Monthly Archives: March 2006

The Burning Prince and the Two Headed Beast – a tale of two raids

Posted on by

These posts are archives of forum / blog entries I made on my EverQuest guild website. The website won’t be around forever, and I wanted the posts all in one place so I didn’t lose them, this blog seemed like as good a place as any.

TNF pulled off another first today, killing Zun`Muram Votal in Ferubi on their first attempt. This was only moments after taking out The Seventh Hammer, allowing Zabatiz to progress in his Epic. The whole run through Ferubi was much quicker than anticipated, so we dropped in on Velitorkin to ruin his day briefly, before heading to the Tower of Solusek Ro for our second visit to the Burning Prince. Solusek fell (although in a slightly scrappy manner) and another bunch of folk got Fire and full EP flags.

Finally, despite the late hour, a small contingent of TNF Raiders headed into the Plane of Fire, to play with it’s denizens, and killed Pyronis, Magmaton and Blazzax, before sleep finally took them. Grats to Loxado for officially winning our first ever TNF Elemental Loot.

TNF – Full EP Flagging for some members

Posted on by

These posts are archives of forum / blog entries I made on my EverQuest guild website. The website won’t be around forever, and I wanted the posts all in one place so I didn’t lose them, this blog seemed like as good a place as any.

I’m going to let one picture speak for this entire article.


Congratulations to those who are now fully EP flagged, thanks to everyone who continues to raid with us each week. Your patience, dedication and good humour are priceless. See you next Saturday.

tired!

Posted on by

man i’m tired. standing in for my team leader this week, and on-call, it’s just all very tiring.

so i’m very tired.

GeForce 6600’s

Posted on by

The GeForce 6600’s arrived last night. Took about 3 minutes to install them – very pleased with the case on the new machines, two slide locks to move and the cards were in.

Much much quicker than the 6200’s as you’d expect. Although I did get two crashes last night in EQ, one bluescreen and one just weirdness where the monitor went off which is a bit worrying. I’ve re-installed drivers and we’ll see if that makes a difference. I’ll be dissapointed if they cause problems in EQ.

A long time in computing

Posted on by


I’ve been messing with computers for a long time now, and trust me, I don’t usually get sentimental about stuff. However, sometime in the mid 90’s, I think about 94 or 95 I bought a computer case, from some guy called Simes who at the time ran a Bulletin Board called Ind3x that I used a lot. The case was something like £90. At the time, it was a damn good deal, and a 300watt power supply was unheard of in those days, but I was thinking big. It was a full tower case, with a boat load of internal bays and a good number of slots for bays for cd roms, tape drives, floppies, etc. People I knew told me I was daft, £90 for a case was just silly, even in ’95.

Over the 11 years that I’ve had the case, I’ve upgraded the contents repeatedly, there’s nothing inside it that used to be inside it, except for that power supply. I’ve always been a believer in leaving PC’s powered on, and that case has been powered on for around 99% of the time I owned in. From Stockton, to our own house in Stockton, to the flat in Nottingham, the terraced house in Nottingham and finally our own home in Nottingham. I carried it around Stockton when were doing network gaming, I carried it around Nottingham when we did the same. It weighed a rediculous amount even when empty, never mind when fully populated with cards, hard disks, tape drives, etc.

11 years of faithful service. It was my ‘second’ machine for about 3 years, fitting snugly under the desk (only just), and letting me browse the web while playing EQ, but finally, we bought new PC’s, and there’s just no room for it any more. After 11 years, the power supply fan had only just started to make disturbing noises (a gentle chuntering). I can’t say it enough, 11 years of non-stop running from a single power supply and a single fan. It did me proud. I felt it deserved a blog entry 🙂

Kudos!

Posted on by

Kudos to Packard Bell. I thought I’d check out their site to see how they advertised the machine we bought (we didn’t buy it from them). They get it right.

http://www.packardbell.co.uk/products/live/at-home/desktops/imedia/-imedia-1509/productsheet-pb34232101-46.html

“Graphics
Chipset nVidia 6200 LE
Integrated on motherboard or on AGP Slot PCI
Dedicated video memory 64MB dedicated upto 256MB shared”

Which just makes me even more angry at the people we did buy it from.

Loan & Moan

Posted on by

So I wrote to customer services, but they didn’t really get it, and told me to talk to the store, and I talked to the store and they don’t really get it. None of them understand that the card they’re advertising never had 256mb of memory, it’s not that we got a card different to the one they’re advertising, it’s that the one they’re advertising doesn’t have what they think it does.

The GeForce 6200 TurboCache PCI-Express cards do not have the memory on-board used in the card ‘name’. They just don’t. So I ordered two replacement cards while I try and educate the retailer. Of course, since it’s such a small market, I ordered GeForce cards even though I think this whole problem is GeForce’s at the root.

But on better news.

Only THREE more loan payments before it’s gone.

That’s going to have been 84 loan payments in total, and it’s nearly over. Finally. It’ll be roughly equivalent to getting a 8-10% pay increase after tax.

I’m pleased we managed to avoid adding the loan onto the mortgage when they offered us the option, I’m glad we’ve managed to hold on and not extend the loan any more, and that we’ve finally gotten to a stage where we can clear that debt.

Credit card balance is the next target … and once that’s gone, the overdraught. Getting there slowly.

love is …

Posted on by

… never having to give out real memory figures.

So the two new PC’s, they were a good deal, we love them, EQ is much quicker, we’re happy.

But I’m not happy about the advertising “256MB GeForce Graphics card” it said. When it really meant “GeForce 6200SE TurboCache 256MB” which translates to “GeForce 6200SE TurbCache with 64MB onboard and using another 192MB of your precious system memory over the PCIExpress slot”.

I might talk to the vendor tomorrow about their advertising, I know that they get theirs from the manufacturer, but it was their advertising which sold me the machine, and it didn’t list the TurboCache feature or explain it anywhere, just said 1GB of main memory and a 256MB Graphics Card.

Bonus!

Posted on by

So it’s bonus time at work, computer prices (without monitors) are mad and low – which means we’re sporting a couple of new ones. Been about 2 1/2 years since we had new machines and the speed of the old ones was starting to show. New P4 3GHz machines with 1GB memory and decent graphics. Not state of the art, not super quick, and not more than £430 each.