I'm sure that in some sort of karmic revenge for my joke about the Mac, I spent a bunch of time working on tech issues at home.

Michele's CD-ROM had been acting up and she had complained that her CD burner wasn't fast enough (8x). I ordered a pair of matching black Lite-On drives. They arrived yesterday and I began the install after the kids went to bed.

As expected, after booting with the new drives installed, the BIOS hung during POST and didn't recognize the drives. First, I reflashed the BIOS. No luck. then I swapped out the IDE cable with a new one. (How nerdly am I for having spare IDE cables lying around?) That got them working. The DVD playback software and Nero burning software installed smoothly. Getting a copy of Nero included with the drives was a great deal.

I copied a mix CD at 48x speed to test things out. Three minutes to burn a CD. Nice. As I type, Zoolander is playing on her computer.

On the girls computer, the mouse stopped moving left and right. I popped it open and found a small ecosystem of dust bunnies inside. I cleaned it out and it still didn't work well. The girls took the mousepad into the bathroom and washed it with soap in an attmept to help.

I opened the mouse and had to realign the IR sensor to get things working well.

Most importantly, last night Shadowbane broke.

Shadowbane downloaded a patch and afterwards the program would crash when I tried to enter the world. After some research, I had to rollback Nvidia drivers from 43.45 to 41.09. Finally, the precious had returned to me.

I powerleveled from 6 to 11 last night. If not for all the tech issues, I could have been level 15 easy...

Time for work. Have a good day.

Posted by michael at April 02, 2003 07:33 AM