ArtisticallyChill

It’s been over a week since my rant. I’ve been busy with both work and working on my PC. I’ll try to get all my thoughts of the past week posted as soon as I can. But first, an update on my troublesome PC.

Last week Wednesday:
After downloading updated drivers for my onboard audio controller, I still came across the same problems as earlier. Guild Wars would crash after 5 minutes or force a system reboot. After doing a complete low level format that lasted two freakin’ days (Thursday going into late Friday), I started off with a clean install and patch. I then went searching the forums for any posts that seemed similar to my problem. Not surprisingly, there were tons of posts regarding Guild Wars and certain video cards. Other then the Intel video chipsets of laptops, other gamers had Radeon video cards. Each post where the user stated they had a Radeon in there system, ranted about similar problems of the game crashing or rebooting their systems.

The following Saturday:
I was able to get in touch with my cousin, Jason and relayed to him my findings. Sure enough, he had not one but two Nvidia-based cards that I could borrow for testing. I quickly picked them up and tested the first one, a GeForce 4000 with 64MB of memory. The card installed fine with Microsoft drivers. I launched Guild Wars and played for nearly 30 minutes before having to rush to work. Later on that night, I played for an hour. The card is a bit taxed by the game, even on minimal settings but it worked for that whole hour without any problems.

Sunday night: I played again for another hour and a half with sound enabled and everything went smoothly. Upon reaching the second hour, I finished the quest with the rest of my guild and the game crashed. I wasn’t too freaked cause I actually got it to work and thought it was just that the 4000 was really chugging badly.

Now: I’ll be checking online these next few days for bargains on a new Nvidia based graphics card. I can’t run anything next gen like an 8X AGP cause I’d have to give my system a full overhaul. Since I can’t afford that, I’ll just get the cheapest 4x AGP I can find. Probably a 5500. I’d like to get the BFG 5950 with 256MB of memory but I can’t find one that retails below below $200 yet.

I’ll try to order one this week so that I can get it by the end of the week. I feel bad for hoarding Jason’s spare parts when I know he can put them to good use, especially when I’m there helping him out. But special thanks to him for saving me some money, time, and more heartache. I owe you a Rocket and a Sword. LOL

~LoneWolf

As I said briefly earlier, my PC is sick. After extensive reformatting and playing with the Device Manager, it appears that my AC’97 onboard AMD-786 controller on my MSI K7 Master has been the culprit of certain program (Call of Duty, especially) crashes and reboots. I’ve searched for an updated driver, but I keep getting led to the MSI support site which only has the one driver I’ve been using. I thought I could install a PCI sound card that I borrowed from Jason, but that would be too easy. Apparently, I don’t have any PCI slots available since my ethernet, usb, and RAID controller cards take up my only three 32bit/33MHz PCI slots. The other two slots are the extended 64bit/66MHz kind. So I either have to remove one of the cards from the 32bit slot and/or find another controller card for one of the 64bit slots, of which are mostly server-esque and expensive. However I did find a cheap 64bit single port ethernet card. Am I frustrated? Yes, of course I am. I suppose the only other thing to do would be to try out this ultimate PC mod I found online. LOL

~LoneWolf