CmdrTaco's Journal: Bad Hardware Karma (Continued)

As some of you know, I've been assembling a gaming machine. A glorious Athlon 2100. A GeForce4. And yes, a Windows operating system. My mission (and rest assured that I have accepted it) is to play NWN and WC3. And so far my mission continues to be a huge failure.

I installed WinXP. Actually I installed it 4 times before I managed to actually log in. From there things began to get wonky. Dungeon Siege crashed every few minutes. NWN would play for a few minutes, and then die. The length of time I could play continued to shrink. I tried an ongoing stream of Windows Updates, Driver Updates, Suggestions from forums regarding BIOS settings.

I gave up on XP.

At the advice of many a windows gamer, I backed up. Hemos has an identical hardware machine that worked fine running 2k, so I installed that instead. At least it installed the first time. After downlodaing and installing 100 megs of service patches and recommended driver updates (downloaded via 56k modem I might ad) I found myself... right where I started! NWN crashes after a few minutes. As does any directx game.

So at this point I'm fairly certain that there is a hardware problem. I'm running the latest drivers. I've tried 2 OSs. I've listened to the advice of several windows users.

So I bring Naru (the name of my box) to Hemos' house yesterday morning. Since he has identical hardware, he has offered to help. He also has been playing windows games for many years. I've haven't played a 3D game on anything except my laptop, which came with windows preinstalled, since a I had Pentium I and windows 95. And even that was only Diablo 2, The Sims, and Sim Golf.

We swap hard drives, and my hard drive crashes in Hemos' PC. Which makes me blame software. But, his harddrive crashes in my PC too which would make me blame hardware. Well, bad hardware tends to cause software to be corrupted, so we start swapping parts. Video card swap changes nothing, but TADA the memory is the deal. My box, running w/ Hemos' hard drive and RAM works like a seasoned 3D game playing never winter nights superbox.

Feeling as if progress has been made, we decide that we should, just to make sure, try my RAM in Hemos' box. If it crashes, we can rest assured that we have discovered the culprit of evil. And then my machine turns off. The UPS beeps. And my heart falls.

The power switch no longer works. Yes, the power supply is dead. After all of this, the power supply died.

So now I need to replace bad ram, and a dead power supply. The hardware gods are clearly making me pay for something I did wrong. Whatever that may be, I apologize. But I will not be defeated. Mind you by the time I can play NWN, NWN2 will be out, and it will require a GeForce6.