Saw This Comeing

Well speaking of the MMO contest again one of the things I won was a Beta spot for the the auto assault MMO. It's a dystopian future game where people in gun wielding cars rule the earth. You would think it would be fun but in actuality it sucked horribly. The controls where crap. The graphics where unimpressive. It was difficult to figure out what exactly you where supposed to do. when you walked around your guy acted like they where still driving. I could go on and on but in the end i played it 5 or 6 times and then just stopped. Now it was in beta so they where still trying to fix up the bugs and it had a good premise but the entire way it was implemented was bad, there is only so much you can change in Beta.

This does not surprise me one bit.

yaaa I won!

And another internet contest down the drain. I usually never win anything but i have been lucky with internet contests. 2 years ago i won the MMO Radio contest that involved enough games to set me for, well i 1 month each if I don't want to pay a subscription, never installed Lineage and of the betas slots I won I never played Tabula rossa and auto assault sucked. still guild wars with the cool mic. headset was cool and I quite enjoyed city of heroes.

This month EVGA (makers of my video card) had a contest, a web scavenger hunt. After finding 10 hidden stars and answering 20 question (obvious marketing ploy) I was entered. Today I check and I won a pair of these babies.

Kind of ridiculous price for a pair of ear phones but hey ill not pass up a free think. Ah too bad i didn't win one of those awesome computer systems or even a new DX 10 video card. Mabe next year.

Computer problem found

I have been trying one thing after another in my attempts to track down the source of my computer problems. This has not been easy as i have not had a lot of free time.

1. I ran the maxtor/segate hard drive diagnostic software. It ran fine to 95% then encounter 5 errors and crashed at around 98%
2. Tried booting the latest version of knoppix. It would not boot into graphics mode even though an older version did. Text mode was fine. Very odd
3. put in a hard i borrowed from the lab (seagate 160gb sata drive) installed windows, everything works fine. let the comp idle, no problems.

Well it certainly points to HD problems. But it could also be the data on the HD, corrupted windows or a virus. Ever since i first put the comp together it had an odd quirk. I could not do a soft boot. the only way the computer would start is from a complete shutdown. It would always get past the bios tests and hang on the boot up. never figured out what piece of hardware was causing this but as my comp runs so smooth with the seagate in it I am suspecting It may have been the HD. Haven't tested the soft boot yet though.

So no do I do an RMA and have my warranty get me a new one or do i change brands buy something different. HD's are so cheep, getting something newer may just be the better choice. It's a moot point if my HD is not under warranty anymore.