Hey gogga!

Just a shout out to GOG.com, who sell DRM-free "Good Old Games" at good prices.

I've been happy with the games I've bought from them. They sell DOS games (Like Duke Nukem 3D, Redneck Rampage), and Windows games, but I haven't really looked into other platforms. Whats really nice is that the DOS games are wrapped in DOSBox so they run under Windows. Yeah, I know you can do it yourself, but then you have to get the DOS game and the latest official patches and tweak DOSBox.

They also have Myst, Riven, Serious Sam, the earlier Fallout and Unreal games, along with a bunch of others, ready for download.

Patching the Patches

Yesterday I re-installed the Microsoft patch which gave me so many problems. No, I'm not crazy - I had already tried it on another machine, along with Microsoft's patch "935448" to their "security update" patch "928843" - according to Microsoft after applying their first patch (on top of a previous patch!) "...certain third-party applications may not start." This was due to two files from the two separate patches conflicting.

Up and Running

I'm up and running again on my main PC. It turned out not to be Partition Magic, as I got similar errors trying to resize the partition with BootItNG. So it must be the PCs configuration. I've had enough restores to last me for a while, so I won't be trying this again in a hurry.

Recovery Mode Again

Today I was hoping to finally blog about the end of my hunt for a cellphone. However, since I had backed up my primary PC to a working external hard drive (why "working"? - that's another story), I decided to try to resize the partitions again. This time I booted from the Partition Magic 8 CD, but it made no difference. After resizing the C partition, Partition Magic gave an error and Windows was unbootable. This time I restored from the original PC restore disks, and am now running "Restore my PC" from Norton Ghost, which will hopefully put it in the working state it was this morning.

These Partition Magic failures are really puzzling me. I have used the software successfully numerous times before. Since Symantec bought Powerquest - the developers of Partition Magic - in September 2003 they have not updated the software other than to rename it. So it could be their fault since I'm working on Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 which was released since then. But I have also had problems with running Partition Magic on my three year old Compaq Presario notebook, so it could be the Compaq.

Oh well, it is recovery mode again.

Still around

Yes, I'm still around, I don't have writer's block nor have I (gasp) abandoned this Blog.
I've just had some Critical crashing computer syndrome (my main PC this time) - more about that later...

Random shutdowns

That was what my eMachines Desktop is doing. It has being doing this since around September last year. The weird thing is that the power button would stay illuminated. It is not like a Windows shutdown, but an immediate power off. I would then just unplug the power cord, wait a few minutes and then plug it in and boot up the PC.

That was until a week or so ago when it just didn't come on after I plugged it again. Of course I thought the power supply had gone for good, and started hunting for a new power supply. The next day I tried it the PC again, and it started up fine. The only problem now is that it only seems to run for a few hours before it shuts down without warning. The strangest thing is that this always happens when I'm not using the computer.

Anyway, after much web research, this seems like a there may be a few possible solutions. Sometimes just blowing out dust from inside the computer case does the trick, or a new power supply solves the problem. Then there are other possibilities like problems with the motherboard, or the CPU fan - that's when troubleshooting is just too complicated (and expensive) for a budget PC.

Aliens versus PS3?

After seeing an article entitled "Gaming PCs Surpass New Consoles" on MyWay News I just had to comment.
The article says "The new video game consoles already look pretty wimpy compared with the latest gaming PCs", but then it turns out they are comparing Gaming PCs costing from $5000 to $9000 to gaming consoles costing a max of $600. The article admits that the high-end PCs have "an advanced 3-D graphics card from Nvidia Corp. that alone retails for $600 - as much as a high-end PlayStation 3", but still miss the point. Of course a $600 PlayStation 3 is not going to perform anywhere near as good as a $5000 Alienware Area-51 7500 mentioned in the article.

Six hundred dollars US for the Sony PlayStation 3 is expensive, but start charging five grand or more and there would be few(er) takers, although at that price Sony could probably include full PC functionality.

Oh well people will continue to compare apples and oranges I guess...