We had our official Launch Party for Warhammer Online a few weeks ago. I've been pretty busy though so I haven't had too much of an opportunity to post about it.

Mythic offered shuttle buses down to this nightclub in DC called Sequoia. Fairly nice place. Probably expensive. They had a LOT of nightclub employees walking around with fancy snack foods. It was also an open bar. I considered getting a flaming Dr Pepper, since it supposedly tastes like Dr. Pepper, but I stuck with Diet Coke the whole evening. I socialized some, but dancing, drinking and socializing ain't really my scene, so I left on the first shuttle bus back to Mythic. Overall a nice party but I'd rather have a piece of whatever it cost them to host it.

Most of the game industry people I've met seem to be gamers that also happen to be drinkers. Or maybe they were drinker's before being gamers. Typically gaming geeks aren't known to be much for such activities, but from my perspective such stereotyping is a fairly small percentage of the gaming populace. For myself, I never understood why consuming something which alters your ability to think and dulls your senses makes you enjoy the activity more.

But anyway, enough of me rambling (See Blog Title). Here's some quick pic's from the event:

Last Saturday, Oct 18, 2008, we went on another Blue Ridge Mountain drive. Last Year, we drove the Skyline Drive starting from the Front Royal (North) Entrance Station down to the Swift Run Gap Entrance Station. This time, we started where we left off and drove down Skyline Drive almost to the end. But instead of exiting Rockfish Gap (South Entrance) we drove back North and exited Swift Gap.
Here's all of the nearly 40 pictures we took.

My opinion of Sarah Palin can be summed up by John Cleese.

After some research, it turns out we didn't need an upgrade. We needed new computers... upgrading just the CPU and a graphics card wouldn't have done the trick. We needed

• New CPU
• New motherboard to support the new CPU.
• New Ram for the new motherboard.
• New graphcis card
• New P/S to support the power requirements of all this new stuff.
• New case to support the cooling requirements of all this new stuff.

With a reccomendation from a co-worker, we went to MicroCenter on Saturday. Here's what we both ended up with:

• MB:    Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS3R 775
• CPU:  Intel® Boxed Core 2 Duo Processor E8400 (Yes I went with Intel for a change)
• RAM: XMS2 2GB PC-8500 DDR2 Memory Kit (Two 1GB DDR2-1066 Memory Modules 
• VGA: e-GeForce GTX 260 Superclocked Edition 896MB GDDR3 PCIe 2.0
• HDD: Caviar GP 500GB IntelliPower Serial ATA-300 Hard Drive
• P/S: OZC StealthXstream 600 Watt ATX 12V Power Supply (I Think)

When we got home I started building and discovered that the P/S had a fan on the top, but our current cases didn't have a top vent, so I had to go back to the store (~25 min drive 1 way) and buy new cases, which I was thinking about buying anyway. Kinda weird for the P/S to be mounted on the bottom of the case, but whaetever.. better airflow I suppose.

• CASE: Antec Three Hundred ATX Case

For each system I kept our old optical drive and internal hard drive on a IDE channel (Which is one of the reasons I bought this MB, for its 1 IDE connection.. most MBs of this caliber only offered SATA). 

Apparently, I was unable to transfer the Windows XP serial# from Violet's old machine to the new one. It was OEM for her Dell, so I was screwed. Windows XP installed fine on my PC and I was up and running the same night. I went back to Micro Center and bought the OEM Window Vista 64bit version.

After taking forever to load the Vista 64 installer, it told me I needed a driver. OMGWTFBBQ! I struggled Sunday and Monday to install Vista 64, but at the end of it all, I couldn't reasonably do it. I tried using the motherboard drivers, copying the entire Vista install disc to a 8gb flash drive (which I had picked up at Micro Center for a mere $20.00), and using 3 different optical drives.

Since I was having this much trouble just installing the OS, imagine trying to install games and apps! So I borrowed a SATA optical drive from work and went back to Micro Center (again) and exchanged Vista 64 for Vista 32. I went home and everything installed great. Since Violet's optical drive was so old, and to save a IDE slot, I ended up buying a new SATA optical drive at The Computer Place, VA, which is right across from work. They suck. I can't comment on their customer service because they didn't have any. Most of their prices are much higher than Micro Center too. I eventually settled on a good enough optical drive and left. It installed in Violet's PC no problem and seems to work fine.

The only other issue I ran into was restoring Firefox's bookmarks. What a PAIN! I did it on Wed, 5 days after my initial installation start date. Violet was without PC for 3 days, and sporadic access for 2 more. Pretty full of suck. Thank goodness my recent bonus from work helped pay for all this :)

At some point I'll be able to play something on it.