New PC "cheer"

So I lasted a month!


Yes the lappy was too painful to play WOW on while raiding and we are going to have another crack at heroic Sindy soon so I cracked and took the overtime at work (weekends are for wimps!) to buy a new rig.


This week those nice people at overclockers delivered me a new budget gaming PC.


- Case: Coolermaster Elite 335 Case - Black
- Power Supply: OCZ 500w II StealthXStream
- CPU: AMD Athlon II X2 Dual Core 245 2.90GHz (Socket AM3)
- Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-MA78LMT-US2H AMD 760G (Socket AM3) DDR3 Motherboard
- RAM: OCZ Gold Low Voltage 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 PC3-10666C9 1333MHz Dual Channel
- Hard Drive: Seagate 500GB SATA-II 16MB Cache
- Graphics Card: XFX ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB GDDR3
- Sound: ALC888B 8-channel High Definition Audio CODEC
- Optical Drive: LG GH22NS50 22x DVD±RW SATA ReWriter

After a few issues with installing an OS its runs like a dream and it is nice to see WOW running at max detail rather than everything at low. I know a lot of people out there have a great time and do well on low detail settings but for me it basically sucked the enjoyment out of the game after running on a decent system. Running at 10fps in Dalaran/ 15 FPS on raids was not fun and I think would have put me at a disadvantage during Sindy.

One odd thing I encountered though in WOW was running at ultra detail the game caused a critical space error in WOW. Now after updates on Vista had finished and I tweaked the details down a bit it appears to be ok but after a bit of reading on the tech forums it appears poor old WOW has issues with high end system basically overloading the memory allocation from what I can read (caveat I am not a programmer so don't have much of an idea on this so just want the game to work reasonably well). If anyone has a bent that way a detailed explanation can be found here on the O boards

http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=13705342873&sid=1

It was vaguely reassuring to me that my lowish end gaming system was blowing WOW out of the water at high detail levels. Glad its now behaving itself though as I bought the new machine to play WOW on and get set for Cataclysm/ The Old Republic it would have been a pain if it didn't work well on the game it was bough to run.

Zetter

Oh and PS when you install Vista on a new PC and the LAN doesnt work it help to actually install the MotherBoard Drivers for the LAN as then it may work!

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

You forget how much of your hard drive WOW takes up now

Well this weekend it finally happened that moment that all PC users dread my HDD went boom. I wasn't surprised as it had been a bit iffy for a while and I didn't lose anything important as I backup anything I cant afford to lose after a couple of painful experiences many years ago.

So I took this opportunity for a clean fresh install and an excuse to lose all that accumulated crap you tend to build up on the drive over a few years. I guess you all know what I mean (well unless you are one of those people with borderline OCD who takes everything off as soon as you have finished it) the old games that you keep in case an expansion comes along or that old app that may come in useful someday. Well its all gone from my system now and the rig is once again clean mean and ready to rumble.
This may also have something to do with me getting an Xbox360 in the family recently so I am planning to keep my PC rig for WOW and a few other apps.

After the usual obligatory putting windows, antivirus and connecting to the web it was time to put WOW back on. Now I admit I was lax and didn't backup the wow directory but I had all day to set it up while was doing other stuff.
What can I say OH MY GOD it takes ages I forgot that the vanilla disks and BC are on CD (remember those?) due to part of the world (and yep I am looking at you America) not getting on the DVD train that early. So that's about 8 cd swaps. Then comes the patching.... 12 hours later I am finally back on line.
I will back WOW up next time especially if the HDD is looking iffy god help me if this was the day before raid night I would be back on the lappy which is never fun for raiding.


Zetter