Splurge!

Well, after leaving a comment on wibblypig’s journal about always thinging and thinging before buying things.. I managed not to yesterday.

After finishing buying a duvet, cover, sheets and pillow covers at Debenhams and thinking about what I’d written, I got the urge to not be so responsible, so I decided to upgrade my games PC.

Basically, I popped over to Sinoco and bought a new top of the range motherboard (Gigabyte GA-7VAXP Ultra, USB 2.0, Serial ATA, RAID etc. etc.), 512MB faster memory (2 DIMMS as the single 512MB DIMMs were out of stock), 80GB Western Digital hard disk (the 120GB one was out of stock) and Gainward NVidia GeForce 4 Ti4200 graphics card. Then I HAD to go and buy Unreal II from PC World to play on it, didn’t I?

Well, I’ve been having “fun” getting the machine working. I’ve installed Windows 98 twice.. and then found what the problem I was having was when I downloaded and ran memtest86.. One of the DIMMs had a one bit flaw in one word 164.1MB from the beginning. No doubt there are lots of 1 bit errors in all the software installed on the machine now and so it’ll need another reinstall. I’ve removed the didgy DIMM now, so I’m running with 256MB.

I did get to play Unreal II for a while.. but the program kept crashing half hanging the machine. I’m not sure if it’s Unreal II’s fault or corrupted Windows or just an unstable machine.

I’ll take the DIMM back to Sinoco next week.

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