Computers « Corin Chellberg

Okay, so the reason I haven’t posted anything new recently is that my computer has basically screwed me over. I woke up on Saturday morning and decided to plug in one of my spare hard drives to my computer. This didn’t go so well. I plugged in the 40gb drive and turned the PC on. Bios detected nothing, and also my DVD rom had vanished. I unplugged the HDD, and I eventually figured out that the DVD drive’s IDE cable had come out…on Sunday evening. Lol… Sunday morning, I turned on my computer, logged in at the login screen (of Windows, unfortunately), and BOOM. Windows logs me out as soon as I caught a glimpse of my desktop. I tried logging in to the guest account too, but the same thing happened. I researched the problem on a different computer, and came to the conclusion that one of my antispyware programs had removed a vital windows file because some piece of adware or spyware renamed it. This caused the login/logout loop. The solution was to copy over a new copy of the file from the Windows recovery console. Only problem was, I hadn’t figured out my IDE cable issue on the DVD drive yet, so I thought I was locked out entirely. I spent like four hours trying to get my computer’s BIOS to let me boot from my usb drive and stick a new copy of the file into the system32 folder, but it was to no avail. Eventually I rechecked all the cables in the computer and discovered the unplugged IDE cable, and fixed it. I tried the solution that was posted in multiple forums, to recopy the .exe into the system32 folder. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. At this point, I decided to repair my Windows installation in a desperate attempt to get into my computer. One problem. It didn’t work. I repaired the Windows installation, and then when it went to restart the computer to complete setup, my display shut off as soon as I saw the Windows setup screen. My monitor went to sleep, its little blue light flashing on and off, mocking me. My thoughts now turned to file preservation/recovery. I tried Hiren’s BootCD, which by the way is an amazing tool for PC repair, but so far I haven’t been able to access the harddrive, as the file managers seem only to be able to read my floppy drive, the cd-rom, and the 50mb drive it mounts in the memory to operate. Pretty unhelpful. I tried resizing my main Windows partition and creating a new one, and then installing a fresh copy of Windows there, but I either had the same problem or it booted the wrong partition. Who knows. This brings you up to the present problem, what data I should sacrifice if it is indeed unrecoverable. There is a slight chance that if I didn’t format my main partition but overwrote the copy of Windows, I could use a file recovery tool to undelete my old My Documents folder, but it’d be quite risky. Anyway. That’s my epic saga/chronicle of computer mistakes. Thanks for reading.

I have little or not time to write this, but I’m gonna do it anyway, because I’m just that dedicated. I got to spend one glorious hour playing Quake Wars before being whisked off to a college fair thing, and it was one of the best hours of my life. Quake Wars is everything I could’ve hoped for and more. Put simply, “BF2 killer” – IGN. The hitboxes are impeccable, the game runs very smoothly on my mediocre computer, even at full resolution (1440×900) and Normal graphics quality. The gameplay is very similar to that of the game’s inspiration, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, a free multiplayer sequel to id’s Return to Castle Wolfenstein. The classes’ roles are all the same, but modernized, and the game as a whole is familiar but not redundant. The medic, for example, has defib paddles instead of a “revive needle”, but the functions are the same. The mouse/aim reaction time (for lack of a better phrase) was great, especially when compared to games like BF2, in which there could be a .5-1.5 second delay between your mouse and the crosshair. The vehicles were fairly easy to control, but difficult enough that practice and skill would give you a significant advantage on the battlefield. The included map, Valley, has its shortcomings, but if it’s par for the ET:QW course, I’m very happy with the game.

That’s all I have time for right now, got an English paper to write before I go to bed, so until tomorrow, goodnight.

P.S. – I’ve got the name SupremeBeing reserved for the game’s official release, so if you decide to use it in the demo, don’t get too attached.