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Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn ("In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming."). --HP Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

The stars hath turned in the heavens once more: Mighty Cthulhu stirs. His dreams reacheth forth, communing with those with ears to hear. Iä! Shub-Niggurath! His thoughts trample down along the pathways of thy mind; thou knowest His footprints, each of which is a wound...

Tuesday, November 16, 2004



Why Cthulhu could never be Preznit
(Or, "96hrs to Flip-Flop")

When Great Cthulhu isn't plotting and scheming the destruction of Man in order to get back His sandbox, He spends time being being what you ape-spawn would call a "computer expert". And when the insane prophet John isn't penning new editions of the Necronomicon, he too is a computer expert, only more so (Gibbering and drooling isn't nearly as time intensive as being the embodiment of interstellar evil.). So when Cthulhu's precious gaming machine started blue-screening, we took it as more of a minor nuisance than a real problem.

A BSOD on 98SE? Haven't seen one of those in four years. It only happens now when I play a game. Other than that everything is fine. Better muck around in the registry. Reboot. Everything looks good, so let's fire up a game...BSOD. Oh well, format the HD and reinstall the OS. Nope, that didn't work. Hmmm...low-level format this time, then reinstall. Nope, damned thing still BSOD's whenever I run up a game.

Okay, low-level format, then install XP. Still crashes when I run a game, but no more BSOD's. Getting better, but not good enough. It's not OS-specific, though.

Must be hardware. Power fluxes? Feedback? Swap out the power-supply. No, that's not it. Disconnect one CD drive, then the other, then the floppy drive. Reboot and test after isolating each drive. Nope.

Gulp. Is it the CMOS? Flash the ROM and update the BIOS. Damnit, that didn't work either.

Man, this is really FUBAR.

Could be the video card, although it's hard to see how Great Cthulhu's precious GeForce4 could be guilty of any wrong-doing. Disable to go straight to onboard video. Nope, that didn't work. Replace with old Voodoo3...damn.

Hokay, swap out the entire mobo, RAM, and CPU with identical ones. Test...BOHICA.

Did I mention that we're experts in this sort of thing? So, of course, it was only four days later that Mighty Cthulhu finally thought to JFGI. Surprise surprise, there are dozens of experts just like us (only not as tentacled) with the exact same problem: This specific motherboard works great most of the time, but fails when running games (games are very graphic-intensive). No fix for the prob, either (the manufacturer says it works fine, go figure).

So our expert solution? Trash it and get a whole new motherboard from a different manufacturer.

And that is why Great Cthulhu can never be your Preznit: He flip-flops on the issues (even if it did take Him four freaking days to do it).

Posted by: Great Cthulhu / <$BlogItemDateTime $>
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