I ended up crashing my computer, hard. Reformat and reinstall [Image Can Not Be Found] Stupid, stupid me! I did not uninstall the old video card drivers before I put on the new ones, and the result was massive instability, BSOD (in Vista!), and inability to even start in safe mode. But all is well now, and I have downloaded Risen and look forward to trying it sometime in the indeterminate future.

The saga continues… Boy, did I ever open up a can of worms!

The video card came with a DVI to VGA converter, which works great, but it doesn't carry the sound signal. I use an HDTV for my monitor, and the HDMI cables for regular TV carry both video and audio for the cable box and Blu-Ray player, etc. I went to my trusty local geek store and got a DVI to HDMI cable, and the video was shit and still no audio. I took it back the next day (today), and the geek-in-residence had never heard of a video card that also outputs audio, and I was all like, “I swear! It has HD audio!” and the guy looked at me like I was some fat stupid middle-aged bitch [Image Can Not Be Found] So I turned to my friend Google and found out that I need the converter that comes with the video card. Only. Well, my video card came with a DVI to VGA converter, not a DVI to HDMI converter (what's with all the initials, huh?), and on the box it said that converter came with “selected models only.” Mine wasn't “selected.” So I had to order the right converter from Newegg.com. And now I wait… [Image Can Not Be Found] That's okay, though, I'm off to party at Orb's house far, far away anyway, and maybe my thingie will be here when I get back. And then hopefully it will work.

I remember my first upgrade was to a 100MB hard drive. I thought there was no way I'd ever use up all that disk space!

Upgrades suck! I used my computer on Friday, all was working well, and then I left it on and did other stuff for some days. I came back to get a stuffing recipe yesterday morning, and on the screen was a message "disk read failure, press ctrl-alt-del to reboot." I did that, and nothing happened. So I turned it off, turned it back on, and absolutely nothing. Dead in the water. No BIOS, even. I said screw it and went out and got a whole new computer.

I got a Gateway gaming computer, with a 1750-GB nVidia graphics card, 1 TB disk, 8 GB RAM, Intel quad processor. Not quite top-of-the-line, but close enough. It's pretty sweet! I thought I would miss my fancy Antec quiet case, but this computer makes hardly any noise anyway even with its cheap sheet-metal enclosure. The only problem with buying a computer at the store is all of the shit that comes preinstalled, but I knew that going in and bought Windows 7 at the same time.

It also has these disk enclosures that let me put in my old hard drives into plastic caddies, and now I can put them in and pull them out at will through the front of the computer. Not quite hot-swappable because the computer has to be off, but nice nonetheless. The problem is that the Windows 7 install adds a little 100MB recovery partition, and it ate my most recent data disk. The whole 500GB! [Image Can Not Be Found]I bought a file recovery software that oughta retrieve most if not all of my files. I wish those Microsoft bastards had let me choose where to put this. [Image Can Not Be Found]

So the upshot is, I am all done being a computer hardware do-it-yourselfer. This one oughta last me for at least five or six years, and then I'll just go buy another one. I am all excited to play an actual game!