The log of the gamer

In my previous post, I described an unlucky situation when BIOS in my computer got corrupted. I’ve been waiting to fix it for two days, when I finally hooked up with a friend of mine, who still happens to have computer with working floppy drive. Fine, I thought, I will do it quick and come clean out of this mess.

Not so fast. First it turned out that his computer is stored somewhere in the basement, so we had to go and pull out of the storage room. Then it appeared that the computer was dead, so we grabbed another one from the storage. This one booted fine, but after entering Windows it became clear that default account has only guest privileges and is unable to detect and install my flash drive I brought with. Damn the machine, we said, and went looking for a nice student in nearby dormitory who owns working computer and floppy drive.

Then this dude happened. First year postgraduate in chemistry, so I thought, it’d be real quick now. So I sat in front of monitor, pull the flash drive out of the pocket, but still something seems strange. Yeah, that’s fucking ubuntu at the desktop. Fortunately, he appeared to use Windows virtual machine due to his fondness of Office 2007, so after 10 minutes of installing floppy drive module and mounting disks I got it working. It took me an hour to make three bootable floppies with three versions of DFI LanParty NF4 Ultra-D BIOS.

Then I’m back home, put the floppy into the drive and damn! It won’t flash! It just hangs after reading BIOS image from the floppy. I thought floppy was corrupt, but no, two others acted the same. What the hell, I thought, and started to work with some strange runtime parameters for awdflash. Finally I’ve found the combination of awdflash /py/sn/cc/cd/qi/f to be working (actually /qi was the one to do miracles), but the nightmare’s not over. It’s time to assemble to machine again, what is the most annoying of all. Got still a leak in water cooling to catch, anyway.

The outcome is easy - never flash with overclocked/untested/unstable settings.

I came to an idead - DFI LanParty NF4 Ultra-D with 510-1 BIOS now is not the best of ideas, especially while using X2 processor. So I tried to flash to newer one, 3/29/06.

I used WinFlash as usual. While flashing the progress indicator stopped at 27% during programming flash memory and bang! computer rebooted. What’s left was:

Award BootBlock 1.0

Checking drive A:

INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER

I don’t have a damn floppy with system and BIOS to flash!

I just got a pair of TCCD-based G.Skill 4400LE sticks. The set contains two 512 MB sticks built upon 437 TCCD chips on Brainpower PCB. The purpose was simple - get another 1 GB of RAM, and have total of 2 gigs running in my rig.

Didn’t have time to test it thoroughly yet. Right now they’re running @255 6-3-3-2,5 with command rate of 2T, together with mentioned earlier 4800LA’s. I may find some time the other day to see what maximum they can reach.

I almost forgot - they were dirt-cheap, paid 98 PLN (just over 20 euros) for it. Quality memory for a superb price.

That’s my first bench of Vantage - never had Vista before, so once Win7 got onboard, I decided to toy with it for a while. My hardware sucks, I know, but there are more important things to be done than buying new PSU and VGA

Anyhow, enjoy the pure power of GeForce 8500 GT run without any tweaks, so I will re-run after upgrade to 2 GB

I have some time off since I hurt my foot last weekend, so I spent a bit more gaming. This let me finish King’s Bounty at last after about two months of struggle. I liked it very much, though.

Final score was 786, which places me on the third spot. I doubt that it’s possible to achieve much more on Normal skill, because of final score calculation formula. I was level 29 Paladin at the end.

Now the only thing left is to wait for expansion - Armored Princess. The story revealed so far is somewhat simple, but what the heck, if it’s still as playable as the basic version. I hope for more army slots available - had more than a million of gold that couldn’t be spent.

Fallout 3 is a world of its own, as in two previous parts. Bethesda did a really good job and created fantastic mood for the revisited nuclear Wasteland. Although it was feared that porting Fallout to Oblivion-like engine will screw things up, I think they stood up the pressure.

The only thing I can complain is instability of program itself, which results in rather frequent crashing to desktop. The situation got better after my upgrade earlier this month, but still it’s not perfect - I did not play the game without being interrupted for longer than two hours. I wonder if upgrading to 2 gigs will finally solve the problem.

I am currently at level 14 in Rivet City just going after father - the optional quests are literally optional as you can easily reach maximum level going the path told by main storyline. However, it’s so much fun that I can’t give up on them so fast.