GuildCom

Actually, my mom never had this talk with me. We never really had to discuss the whole, "If your friends jumped off a cliff, would you do it, too?" bit because I never was much of a follower in school. Peer pressure, for the most part, was just one more part of socialization I never understood. Had my first (and likely last) beer when I was 22 or 23, I think; I don’t even remember which.

So why the hell would I want to jump on the bandwagon and install the Windows 7 Beta?

Read more…

Forewarning:  This post is long and is largely a tale of woe and hardship, and therefore contains much more cursing and general vulgarity than normal.  You’ve been warned.

What a way to end 2008.  Christmas was great, I amassed a goodly amount of loot, drank good beer, and ate way too much good cooking.  Thanks to massive Steam sales, I bought Bioshock for $5 and (finally) Far Cry for about $7 (am I the only one thinking that’s odd?  FC is freakin’ old now, yet it cost me more!  Then again, it wasn’t 75% off either…).  I picked up Grand Theft Auto IV, and once I got it running (I’ll get to that in a minute) it seems pretty awesome in the limited time I’ve gotten to spend with it, even running it at only medium settings.  I also finally got Fallout 3 as well.  I got a nice 8GB Phillips MP3/WMA player for Christmas, and it sounds pretty darn good.  Good enough I went and bought $30 Sony headphones to do it justice (my old Koss KC-75s need some burden taken off them anyways; the right headphone has some buzzing at certain bass frequencies; it’ll likely get regulated to games-only duty).  I (finally) picked up the 2-disk version of The Dark Knight.  Other nice things in my pile of loot is new slippers (my old ones were in a sore state of disrepair), two sweet shirts, jeans that actually *FIT*, and a nice light jacket.  Oh, yeah, Marissa and I got a printer too.  And an assload of candy.  I like candy.  :mrgreen:

Sounds good, right?  So what made this week so long?  Well, it was what happened after Christmas (though the problem started beforehand; I had been working on it for several days beforehand, actually, it just gradually got worse).  Remember, I had just migrated all my day-to-day operations from Windows XP to Windows Vista just a few short weeks ago (I hadn’t even reinstalled everything yet).  A few days ago, I decided to go ahead and get Games for Windows Live Client 2.0 (as well as the in-game redistributable).  I had installed it once before, and it worked fine, but since I didn’t actually have any GFWL-supported games yet, I uninstalled it.  Don’t ask why.  Anyways, I decided to reinstall it in preparation of getting Fallout 3 and Grand Theft Auto IV, both GFWL-compatible games (the latter requiring it, actually).  So I went ahead and installed it, ran the program, and…uh-oh:  crash during the loading screen.  That isn’t good.  I closed it and re-ran the program:  same thing.  Not good.

“What the fuck?  This goddamn thing worked before!"  And indeed it had.  To make matters more confusing, the only major system changes I had done since the last time I installed it was install some .NET Framework 3.5 updates.  The error jargon only code-monkeys truly understand read, among other nonsense, APPCRASH and something to do with KERNEL32 (I still have the actual full error report laying around but I’m lazy, and I’m writing this post amidst of a crapload of IE7 lockups/crashes).  In any case, the prognosis was clear:  Not Good.

“What the fuck?  This goddamn thing worked before!"  And indeed it had, with me making no major changes to the system except for some .NET Framework updates.  So what was wrong?  Honestl,y I still don’t know, though I have an idea.  Either way, its irrelevant; the problem is fixed; I did it the Guildsman way:  after FUBARing things all to shit, I just blew it all to hell and rebuilt it.  Again.  For the second time in a month.  I’ll explain:

The first solution was, obviously, uninstalling them ess and re-installing it.  Of course, it didn’t work.  Secondly, I double-checked that my regional settings hadn’t been fucked with (it turns out GFWL Client doesn’t like you not using decimels and commas for your currency and number formatting…).  Mine were set correctly.  Of course they were:  I’m an English-speaking American with only one language installed on my copy of Windows (English!).  Of course the shite was set right.  But I looked anyways because Windows doesn’t have a True Texas Guildsman option on it *locking* it to what God intended it all to be and not allowing fool-ass Yankees from farting with it.  So that wasn’t the cause either.  Next, I ran System File Checker; it did find some errors, but claims it fixed them.  I then uninstalled .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 as well as 3.0, and ran a .NET Cleaner, then put it all back and reinstalled GFWL.  No dice.  This was starting to piss me off.  To make matters worse, since this was still before Christmas, I didn’t have any GFWL games to test to see if the in-game part worked and it was just the client that was fucking up…or if it was the whole damn thing.

