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Johnatone

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About Johnatone

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    Make love not Half-Life expansion packs

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  1. Yeah, I got sick and tired of being eight years behind the technology. The computer's pretty nice, but I never got around to updating it because I usually spent all my money on gas, cigarettes and weed. Well, that me is gone now.

    Anyway, this is the computer I have. It's not bad at all, and with the default hardware things actually work pretty well, but nonetheless I was behind the curve for gaming these days.

    Before I went up the river, I bought myself a SoundBlaster Audigy SE so I could chat while gaming without sounding like shit, plus it helped with my musical pursuits (i.e. it doesn't sound nearly as bad when I record). It didn't really affect the performance of my machine any, but having things sound better is always a plus.

    Last week I bought myself 2GB of RAM to max out what my computer will take, and I was pretty satisfied. Things tended to load faster with less hang-ups. Still, it wasn't enough.

    So, Friday I went to Best Buy and applied for a credit card (like I really need another one), got approved, and purchased a BFG GeForce 8500 GT 1GB. It nice, very nice. All my games run on full settings at 1280x1024 without any drop in framerate. I figure now if I'm behind, I'm only behind by a few months. I plan on either buying a Fragbox or building a rig, but in the meantime I'm set.

    Now, granted, I think some of the system requirements of these games is criminal considering all they do is affect graphics, and if the game itself sucks, what's the point? However, after playing on my friend's rig, I realized that being able to properly run the software does indeed enhance gameplay. Now I can actually say I suck because I suck, and not because my computer lags.

    So anyway, despite all this, I'm having a few technical issues that I can't seem to pinpoint. When I got the soundcard, I found that if I ran it while using my modem, the computer would restart itself. I switched the soundcard from the top PCI slot to the bottom one (the modem is in the middle), and that seemed to fix it for a while. Now, though, the problem has returned. I checked the hardware manager, and the only conflicting device is something listed only as the 'Serial', and I don't know what that means. Any ideas?

    Another question I had is this: one of the system requirements of my video card is a "300w PCI compliant power supply," meaning of course the one on my motherboard. However, my rig only has a 250w supply. The card works and runs, but is this going to be a problem in the meantime?

    One last question. This one is hard to describe. I got home, hooked my rig back up, got online, and opened AIM. After about five minutes the computer flashed blue for a few seconds, the screen quickly displayed some numbers, and the computer restarted. Once it did, I got back online and started AIM again. Same thing happened. However, when I don't run AIM, this doesn't happen. Tonight, though, I had my sound card going, and tried to connect to the internet, and the blue screen appeared again and it restarted. I don't know what the numbers were; they kind of resembled memory ranges. Other than under those two circumstances, this never happens. As a note, I was using AIM while at my friend's house while I was utilizing his cable internet, and this didn't occur. Do you know what would be causing this?

    Sorry if any of these problems are obvious; I'm pretty rusty on my tech knowledge these days. I appreciate any help you guys can give me.

    Other than that, it's great to be back. Thanks in advance.

    EDIT: I was loading a webpage, and patiently waiting on my 28k connection by playing a game of Solitare, and the dreaded blue screen-restart happened again. So, three circumstances now.

    1. Show previous comments  2 more
    2. Jim Rainer

      Jim Rainer

      28k? Haha, I didn't think dial-up existed slower than 56k anymore.

    3. AndrewB

      AndrewB

      Jim Rainer said:

      28k? Haha, I didn't think dial-up existed slower than 56k anymore.

      I don't think dialup really ever existed any faster than 45k or so.

    4. Bloodshedder
    5. Show next comments  3 more
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