Saturday November 10, 2007

Obligatory "isn't this nifty?" advertisement: Phaelia of Resto4Life and Valenna of Parry! Dodge! Spin! have written a program to pull HTML code out of Wowhead and display item tooltips inline in a blog post (or any webpage).

It's very nice, and I'm using it (as of last post), so I thought I'd give credit where credit is due. The program is called WISP, and can be found here.

Friday August 24, 2007

Not been around much because, yeah, no working computer to call my own.

Also been rubbish at answering emails - apologies about that; will reply as soon as I can.

This post, though, is made in a bit of a hurry to mention two things:

1. I'm back in Italy right now for a holiday with the family, and I'm going to the seaside, which means I won't have internet for a week (and so won't be replying to emails for a week and a few days longer; I get back to the UK on the afternoon / evening of the 4th of September, so don't really expect any reply before the 5th at the earliest)

2. Went to the computer store where I'd bought my laptop (and therefore where I'd handed it back in for repairing under warranty when the screen started going blue on me) this afternoon; the laptop was there, all repaired.

I have a computer again! \o/

Sunday August 05, 2007

Computer still dead. Not the RAM (if I perform a RAMectomy, it still doesn't boot), not the HD (it doesn't boot from CD either). Gah.

That explains why I've not been posting much, by the way. The only working computer I have access to belongs to boyfriend, so I can't really use it very much - and when I do have the use of it, I tend to do more important things (like check my email, on which I'm terribly behind in terms of responding... if you're waiting for an email from me be patient, I'll get to it!)... and when I don't, I rarely feel like spending the time I have available for recreation making a blog post - would rather play a game. (Though lately I've not been feeling like playing my current online game of choice - Lord of the Rings Online - because there's absolutely nothing to do there... I'll most likely go back to World of Warcraft, which had plenty of things still for me to do before I left it, not to mention the ones that got added in the meanwhile, and not to mention the new expansion which just got announced. It's a real pity, LotRO has huge potential to be a great game... it's just unrealized right now, and I can see nothing changing with the next patch - and the game will probably die from lack of subscribers before the potential is realized. But that's a longer rant for another post.)

Wednesday July 25, 2007

This particular tale of woe starts shortly after I moved to the UK in a more-or-less permanent fashion. I took a (back then) almost brand new laptop with me: it was shiny, it worked much better than my old desktop had, and it did what I wanted it to do.

All was well for a few weeks, then the laptop decided to break. While I was playing a game (an old game, at that - Starcraft), it rebooted. And rebooted. And rebooted. It wouldn't even load Windows anymore, nor any of the load-from-CD rescue solutions I tried. So I backed up my data (thank god for Ask Metafilter, that website is absolutely priceless) and asked my parents to mail me my old desktop, so I had a computer to use while the laptop got fixed (as opposed to just stealing my boyfriend's computer now and then).

It took some convincing, but they sent me the desktop. That computer worked briefly, then the videocard died. Fine, we had a spare videocard in the house; we replaced it, and all was fine for a while.

Then the (second-hand) monitor we'd acquired to attach to the computer started turning all sorts of interesting colors. A gentle push (or a not-so-gentle whack) would fix it, and though I knew it would eventually break down, I would be getting my laptop back soon.

Then I got my laptop back. Yay, everything worked again! I moved all my data back to it, and it took less than a couple of weeks for its monitor to start going blue, too. This, of course, was a different issue, not fixed by a gentle push (or a not-so-gentle whack); it quickly ended up making the laptop unusable for me, unless I connected it to an external monitor - which I did, while waiting to get the chance to send it off for repairs again.

A week ago, I pulled all my data off the laptop again, sent the laptop off for repairs (thankfully it's still under warranty) and went back to using the desktop.

And yesterday, while I was innocently surfing the internet, it froze on me (the kind of hard freeze where you have to pull the plug to get any reaction from the computer, as not even the power button will work). And now it doesn't load into Windows anymore (freezes halfway through), nor into any sort of CD-based rescue environments. As the HD Windows is on appears to be fine (booting into DOS and running various disk-checking programs works), I suspect the RAM (running Memtest86 right now to check), but if it is, we have no spare RAM to use, and the desktop is (unless my memory is trying to trick me) using a single 512MB stick - so it's all or nothing, and neither will do me much good.

Sigh. And I don't even know when I'll get my laptop back. At least my data is fine, I guess, it could've been worse.