I only had a day or two (depending on how Christmas gifts went) to find out, so I decided to leave it be unless I found another solution to try.  Finally, on Christmas morning, I ripped open a package shaped much like a PC game case and discovered it was Fallout 3.  Perfect; this would help me diagnose the extent of the problem.  And its a badass gameto boot.  Time to solve this damn thing. 

The next day, I installed Fallout 3 and reinstalled GFWL.  The client still crashed (of course), so I hopped into FO3 and chose the proper Live option from the main menu.  The fucking thing *worked*!  Not only did it work, I signed in just fine, and it even downloaded the patch for FO3 for me.  Nice of it; I didn’t know it did that.  And unlike Steam, getting the patch was optional.  That’s always nice.  So I signed off, exited the game, tried running GFWL client again, and witnessed the same damn crash screen I’d been seeing for days.  Damn.  But at least I know the problem was only with the stand-alone client and not the whole damn thing.  Finally, some good news.  The next evening, I went and bought GTA4 (and The Dark Knight) and installed it.  Or tried to.

First thing is first:  GTA4 is *big*.  Its the first game I’ve seen that takes two DVDs to install.  Total install size for the game alone is 14.9 GBs.  About as big as the full Cinematic Mod 9.5 with the HD addon for Half-Life 2.  Anyways, back to the story.  The first thing the GTA4 installer has you do is install RockstarGames Social Club (some other needlessprogramyoumusthave to run the game).  "Fine, whatever, continue damn you."  Then we get to the actual game install.  It didn’t take as long as I would have thought, to be honest; maybe 30 minutes or so.  Not bad for two DVDs.  Onwards it goes.  Next it has to do a Release Date Check to make sure I’m not pirating it days before the release (mind, you, this is a few weeks after the release now).  This is also a fancy way to get you to activate the game (which you must to to play; it doesn’t install the game’s executable until you do.  Pretty slick).  Well, I couldn’t connect to the damn server to activate and verify the release date.  Hell, my firewall was even off!.  So I did the offline activation (which still requires an Internet connection, but can be done from another machine).  I kinda like the idea of being able to activate my game if I’m ever Internet-less again; all I need is a Net-enabled machine elsewhere to get an unlock code.  Pretty nifty, really, despite the pain in the ass activating in principle is.  At least Rockstar didn’t require the computer you want ot play on to have Internet like EA’s Mass Effect and Crysis Warhead.  No install limits, either.  So, for a SecuROM game that makes me run two pieces of software to play, it isn’t as bad as some other recent titles.  ^_^

A note about that failing Release Date Check/Activation:  it worked perfectly fine later, and when I had my firewall on.  Either the server was down, or I caused the problem myself somehow when I turned off my firewall (I suspect the connection was still being blocked somehow, but I couldn’t tell it to allow it through).  Either way, my opinion on the whole ordeal wasn’t as negative after that second reinstall.

So I tried to start the game.  RockstarSocial Club encountered a crash.  The same damn error as GFWL.  "What the hell is this bullshit?”  I was beginning to see something was very, very fucked up.  And unlike FO3, I couldn’t even load GTA4 until I figured out that he hell was broken.

After even more trial-and-error troubleshooting, I decided to try the whole .NET Framework removal thing again; I was pretty sure the problem was tied to .NET somehow.  So I went through the process again, removing both the 3.0 and 3.5 SP1 Framework and reinstalling them.  When I went to reinstall GFWL (again), something new happened:  .NET Framework 3.0 wasn’t installed.  Well, according to Add/Remove Windows Features, yet it was:  all three boxes were checked.  Something smells wrong here.  So I run System File Checker again.  This time it says there’s lots of corrupted files…that it can’t repair.  Not good.  The situation was gradually getting worse.  Time to end this nonsense–hopefully. 

