Saturday, October 25, 2008

FFXI will be the Death of Me

So, I will admit it, I am addicted to the wonderful game known as FFXI. I have been playing off and on for the better part of almost 5 years and even though I thought I had quit for the last time back in June, I find myself once again installing that bastard game ;.; I guess it was inevitable though, some things you just can't get away from and this is most definitely one of those for me.

On to the real reason for this post though, I am currently Re-Updating FFXI. Why am I Re-Updating you ask? I'm doing it because life hates me >.>. Every time I tried to play FFXI last night after I finished updating it the first time it Froze.... EVERY DAMN TIME!!! ;.; So here I am finally back at the updating stage, with two more hours of updates to go /sigh

It really is quite frustrating you know? I want to play already damn it! I hate having a game withing arms reach only to be denied it's sweet bounty. I wish I knew what was wrong with it though. That really is the worst part of it all. I do not know if this will actually fix it or if I might have to re-install windows -.-

Oh well.

-Philly T

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Phil Sucks at Playing Esper >.>;

So.... For those of you who play Magic the Gathering and are up to date on the current Block you probably know what I am talking about when I mention the Shard of Esper. For those of you whom are either not into MTG or aren't up to date, Esper is one of Five Shards of the Plane of Alara consisting of the colors blue, black, and white. It's main focus is colored artifacts and control.

The plan to make an Esper deck had been festering in my brain since I played one at Pre-Release almost a month ago now, but I hadn't actually gotten around to it yet. That however changed when I purchased some new cards today and got some nice rares and a Mythic rare that went incredibly well with the Esper theme. So, when I got home I went and selected some cards that I thought would go well with the deck and weeded out enough to make a hefty but manageable blue, black, white 90 card artifact, control deck.

Now obviously I didn't expect it to do too terribly well since it was a brand new deck, but the absolute pounding that I took in all four games that I played against my roommates left me wondering what the hell I had done wrong.

I think that I need to recenter my focus. I tried to have a bit of everything from the colors I was playing, some creature destruction, some counters, decent creatures, etc.... I think that I need to choose 4 Cards (the mythic and 3 of the rares) that will make the core of the deck, and build a 60 card core deck from that and then play a few games that will give me an idea of where I need some shoring up. Hopefully I can make this work as I really like the idea of an playing a casual Esper deck.

-Philly T

When You Just Want to Stab Something

So, as some of you might know (if you know me irl) and as those of you whom will read my blog will come to find out I am a PC gamer. As such from time to time I need to upgrade or expand upon certain components of my system to stay up to date with the current games out there. Those of you who have built your on computers can relate when I say that sometimes things work and sometimes.... They don't.

Ok, so here were my previous system specs for those of you interested:

PSU: Hiper 600 watt modular
MoBo: Asus P5W DH Deluxe
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo 6400 (Overclocked to 2.66)
Mem: 1 GB Corsair 5400 x 2 In Dual Channel Mode
Video: XFX Nvidia 7900 GT (had 2 of them in SLI but one died)
HDD: Maxtor 500GB 7200rpm SATA
Optical: Lite ON Lightscribe DVD burner
OS: Vista Ultimate 64 bit Edition Tweaked

So I had a couple of upgrades in mind to make the most out of what I have. This paycheck I was going to pick up and install 4GB of PC2 6400 and overclock the ram that I have so that it is all running at 6400 with a total of 6144 mb of ram. Next free paycheck I intend to upgrade to a Core 2 Quad 6600 and possibly a 9600 gto (not sure on Video Card yet). Anyways as the saying goes: the best laid plans......

I work for a company by the name of Tiger Direct and they had the Ram that I wanted for 74.99 with a $25 mail-in-rebate so I figured, might as well pick it up from there right? So I go, I pick up what I need (bought some more compressed air since I was out and the inside of my case was getting pretty dusty. Long story short I get home and things start to go.... wrong. I figure alright lets just install the ram and then go into bios and change all of the settings that need changed. So I boot up the Tower and calmly sit and wait for my usb controllers to initialize since I have a usb keyboard. I wait for 5 minutes before deciding that obviously something is not working here. So i take out the ram restart the PC and enter the bios with no problem. My first clue that something may not be right, but I figure that perhaps I just need to tweak the bios before I can get things going. Then I realize that my knowledge of Bios and Ram tweakage is somewhat lacking and I call up my friend who is something of PC hardware genius.

B guides me through changing some voltages so that the Ram should register properly and boot. Happy with the new changes I turn of the Computer and re-install the ram. Doesn't work. For about an hour B and I tweak voltages, manually set clock rates, try different configurations of the Ram sticks and nothing works. So, we decide to go with our last resort and pull the bios battery in hopes that something we changed or missed is the problem. It works... sort of. We get the tower back up and running change the settings and voltages that we have determined need to be changed to allow my computer to register the Ram and actually boot up with it installed and restart the PC. It works, but we discover that only 3 Gigs of ram are being shown, B had forgotten that this particular MoBo had need of enabling a remapping feature for the ram to show more the 3 Gigs so I go change that and wonders of wonders it actually worked right off the bat. Nice right? Eh, not so much.

I go through all of the start up motions and find one distinct problem, Blue Screen of Death. Yeah that's right, shudder in fear at the bane of all Windows Users. Ok I though, maybe its just one of those random fluke BSODs and if I restart it will be fine. Nope, still there. So we go back and reverse one by one all of the changes we had made that were not necessary, even down clocking the ram to 5300 but every time we came up with a BSOD before Windows could even finish loading.

Now maybe there were other things I could have done, maybe there was something I was forgetting that might have made the new ram work but nothing we could think of did it so back to Tiger Direct I went. Exchanged the ram for the equivilant in Patriot (they were out of the Ram I had purchased yesterday) and got back home. Now here is the odd thing, tried the ram in the PC all alone, nothing no post. Tried it in the dominant slots with the old ram in the other 2 slots. Nothing no post. Flipped it around so the old ram was in the dominant slots and the new ram in the other slots? Worked. Went in to bios changed everything to the way I wanted it and booted into Windows without a problem. Must say that was the most unpleasent hardware instillation I have ever had to go through with my current PC. Damn thing.

Oh well thats life, hopefully I won't have any problems with the new Proccessor and Video Card but who knows right?

-Philly T