Computer Blues

Over the last few days I have been having what I term as “bad mental health” days.  I’ve been super stressed about various sundry things at work, and combine that with the fact that I just do not handle change well.  Every time my wife goes away during the summer for a conference, I go through this massive adjustment period.  So much of my life is intertwined with hers, that when she is gone… there is just a void.  I try my best to manage this “funk” but now and then it gets the better of me.  I am thankful that I have a lot of friends who are willing to cheer me up.

Computer Blues

It seems like over the last few days… my computers have been betraying me.  I have been having issues with my gaming laptop, where it is intermittently losing its power connection.  Fiddling with the cord brings back the connection for short periods of time, before going out.  I initially thought… this is likely a power supply issue so I did what I always do and went on amazon… found a replacement and got it shipped through prime.  I got the new power supply and it worked even worse.

After much research it seemed like the g73 model has had some issue with the power port getting lose itself.  After watching a few videos… I decided this was not something I wanted to undertake myself.  It involved pretty much a complete teardown of the laptop, de-soldering one port and soldering back in another.  I am essentially a software guy… I build my own PCs but that is mostly just assembling a bunch of parts that were designed to go together.  I have done soldering work before, but it was nothing I was ever extremely comfortable doing.

After digging around I found what appeared to be an extremely reputable guy here in my town that does this sort of thing.  He owns a “Nerds: We Can Fix That” franchise and as such is primarily a mobile pc repair truck, so we agreed to meet so that I could have him look over my laptop.  After doing various sundry tests his though process was that it really was a bad power supply.  After looking around he showed me a spot in the power connector one where of the prongs was most definitely crushed.  His suggestion was to find an original Asus power supply and try that.

After much digging I finally was able to get a real Asus power supply ordered… but unlike the speed I am used to with prime.. it wont be here until Thursday at the earliest.  As a result I am without my laptop and my ability to hang out downstairs while playing games.  I know I have blogged about this before… when I lost my Gateway FX laptop, but I never really appreciate how amazing that is… until I can’t do it.  After a long day it is so nice to just chill out on the couch with my laptop and half play games and half watch stuff off the DVR.  I am nervous however that this will not really be the issue, but I am willing to try it… and it is far less invasive than other possible solutions.

Another Betrayal

Last night I get home, and go upstairs to begin the evening ritual of playing something.  I get on mumble to talk to my friends… and in the middle of booting something up my gaming desktop locks up hard.  In fact at first I can’t seem to get it to boot…  which I later find that it is simply booting exceedingly slowly.  I go into diagnostic mode trying to figure out what exactly is wrong.  Everything seems to be operating as expected… voltage looks good… hard drive tests fine… memory tests fine.  So after much fiddling I am basically at square one as to what might have happened.

A lock up is common enough, but a lock up followed by not wanting to boot afterwards really floored me.  I am not talking windows booting… I am talking slow bios posting.  I am going to have to keep and eye on things, but last night switched from a gaming night… to a do maintenance on all the things night.  I went ahead and patched everything that could possibly be patched, updated all the drivers that could be updated… and did some registry maintenance.  Given my “bad mental health” state… having both machines down at the same time was a state I was almost unable to cope with.

I realize that these are all first world problems… and rather petty…  but having both machines potentially down at the same time sucked.  Luckily through all my fiddling whatever happened seems to be not happening now.  When a problem mysteriously goes away… it bothers the hell out of me though.  I am not sure what happened, have no log evidence of what caused the lockup/slow boot scenario and ultimately no evidence of what seems to have cleared it up.  My desktop is three to four years old at this point, so it might simply be aging hardware issues. 

Now that I think of it… it might be older than that…  I got it when we we were still raiding Wrath of the Lich King content in World of Warcraft.  It has been a trusty machine that has pretty much run anything I have thrown at it for several years.  It might in fact be time to upgrade…  but I would much rather do it on my own time than having a box just up and die on me.  Here is hoping that I have at least temporarily staved off whatever occurred.

Killing Psychos

I finally was able to get my machine in a state I was happy with around 9:30 last night.  At this point I got back onto mumble and decided to join some friends in Borderlands 2.  It was me playing Axton, Ash playing Zero and Rae playing a super bloodlust infused Maya.  Quite frankly the combination of Rae and I riding around in a vehicle together is probably a bad thing.  Especially when it comes to doing quests that have non-standard objectives.  There may or may not have been a few objectives we almost failed at… because we were both too busy shooting things to notice that was not the goal.

When the game first shipped for whatever reason I was not able to hook up with the crew playing it.  As a result I have pretty much only played single player borderlands 2 content.  Last night was an absolute blast, and having players to rez me…  really helped when I tried to play “tank” and bull rush a bunch of mobs.  I need to find some better weapons… because right now my assault rifle is a tap to fire model that seems to always need reloading at the wrong time.  I picked up an amazing sub machinegun last night, but it seems to go through bullets like water… and I am always scavenging to find more.

The combo of Axton/Maya/Zero seemed extremely formidable… but I think if you put ANY combination of different classes together you would have had the same results.  Looking forward to maybe getting back in tonight and finishing the quests we were doing.  Honestly I don’t really care if we even do quests…. I was just in the mood to roam around and kill things to satiate my “computer troubles” induced bloodlust.  Borderlands 2 is a really good game for that kind of mindless violence.  It is like the Saturday morning cartoon of death.

Rift Update

The other big thing going on today is the fact that it is the launch of the Rift Free to Play conversion.  It will be interesting seeing how this improves or damages the community.  My hope is that by lowering the barrier of entry it will be easier to get folks to try the game.  Additionally I am hoping for a path through the cash shop to pick up some dimension goodies… because quite frankly I have been way too poor thus far to really experience the dimension content properly.  In any case it will definitely be a massive change to the game… and as such interesting to watch unfold.

Additionally… it is really hard to type with a cat trying to balance on your arm.  I guess I should take that as a queue to wrap things up.  I hope you all have a great day, and that you are in a better mental place than I have been.  I think my body is betraying me as well.  This morning I am additionally having a “bad lung day” in that my asthma and allergies have decided to make my life hell.  Trying to decide if today will be a stay home and take breathing treatments all day occasion or not. 

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