The Headcrab Speaks! — New Video Card Part III

Ouch!

I got a Micro Center gift certificate in the mail when I got home last night, and that put a shiny ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB right into my price range. Hooray for my favorite little sister!* I popped over to Micro Center right away and exchanged the cards. (And off to Fry’s for a bigger power supply!)

It’s now almost 18 hours later, and I finally seem to have the system stable enough to re-install my OS. Oh, I hadn’t planned to re-install the OS, but the Radeon (how shall I say this?) brought to light some of the shortcomings of my hardware configuration that (how shall I say this?) made the system a little bit unstable. After a few (dozen) BSODs, caused by these problems as I tried to hunt them down, the system was no longer even remotely stable. I’m lucky to have gotten my HL2 savegames onto my file server at all — and I’m still not 100% sure they’re not corrupted.

Oh, and about re-installing Windows 2000: When you are getting BSODs during the install process, (how shall I say this?) buckle up, because it may get a bit rough.

However, there are a few reasons why this series of events irritates me, rather than making me livid.

• My gaming system has needed a re-install for months.
• Canthros and Pedant were hanging around online to soothe my rage.
• I have a professional IT staffer living here full-time. (Me, of course.)
• I’m still looking forward to sweet, sweet pixels.

Oh, and one more advantage: now K and I won’t have to buy a new video card for her computer. She can play The Sims 2 on my old GeForce 4!

*Of course, since I only have one sister, she gets this title by default. But it’s very nice that she puts in the effort despite her hereditary privelege.