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Gee!Alright so some odd things have been happening.
First my car stereo was stolen right outside my new place. They didn't break the window but they did destroy part of the frame around the window presumably to get a wire hanger in there to flip the lock. The window mechanism was borked. Luckily they neglected to look under my seat and gaffle my CD wallet. My insurance is going to cover all of it except for $100 but it just means I don't have a car until they complete it which could take four or more days.
Good thing I don't have a job to go to.
The thing that sucks is that this is the second time my stereo has been stolen within the last six months. I just had to laugh.
"Suffering" through another fit of addiction I decided to purchase a 512 MB DIMM for my PC to bring the grand total up to 1 Gig and vastly improve performance. My PC is starting to creep up on the waning side of the cutting edge curve; I'm becoming aware of it's increased difficulty keeping up with the latest games. When Doom 3 or Half-Life 2 comes out I may be in serious trouble.
In any case PlanetSide is a great game but it has been crashing to the desktop constantly. It's extremely frustrating to be in the middle of a firefight and just blip out without warning. By the time I get the game loaded again the battle's over. It's certainly amusing to appear in the middle of an enemy held base only to be gunned down by a score of gleeful troops in a matter of seconds but the charm only carries it so far.
Updating all of my drivers did nothing. I even went as far as re-installing Windows out of frustration when I realized that even other games were quitting to desktop. Then I noticed other applications were doing the same thing. The major thing that has changed since the crashes began was the installation of the new DIMM and after removing it everything worked smoothly again. So I found the problem, it must be bad memory. Back to Fry's to swap it out for new one.
Braving Fry's returns/exchanges line can render the most intrepid geek to a quivering mass choking in the combined stench of all the unwashed pits in North Hollywood. Luckily it was not crowded and I had made it before the end of the 15-day return/exchange limit so it was less painful then usual.
Back to the hutch with spanking-new memory in hand I found that it did not fix the problem. Not one whit. Dagnabit.
Today I'm going to flash the Motherboard's BIOS to show it who's boss. I imagine that the BIOS might have a bug in it when dealing with large quantities of main memory. Some sort of overlap between high end memory address space and other hardware addressing space would certainly cause the type of problems I'm seeing. If this doesn't fix the problem I'm not sure what I'm going to do.
In other news there is NO WAY to create a boot disk using Windows 2000. How ridiculous is that. On the brighter side, this experience has reaffirmed my undying love for my powerbook and all things Unix and Mac-orientated. I love the 'lil guy.