Computer woes
Feb. 8th, 2016 11:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
janestarzOn Saturday I downloaded an "on the house" game from Origin. They do this every once in a while - re-releasing a game for free. It's available for a limited time only and it allows you to try out various other games and types of games for free. This got me Ultima 8 (never played) and Jade Empire (following a story is not my thing!) and I found some things about what type of games I liked. This time, they offered a Need for Speed.
Downloading it took a while but as soon as the game started I was dropped right in the middle of the streets. I had great fun racing on the streets in a Porsche, dodging police pursuit and going over 130 mph -- something I never get to do in my own car. It was an adrenaline rush from the get-go, only mildly dampened by my puzzlement of figuring out the controls of the game.
But it was soon over, suddenly my screen went black, and although I could hear the game hadn't crashed I couldn't see anything. I felt the sides of my pc and they were pretty hot, so I turned the pc off and let it cool down for a while. I cursed myself for not checking -- I've had overheating issues with World of Tanks too, until I dialed down the detail settings. I could have known such a graphically intense game would heat up my GPU.
After an hour we fired up the PC and it wasn't looking good. There were turquoise stripes over my entire screen and although I could log in, I had trouble reading text. Windows had already determined the display adapter had been shut off because "it was reporting problems" and some asking around with my PC nerd friends and stepfather confirmed that my graphics card was probably broken.
On a Saturday night.
Yesterday I spent most of the day either quilting or knitting, waiting for Monday Morning 10am, when the Paradigit would open and we could bring the pc in. This morning it was finally time. We packed up the computer case (still screwed open), as well as my mouse and keyboard, as the middle mouse button had broken a week ago.
Before we'd even finished our coffee, it was all fixed. The nice man at the counter checked to see if all the components of the mouse-keyboard combination were there, grabbed a new box, unpacked it, and handed it to me as a replacement. Then, at our description of the problem, he confirmed that it was probably the graphics card. He pulled up possible replacements on the screen, I chose the cheapest. Then he got it from the back, pulled it from the box, connected it to the motherboard and we were done with absolutely no hassle at all. (Well, I still had to pay, of course). But this was about as painless as a computer malfunction can get.
So I'm back, with a spiffy new keyboard and mouse, and a spiffy new graphics card, and now I get to do a stress-test on the graphics card by playing all my favourite games!
Downloading it took a while but as soon as the game started I was dropped right in the middle of the streets. I had great fun racing on the streets in a Porsche, dodging police pursuit and going over 130 mph -- something I never get to do in my own car. It was an adrenaline rush from the get-go, only mildly dampened by my puzzlement of figuring out the controls of the game.
But it was soon over, suddenly my screen went black, and although I could hear the game hadn't crashed I couldn't see anything. I felt the sides of my pc and they were pretty hot, so I turned the pc off and let it cool down for a while. I cursed myself for not checking -- I've had overheating issues with World of Tanks too, until I dialed down the detail settings. I could have known such a graphically intense game would heat up my GPU.
After an hour we fired up the PC and it wasn't looking good. There were turquoise stripes over my entire screen and although I could log in, I had trouble reading text. Windows had already determined the display adapter had been shut off because "it was reporting problems" and some asking around with my PC nerd friends and stepfather confirmed that my graphics card was probably broken.
On a Saturday night.
Yesterday I spent most of the day either quilting or knitting, waiting for Monday Morning 10am, when the Paradigit would open and we could bring the pc in. This morning it was finally time. We packed up the computer case (still screwed open), as well as my mouse and keyboard, as the middle mouse button had broken a week ago.
Before we'd even finished our coffee, it was all fixed. The nice man at the counter checked to see if all the components of the mouse-keyboard combination were there, grabbed a new box, unpacked it, and handed it to me as a replacement. Then, at our description of the problem, he confirmed that it was probably the graphics card. He pulled up possible replacements on the screen, I chose the cheapest. Then he got it from the back, pulled it from the box, connected it to the motherboard and we were done with absolutely no hassle at all. (Well, I still had to pay, of course). But this was about as painless as a computer malfunction can get.
So I'm back, with a spiffy new keyboard and mouse, and a spiffy new graphics card, and now I get to do a stress-test on the graphics card by playing all my favourite games!
