him to a couple of 1% tries (one of which was 50K left when a tank bit the big one) so we scented blood and with 30 mins to go on the raid we were standing over Professors corpse. I think we would have done this at least a month ago but as I posted previously summer has really taken its toll on us being a small guild with a few people signing off for the summer to return for Cata.
So all that really stands between us and our drakes is the spectre of Sindy. Hopefully we can do this before the buff kicks up to 30%.

On a separate subject I see that Blizz has binned real ID for the forums, its a pity it caused so many casualties along the way. I did miss a lot of the forum furore due to work commitments but it looked like the equivalent of dropping a tactical nuke on the whole blogging community for the repercussion it is having. Hopefully Blizz backing down will convince people that that do still have a voice against the Juggernaut that Blizz has become.


Zetter

3 comments:

Jauffre said...

Hi

I think that if would be playing on my laptop. Before raid start i would measure and watching things what are different compared to my "main machine". :-). Then it will be the big boss fight, might be that blue screen will flicker. During boss fight, i don't see anymore my small laptop. I only see few addons giving info and colorful fight happenings...

Tessy said...

Congratulations on the kill! :D

My laptop is singing on the last verse and its 3-year warranty runs out this month, so next time it kicks the bucket it will be adios laptop. Hopefully it will last another year, although I am not sure Cataclysm will run on it, but I'll cross that bridge when I get there.

zetter said...

At the moment I cant really be bothered to play if im not raiding its a bit like going from driving a sports car to a push bike. I dont think it helps that there isnt much going on in wow atm.

Zetter