...Beets...Asparagus...
11:13 AM EST -- SLEEP!
Tuesday I mentioned that my Econ class was cancelled for today due to mysterious circumstances which still have not been completely explained to me. So, this means only one thing to me... SLEEP! And Pizza Rolls for breakfast!
10:01 PM EST -- SpeedDisk and faulty RAM do NOT mix!
More experimentation with putting my old RAM chips on the computer upstairs. Last time, apparently one of the chips were still bad (Which makes me glad it wasn't my motherboard at fault). I determined this because Unreal Tournament's install BSoDed me down with Page Faults (Norton CrashGuard tells me these things). Thus, my dad decided to do shotgun hardware replacement to determine which chip, exactly, was bad. Hey, we don't have any other way to test it.
I gave him the UT CD to test it (Going on the logic that if some RAM was bad, that, if anything, would BSoD it down) and left for class around 6:40 PM. I came back to hear him tell me that the install seemed to complete itself perfectly. I figured all was fine, he found the bad chip. Then he told me he ran Norton SpeedDisk for a routine defrag.
My brother and I immediately panicked at that.
Now, don't get me wrong here, ol' Pete Norton and the crew at Symantec makes some damn good utility software. I still consider the Norton Utilities among the top of any "Must get" list for a new computer. But, it's useless without working RAM. Like most any other program. This case is no different.
And don't get me wrong on the other account, my dad's no fool with computers. His knowledge is more old-school than modern-day, though, and he can trip up over some of the newer stuff out there.
For the uninitiated in the arts of defragging, you've either been a (!Microsoft) user for life, or you seriously need some info here. What SpeedDisk and any other defragger does is read fragmented files into memory (Note the key words) and writes them back to disk, all sorted out nicely.
The key words there were into memory. My brother and I immediately panicked. If SpeedDisk was successfully writing and reading from RAM without a BSoD stopping it, the data on the drive might be corrupted beyond belief now. Our only hope was the BSoD that we found when we got upstairs. Time to assess damage.
10:45 PM EST -- My bro never reads startup screens
Remember Yesterday when I said the new computer only had 32MB of RAM? Well, my bro was the one telling me that, not the actual startup screens. It had 64MB all along. Pfshh.
Damage appeared minimal. The computer started back up perfectly (After another RAM shotgunning) and things seemed to run. No worries, then. Now UT runs, albiet in Software Rendering mode, at about 23FPS. Still very playable. LAN party time. We've isolated the bad chip, it seems.
10:55 PM EST -- Keychain module?
I now have a useless RAM chip. Most people with RAM chips on their keychains bought them from someone else... a lousy 1MB or so SIMM chip with a hole pre-drilled in 'em. And bought from a store that sells things like keychain modules.
Bah to them.
I'll have a busted 64MB SDRAM chip that I bought from a COMPUTER STORE on my keychain.
Well... maybe. This thing's a bit big, really.