It was time to execute the Final Solution, one which I try to avoid like the plague, especially since I’d already done it once this month.  If this didn’t fix the GFWL/RGSC problem, nothing likely would, at least for now.  But at least my file system would be back to normal and .NET Framework would be working again.  So, it was time to reformat.  But how does one reformat and keep his data with no viable backup solution?  Luckily, I solved this last time, and in such a way, you only have to move data once rather than twice.  It was time to make a new partition on my hard drive.

I started off removing all games and non-essential apps (after backing up my save files, of course) to free up hard drive space.  The trick is to free up enough to equal the size of your Windows install, absolutely essential software (like the partition software and a good hard drive defragger), and your data.  For me, this was about 230 gigabytes.  Once I freed up the needed room, I went about using all of that free space I could to create my new partition.  I was using Easeus Partition Manager for this job; last time I had several minor problems (as in major problems that were easily fixed) with the bootloader that I think Acronis Disk Director was causing (its a hell of a nice program, though), so I decided to try something new this time.  And Easeus is free.  Nice.

I started off with telling it to create a new partition with the free space on the hard drive.  Simple enough.  Acronis would have had the task finished between 30 minutes and an hour at most.  Easeus took four.  FOUR FUCKING HOURS.  I guess that’s the price you pay for free.  But, hell it *did* work, no problems at all.  So now came the fun task of re-installing Windows Vista on the new partition so I can start copying over my data.  Fast forward a few hours; it takes a while to completely update Windows & cut-and-paste 200 GBs of crap.  Before I went to bed, I had one more thing to try:  does GFWL work now?  I installed .NET Framework 3.5 SP1, then installed GFWL.  It…worked!  But was it just a one-time thing like before?  Time to find out.  I rebooted, and did a few misc. installs of essential utilities like CCleaner and such, and threw in more reboots.  Launched GFWL again; it still worked!  Good.  Now, to see about RGSC…

I went about installing GTA4 again, and with it RGSC.  This time I activated with no issues (this is what I was referring to earlier; now you know why I reinstalled this beast of a game so soon).   And this time it worked too.  I can finally *see* the damn game!    And now its time for bed.

The next morning, it was time to get back to work (this was yesterday).  After ensuring nothing important was left on the old install, it was time to format it, remove its entry from the bootloader, *fix* the damn bootloader (it seems the error happens even when I *don’t* use Acronis.  Figures, but easily fixed), delete the partition, and tell Easeus to gobble up the free space into my sparkling new partition with my fresh install of Windows.  Hell, it even smells new.

Assuming Easues would take its sweet-ass time again, I left the computer to do its thing in peace (partitioning is the most nerve-racking part of the process.  If something screws up or the power goes out, kiss your data goodbye).  An hour or two later, I return to check the progress.  As I reach to turn the monitor on, the computer shuts off.  Seriously.  Easily one of the eeriest things I’ve ever experienced.  And two seconds when it turned back on with no video signal, I knew something was wrong; it was no normal reboot-when-done things.  And I knew five years of personal files were gone.

After staring at the running computer with no video signal, wrestling with the decision to turn it off myself and turn it back on (hey, it may not be screwed up yet but I could fuck it up myself, I think to myself).  I finally jab the Reset button and watch all the BIOS-loading babble scroll by, expecting to see an error or nothingness afterwards.

A green scrollbarappears.  Vista is still booting!  "What the holy hell is going on?"  But I’d never been happier to see that half-assed boot screen Vista has.  I was even happier when the login screen appears, and absolutely ecstatic when my desktop appeared.  Time to check the damage.  All my data seemed intact, and SFC reported no issues.  Equally important, GFWL and RGSC still worked.  Nice.  But the partition still hadn’t merged with the unallocated disk space.  It was as if nothing had happened for the past couple of hours, except me damn near having a heart attack.

Fuck Easeus.  Nevermore shall I use it after that stunt.  On the flip side, somehow it did manage to preserve my data despite whatever-the-hell happened.  [Edit (10/22/09):  I've since heard more and more good things about Easeus, and now thing what happened was a fluke.  I take back my venomous speech, which was written out of frustration, and I'll likely be trying their software again in the future sometime.]

