WhistlinDixie

The New Laptop

I’m a bit late updating everyone, but I got home last Saturday night. First thing Sunday evening, I opened up my new laptop. Excitement ensued.

I noticed soon after booting up that I only had one hard drive showing up in Windows. This was bad because there were two (confirmed by visual inspection) hard drives in the computer. I initialized and formatted the drive, but no new drives showed up in Windows Explorer. After I rebooted the computer, the hard drive appeared uninitialized and unformatted. I popped in SpinRite and started it running on both drives in my computer and went to bed. Late the next night, it completed. I hurriedly tried formatting the hard drive again, but with the same results.

On Tuesday, I started chatting with HP tech support. I ended up going through four different reps. The first one thought that I had NTFS permission issues that were preventing me from accessing the drive (completely wrong). The second one appeared to be on the right track, but I lost my connection, causing the chat to end prematurely. The third rep had me use a Seagate utility to format the drive, but that proved unfruitful.

Before I started chatting with the fourth rep, I decided to jump into the BIOS to see if anything in there might give me an idea. I happened to run across a diagnostics tab that gave me the option to run diagnostics on both of my hard drives and the memory. I ran the diagnostic on my troublesome drive, and less than a minute later got the message Error #10003- Replace hard drive. Excited, I started my fourth and final chat with HP support. I immediately told the rep that I had gotten the message and he immediately started ordering me a new hard drive.

The hard drive showed up Thursday, and I immediately put it in my laptop and booted up. I looked in disk management only to find that this hard drive did not show up at all. I powered down the laptop and looked at the hard drive again. I noticed that the new hard drive appeared to be a few millimeters shorter, causing the contacts on the hard drive to not reach the contacts on the motherboard. This was relatively easy to fix since HP places a proprietary adapter on hard drives. All I had to do was back the adapter off a few millimeters and put the hard drive back in. I booted back up and Windows saw the hard drive. It all works great now, and it didn’t cost me a penny.

At this point, my only outstanding issue is getting Guitar Hero III working. When I try to run it after installing it, I get an error message about not being able to load a security module. Even after applying the v1.1 patch, the error persisted. I tried using a no-DVD crack, which allowed me to start the game. Unfortunately, the game would crash while playing, which made it unplayable. I can’t seem to find a fix on the web, so I’ll be contacting Aspyr soon about this.

I am happy to report that Portal runs just fine now and looks very beautiful. I’ll get around to playing HL2:Ep2 and TF2 later. Also, my brother bought The Orange Box today, so as soon as he gets a graphics card for the family computer (currently using integrated graphics), we can go head-to-head in TF2.

Don’t Copy Me!

By now, I’m sure that everyone has heard of Guitar Hero.  Prior to the latest release in the series, Guitar Hero III, the majority of the songs in the game were actually covers of the original versions of the songs.

When Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s was being produced, Activision approached The Romantics about using their 80s hit “What I Like About You” in the game.  The band gave Activision permission to use the song.  Activision recorded a cover of the song and went on to sell millions of copies of the game.  End of story, right?

Wrong.  After the game was released, The Romantics decided to sue Activision.  What could the possibly due them about?  After all, Activision had received permission from the band to cover the song.  It ends up that the band feels that Activision’s cover was too good and they felt that the cover infringed on its right to its own likeness. 

WTF?!  I would be happy that a good cover of my song was placed in a game that millions of children play.  After all, I would expect it to add to the group’s popularity among today’s youth who weren’t around in the 80s to listen to the song during its heyday.  I would only sue Activision if they did a crappy job on the cover that made me sound like I had no talent.  A musical defamation of sorts.  I wish that I could sue someone for making me look good.

The Orange Box

My boss, Chris, has been getting on to me lately for my lack of gaming. He has been trying to get me to start playing World of Warcraft (WoW) so that he can kick my butt with his level gazillion hunter and feel good about himself for ganking a n00b. I generally don’t have much fun with level grinding type games (aka. RPGs), so I have repeatedly turned him down. However, I still wanted to get a new game since the last game that I bought was the Starcraft Warchest (Stacraft and its expansion, Starcraft: Brood War) and the last new game that I played was Half-Life 2: Episode One (thanks Tim).

I decided that this situation must be remedied. To do so, I took advantage of my grocerie run to Wal-Mart last Saturday to pick up The Orange Box. For those of you who don’t know, The Orange Box is a package of games released by Valve that includes Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Team Fortress 2, and Portal, along with the original Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 2: Episode One. Due to the small hard drive in my aging laptop, I was only able to install HL2:Ep2 and Portal. (This left me with a measly 2GB free on my less-than-spacious 80GB hard drive.)

I had heard that Portal was a rather short game, so I decided to play it first to get my reflexes back and because it was more convenient to play after work. I found the game to be rather easy for about the first ten levels or so. The puzzles started getting harder, requiring actual thought on my part. By the time I got to the 18th level, I was so stumped that I resorted to a video walkthough to figure out what I was supposed to do. While this showed me the correct strategy, executing it was another thing entirely. I finally beat the game last night. This marked the first time ever that I beat a game without god mode or any other cheats. (I know, it’s pretty pathetic, but I just suck at gaming.) At the end was quite a treat. The ending credits were accompanied my a song written by Jonathan Coulton sung by the evil robot (GLaDOS) that you killed in the final battle. The lyrics are absolutely hysterical, but you have to play the game to really understand them.

I’ll get around to HL2:Ep2 this weekend. I hope that it is as good as Portal, because it would be a little disappointing if it wasn’t. At least I’ll know that no matter what, it will always be better than Halo, or any of its sequels, ever were.

Here’s a hilarious video review of The Orange Box that I ran across.

Note: If you have Adblock Plus, you must disable it to view this video.
Warning: This review contains coarse language.

Vista Game Performance: 7 Months Later

According to an article at FiringSquad, the performance of video games under Windows Vista is now on par with performance on Windows XP. There only seemed to be slight differences when SLI and CrossFire configurations were tested that favored XP, but they were only a few percentage points. The only issues still out there seem to be graphical corruption issues with CrossFire configurations in certain games, and a lacking of full-featured versions of utilities, such as nTune. It’s really starting to look like Vista is ready for prime time.

Licensed to Kill

OK, so maybe I don’t actually have a license to kill, or even a ninja license, which would be sooo cool, but I am dangerous. Tonight marked the first time that I ever came out on top of a deathmatch. Don’t laugh. I’d like to see you be first out of six when you’ve only had the game two days. Of course, everyone else that I was playing with had been playing for at least a week, all against eachother. What can I say? For someone who hasn’t played any DM at all since the summer of 2002, I’m not doing too bad. BTW, in case you were wondering, we were playing Half-Life 2: Deathmatch. The ": Deathmatch" part is important because it is actually a separate game from Half-Life 2. All I can say is you better watch out before I put a red-hot length of rebar in your back with a crossbow.