A Computer Weekend

I have a lot of computer-related stuff going on.

Tomorrow is the LAN party. It's been far too long since I've seen Jake and the guys (except for the Krys guy, who I haven't met yet) in too long. I also haven't played Half-Life in a while, so I may be a bit rusty. I hope everyone else is rusty too, but I'm not holding out any hope for that.

On Monday, the IT guy came over and traded computers with me. The old one had a bad memory slot, and I wanted more than the 256 MB that can fit in the working slot, so he's sending it in to IBM to fix. He was good enough to swap out the hard drive so that the switch would be (presumably) transparent, except that I'd have 512 MB including the chip that was in the dead slot on the old machine.

This was well and good, until the machine started crashing (which was right away). It would sometimes freeze and sometimes go blue screen on me. After a week of intermittent troubleshooting by me and the IT guy, I think I've narrowed the problem down to a bad stick of memory. The second stick in my old machine seems to have picked up some bad karma from the slot it was in. So, now I'm almost back to normal with the machine, and the old one will be back in a week or two. I'll be gone next week, so it's all good, I say.

The third thing going on is that my brother is building a computer. He finally bought the last few parts last Saturday, and they arrived this afternoon. He was going to come over last night for the build, but the five day 2-day shipping put a stop to that. The only time we have between today and Monday morning when I am leaving for Virginia for a week is Saturday morning, so we'll try to get it done in the ungodly hours of the weekend. I'm excited though. I haven't built a machine from scratch in a long time, and so I've been prepping as well as I can for it.

By the way, sorry for not getting you involved Jake, but you've been busy too lately, and we've had a hard enough time scheduling this with just the two of us (who have also been busy lately).

I've also been backing up data on my hard drive getting it ready for a nuke and load. I've been increasingly disappointed with its performance as of late, and so I'm starting over. If it all goes well and I get happy with everything, then maybe I'll try switching my server over to Apache. Its web server has been unreliable as of late.

With my brother's build, I will have had two brothers get new machines since the start of the school year. We're all getting together over Thanksgiving for some multiplayer action, although it will probably be real-time strategy-centered, rather than frag-based.