Early Morning

      Most people like to wake up to the smell of coffee, read a newspaper, check out the news online, perhaps stretch a little, maybe even have sex and that's a great way to start the day. But for me ..honestly speaking there's nothing better than a panic attack and a great feeling of dread, to get you out of bed.

      Besides waking up with a headache ( as usual) today I also woke up to find that my PC was not working. On turning it on it would simply stand by, with both fans at max power and do nothing.  My first thought was that there might be something wrong the the CPU ..in which case I was screwed. But after about 30 seconds the motherboard ( Asus P5KC) beeped. One long beep followed by 3 short ones. That was a decent sign for me, so I got out my handy "Beep codes and you" manual ( i'm kidding I got the mb's manual) and found out that one long beep followed by 3 shorter ones means there is no VGA input. So the video card was to blame( nVidia Geforce 8800 GTS 512). Now this may have also screwed me, because upon adding the second fan to my GPU aka ..opening it up I had lost my warranty. I checked the connections, the wires and everything because it's easy to dislodge the board out of it's proper place, but there was nothing wrong.  I then proceeded to taking it out, and putting it back in. Fortunately that worked and everything came back to normal...almost. Because after I booted Windows i quickly got a BSOD, but it seems it only was a one-time event. Now I'm off to have my coffee. Cheers

Assassin's Creed Issues

 Well let me tell you about this little thing. Yesterday, after quite a long long long long day ( of doing nothing) I decided to catch up on my gaming. Yes I can consider myself a gamer, I have a passion for games, but I haven't really played anything the last few months for different reasons. So I decided to replay Assassin's Creed, cause I never had the chance to test it on the new GPU.

By the way if you don't know I'm running Vista SP 1 and a GeForce 8800GTS 512. So I set everything except the multisampling to the highest rating possible and start playing. After about an hour, I decide to try the multisampling. So I set that on high and get back into the game. Guess what, the pc crashes, BSODs, and restarts. A little puzzled I restart the game, set the multisampling lvl back to default and continue playing. After another 2 minutes the same thing happens. The bsods giving different graphics driver files as being the cause of the crash. Now I'm even more confused.

A note: I personally built my PC from pieces, and I used an old frame which is somewhat too small to properly fit the GPU card. So that's why I always have one side out, and that's also partially the reason why my card is always very hot. And this led me to believe that maybe it was overheating. The normal temperature while the card is idle should be somewhere close to 50-55 degrees C. Mine idles at 73, and goes up to 82 on load, which actually isn't THAT bad. So it wasn't overheating.

As a final check I looked round the net for other people with the same issues. And sure enough I found a whole lot. No nobody has any fix, and the problem seems to come up randomly, even if the game was working perfect before.

The FIx: the fix for me was switching back from DX10 to DX9. I mean only use the DX9 exec. And I haven't had any problems with it since. Though it is strange..

See you guys