About
The random thoughts of a random techie
Martin A. Brooks
martin@hinterlands.org
Mon, 14 May 2007
About a week ago I was merrily fragging away on America's Army when my computer suddenly shut itself off. My first thought was power cut but then I caught a whiff of singed plastic. On inspection my computer's PSU wasn't very happy and my graphics card looked a little.... singed. Further experimentation revealed that the fuse in the power cord plug had blown too.
A trip to PC World was needed for a new PSU and graphics card. I returned with a modular PSU (i.e. one you can choose which cables to connect to) and a Geforce 7900GS, an older card but still more than capable. Fitting them took very little time, I then fired everything up to test. My computer got as far as connecting to an AA server before it locked solid.
I assumed this was due to driver problems or registry rot so I decided to do a clean install of my computer. I have a hardware RAID card in my machine that requires a floppy disk with a driver on for the Windows XP installer to be able to pick it up, it was at this point that I found out that my floppy disk drive doesn't work any more. I do have a USB FDD but regular readers of my blog will know that USB has been unreliable on this machine for some time.
A friend of mine kindly pointed me at nLite which I then used to build a custom XP install CD containing the RAID driver and, as an afterthought, I also included a few other drivers too. Thirty minutes later I was happily watching an unattended install going smoothly ahead.
It didn't help though, even after this complete reinstall I still have the same locking problems. I really really will get my new games machine ordered soon.