I loaded up Acronis Disk Director (which isn’t free) and told it to do the job Easeus failed to do.  Thirty minutes later, I was back rocking with just one partition that had more than two hundred gigabytes of free space…and the need for me to do lots of reinstalling.  But at least everything was back to normal.

Since then, I’ve mainly been letting Steam download and install its wares.  After that comes the unenviable job to reinstalling lots of other applications and games.  Fuck, what a way to end the year.  On the plus side, I start the year with a fresh working install.  And tonight, I’ll be drinking cheap beer and rocking GTA4 or something.  I’m not stupid enough to get out with all the drunken idiots who can’t even drive when stone-sober; I can get just as drunk on my own couch. 

So, this is me signing off for the remainder of the year.  You all be safe tonight so you can actually visit here tomorrow…not that I’m planning to update tomorrow, mind you. 

Have a good one, everybody. 

Poor Bishop has been toiling away with Big Red and the toils it brought with it–though I’m still envious of it; I wouldn’t have those issues because:
A)  I don’t mind using the front ports and have no real use for surround sound headphones–I’ve yet to see any beat my stero ones using CMSS 3-D…and most games don’t even need that; they tend to sound ’surround’ natively in my experience (I know because the latest couple of Creative drivers befucked the mode on my card, and in games, I don’t seem to miss it)
B)  I keep all my disks with me. 

Anyways, while he’s been knee-deep in all that mess, my rig, the Stormrider (which has now taken the affectionate nickname of Old Blue) is just a few days away from its first birthday.  I honestly don’t remember the build-day, but it had to have been around Dec. 22rd of 2007.  Why?  Well, because I joined Steam the day after Christmas last year, and that entails I had at least Windows XP installed and running.  I do recall not doing any work on it Christmas Day (obviously), and remember I built it one morning before my afternoon shift at work.  Also given Marissa wasn’t around most of the time I was working on it (meaning she was at work for just a few hours) pretty much tells me it had to be a Saturday, which would be December 22, 2007.  

So my baby turns one in about 3 days.  Its pretty hard to believe; the year seems to have flown by in hindsight (as things always seem to).  Its starting to need a new video card and bigger hard drives, but its still a quite capable machine, even on Crysis.  It has since been overclocked from the factory-set 2.66 GHz up to 3.6 GHz and is rock-solid stable in my testing.  Within just the past couple of weeks, I’ve migrated everything over to using Windows Vista full-time without issue (other than a few oddities here and there and crappy Creative drivers).  Games run just as good (in some cases better) than they did in XP–at least the ones I’ve tried, which are the important ones; the only important one I haven’t tested yet is Serious Sam. 

Unlike my previous two attempts at using Vista, I’ve really taken to it this time.  I contribute this to three things:  none of the old issues seem to have cropped up, I put the damned UAC in Silent Mode, and I forced myself to use it day-today for everything…even gaming (once I confirmed it works fine).  Windows XP no longer even has a presence on my hard drive nor in my bootloader.  Once I got accustomed to the changes, I really, really like Windows Vista.  In nearly every way, I find it superior to XP (though there were a couple of things that I had to do in the command line that used to be able to be edited in a menu somewhere, but that’s not a big deal). 

And by this time next week, I highly expect to have either Fallout 3 or Grand Theft Auto 4on my PC (and by the end of the month, whichever one I didn’t get for Christmas…but based on box size, I’m 99% sure one or the other is under the tree, especially since those were the only two PC games I asked for. lol). 

I’ve been waiting for the PC release of GTA4 for months, and just hope my rig is up to snuff to run it (its easily the most CPU-intensive game I’ve seen yet…hell, the recommended specs say you need a damned quad-core!).  But even if my rig can’t cut it, when I do some upgrades next year, I’ll be able to.  No big deal; I played Knights of the Old Republic on a laptop that failed the minimum specs for years (I could run the game only with everything in the options turned to their lowest settings)…hell, I even (finally) bought KotOR II a few months before that laptop died and played it the same way (a testament to how good those two games are; I thoroughly enjoyed them both even when they looked like shit).  Still, hopefully I can at least run GTA4 on Medium (which would at least look as good as the console versions…which was pretty darn nice, really).

