Post 100 & sadness

Well, this was supposed to be a blog banter post, but over the weekend I have had hardware issues.

Essentially my graphics card looks to have gone to the big graphics card maker in the sky. This is a problem (and I havnt' changed my skills in days... Why oh why doesn't CCP allow web based change of characters skills?). It started on Monday with some blue lines over the screen... and now appears to have died completely. I'll be trying another reseat operation tonight, but if it fails, I'll have to order a new part. The computer/card is just over 2 years old, so it just our of warranty...

The issue is being a PCI-X card - I don't have a spare capable of running 2 eve clients simultaneously unfortunately.

So I have 2 choices essentially.

• Buy a new graphics card and hope it fixes issue (comparible card = £200 or about $350).
• Buy a new computer if above fails to work - about £800

As such it leaves me stuffed for FanFest. I can't book it now - and if I had booked I'd have had to cancel as the expense if the new graphics card fails will be too high.

Basically not having a graphics card = no EVE = no computer. I'd prefer a working computer to fanfest. Its just such a hard decision to make.

Normal service will resume tomorrow with fanfest banter and updates on the graphics card fix plan.

Hardware woes

I posted this in game last night and forgot to mention - I think my 2nd 17" monitor is going up the spout. It stopped working 100% last night while playing EVE. Luckily I was mostly finished and was on way to dock for the day at the time - but it had to happen in low-sec. Only joy was it was the covert ops ship that I lost on that screen temporarily and it was cloaked so no big deal in the short term..

I disconnected all cables/reconnected this am, and it fired up again thankfully. It's what must be a 6 year old IIyama 17" TFT - from the days when such a thing cost me over £400 (with DVI & VGA input). It's a piece of my computing history and it will be a shame when it finally dies, as many years of service were had from it...

If/when it completely fails, I'll need a new one ASAP - in good news I have another spare, but its VGA only cable wise. Problem as my dual-head card is dual-DVI. Still another 17" monitor would be excellent.

Other hardware issues showing up now with Premium-lite (2nd client) are that Premium does eat a lot more ram. Its not causing a huge problem right now (except when converting videos to PSP format & running 2 EVE clients simultaneously due to a running out of ram/swap like crazy issue) - but I'm thinking another 2Gb of ram would not go amiss soon. (And yes I know I won't get to use it all with a 32 bit OS).

I'm also thinking of a Macbook for EVE when travelling/my photography habit. Does Premium on Mac now work on the standard non-pro Macbooks? (with 9400M Nvidia card) (I *know* the pre-Aprocrapha client did work) Whats the performance like Mac-people?