Demon Hunting

Digital Resurrection

Demon Hunting
Not the Culprit, but a close cousin

Yesterday was the day of me bringing back machines from the dead.  During the week my secondary machine gave up the ghost, the one that I use to remote in from work on a regular basis and the one that I use to manage my media server.  I came home from work on Tuesday and and my second machine was screaming, literally.  Emitting an insanely loud noise, but I really did not have time to investigate it so I put that off until the weekend.  My immediate thought was the processor fan, and that the system had overheated.  Luckily I happened to have a spare one of these because I thought this processor fan had gone out before.  Turns out that when I popped it open on my table, it was not the processor fan at all but the video card.  The Asus 550 ti finally gave up the ghost and thankfully I have a whole slew of video cards to attempt.  So I threw in my lowest power consumption, lowest heat card…  which was a HD 7500 series card that came with an older machine that I replaced.  Sure enough machine booted up just fine and the box is working once again.

For my second act of machine resurrection I decided to go a bit further back.  In October 2014 my y500 laptop with SLI 650 gtx cards died.  Well died is the wrong term, because it simply just stopped booting.  It would hang on the Lenovo bios screen and refused to go any further.  After spending a few weeks without ANY help from Lenovo or any other source…  I ended up purchasing a really good deal of a laptop in a Lenovo y580 from Craigslist and moved on with my life.  Problem being…  this has been a bit of an obsession in my life.  Every few months I go on a binge of searching for other people who have had the same problem.  Numerous people had reported that it was the SSD, and when I cracked mine open I seemed to only have the one hard drive.  I even went so far as replacing the hard drive with another one that I had laying around and nothing.  Turns out there is a different kind of SSD than I even realized existed…  a caching SSD which looks a lot like a funky RAM chip.  While I was fiddling with machines yesterday I cracked open my laptop and saw the little SDD chip… removed it… and then BOOM it booted.  In fact right now I am writing this blog post on the laptop.  It seems perfectly fine, but just boots a little slower.  Spending today patching things up to see which of the laptops actually performs faster.  My theory is it will be this one because for the games that COULD support SLI it ran quite a bit faster.

Demon Hunter

Demon Hunting

As far as gaming goes, yesterday I spent my day piddling around in Diablo 3.  For some reason I got the desire to start a new character and as of last night I got it to 40.  I had never really played a demon hunter before yesterday, but I have to say I kinda dig it.  I am playing a largely degenerate build where I am doing whatever I can to keep up the ability of Rapid Fire.  I have heard this ability becomes less awesome as gain levels…  but for the time being it is an insane machine gun ability that whittles down mobs quickly.  Mostly this all came about as I was working my way through farming materials by doing bounties.  I figured I might as well get the benefit of leveling as well, so I rolled a new character and once I hit 10 proceeded to spend my time doing bounty after bounty.  This seems like an insanely fast way to level a character.  Not sure how much I will actually play the demon hunter in the long run, but for the time being it is a fun diversion.  I am not really sure why I am so drawn to Diablo at the moment.  There are things I should probably be doing in Final Fantasy XIV, and other things I should be doing in Wildstar.  However for the time being this seems to be the right amount of interactivity.  Diablo I can just shut my mind off and play, and that seems extremely intoxicating at the moment.  It also lets me hang out downstairs and watch stuff on the chromecast, because I guess I need the relaxation.

 

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