As for Fallout 3, I didn’t know much about it until around the time it was launched, and initially it only got my interest because it was developed by Bethesda (who put out The Elder Scrolls III:  Morrowind and The Elder Scrolls IV:  Oblivion) and is using the same engine.  That alone got my attention.  Then I got to play it some; I was hooked.  I can’t wait to add it to my collection and be able to dive into it wholeheartedly.  Even better, I’ll be getting in at just the right time, as the G.E.C.K. (FO3’s construction kit) has been out for a bit now, so the modding community is cranking out cool stuff like there’s no tomorrow. 

Also, Fakefactory’s Cinematic Mod 9.5 for Half-Life 2 is supposed to come out sometime within the next couple of weeks.  And on top of that, F.E.A.R. 2:  Project Origin comes out in early February.  I hope I’ll be able to pick that one up too. 

In the meantime, I’ve been shooting through Half-Life 2:  Episode 2 since I never got around to finishing it (and I wanted to finish the vanilla version of it since the newer Cinematic Mod versions add in some cut content, I believe).  If I finish that before Christmas, I might load up Grand Theft Auto:  Vice City to get back into the GTA ‘feel’ before diving into GTA4 (though enough has changed in the latter that this might not be needed…).  Or not; I might work a bit on Crysis or Portal; I still have a few achievements to get in the latter.

Well, I suppose that’s it for now.  Besides, Old Blue needs to be defragged, and its time to go kill headcrabs. 

There may have been a slight miscalculation.

Suffice it to say this thing is huge. I mean, ok, I knew from FedEx’s shipping information that it weighed in at just under 90 lbs., but I was pretty astonished when the box wouldn’t fit in the trunk. Or in the front seat. Even with the seat laid back, it was pretty clear that simply wasn’t going to be an option. The FedEx guy and I wound up opening the box right out there in the parking lot of United (long story, so don’t ask) and I put the little boxes in the back and put the computer in the passenger seat, where I held onto it on the drive home.

Operation Dumbo Drop finally concluded, but did take just a little longer than anticipated.

The box contained:

• The PC itself, enshrouded in protective plastic film and a rather thick layer of foam.
• Two 2.5′ x 5″ x 18″ boxes — one red and one black — whose contents were unknown at the time of delivery.
• One 2.5′ long cardboard tube, the contents of which are still unknown because I forgot to crack it open and take a look.
• One nylon binder, presumably containing the owner’s manual and associated waivers.

The black box contained the freebie keyboard and mouse, restoration disks, and other nameless miscellany that lies forgotten on the floor somewhere.

The red box contained several mysteries, actually. The first turned out to be a tool kit in its own carrying case; perhaps the PC doesn’t employ standard screws? The second, as it happens, is a set of (very nice looking) headphones that I don’t remember ordering. The third, I was astonished to discover, was a pen. It’s black and silver, with the XPS logo on the cap. It contains a run-of-the-mill writing instrument, an LED flashlight, and a laser pointer. Batteries (and spare batteries) included. No, I didn’t order that either. The final object contained in the red box was less of a mystery; it’s a knit cap with a skull on it. I think. I’m not too up on my knit caps.

Now, come 5:00 PM today, the real work begins as I take this monstrous product of corporate America, strip it to the bare bones, and make it mine. Oh, and I have to install WoW, too, which I hope I can do without the disks, because otherwise I’m pretty much hosed for games to play at the moment.

Lo and behold, the FedEx man said, “Let it be deliveréd today!” and so it was. I checked the website when I got up this morning and the site said that the package was on the vehicle for delivery, so I knew that, at least, it had made its way to Amarillo.

But, actually, it isn’t being delivered at all. Perhaps in precognitive deference to my concerns of yesterday, I received a phone call this morning which inquired as to whether I would be home to accept delivery or, alternatively, if I would prefer to come to the FedEx depot and simply pick up my package.

So I’ll be picking up the box at some point today — probably just after lunch, if I can figure out where the depot is. (East I-40? Yes, because that contains all the vital information I require.)

…whatever. It’s supposed to happen tomorrow, if FedEx has anything to say about it.

Here’s hoping they show up after 5:00.

…has shipped. According to FedEx, it should be here on the 16th. Dell is guessing sometime between the 17th and the 18th. Considering they had expected to ship it on the 16th of January, I’m going to take that with a grain of salt.