Well, I finally took the time to get my main PC operational this weekend. Unfortunately, I did have a delay in that the Windows XP Professional CD I made was slightly defective. I ended up needing to create a new CD, and only then did the install work properly. I spent most of Saturday reinstalling the operating system, drivers, and applications. That of course excludes games; I figure I’ll install the games on an as-needed basis. About the only program I didn’t install was WindowBlinds, and that was because I mainly used that for putting a black theme on my desktop. Finding the Royal Noir theme made it unnecessary. :-) Of course, now I have Sinc asking me if I want to play Command & Conquer 3: Kane’s Wrath. I don’t even HAVE the game yet… heh. Still, all in all, I’m getting more or less back to normal. I’ve even managed to pull my movies off of the iPod.

The funny thing is that I’m not entirely sure the “dead” 320 GB SATA hard drive that I pulled out of the PC is actually dead. I think the two drives may have become desynched, though I don’t know for certain. What I’ll probably end up doing is buying an external enclosure for the drive and use it as an external drive with the main PC. If it doesn’t work, well, I can go buy a new drive easily enough. :-)

On the other hand, I apparently did something foolish with the PowerBook. While the main PC was offline I was using it as my main computer, and had it on almost a week 24/7. I put it in sleep mode while I was at work the last couple of days, but apparently the damage was done. On Friday, I noticed that the video was corrupted. I turned the PowerBook off and let it rest overnight, but it didn’t help. The video chipset is apparently FUBARed, with lots of corruption and artifacting going on. *sigh* It’s a shame, because that laptop has served me extremely well for over five years. Unfortunately, I can’t justify the cost of a new MacBook, as I still use my work laptop for anything work related and take that with me on most trips (as it has the VPN software to connect to the office and has a built-in cellular broadband card). That’s especially annoying as I used the PowerBook for video editing. Then again, I only did video editing when out at events for Mortal Kombat Online. *sigh* I’m sure I’ll think of something, though.

Ah, well. At least my main PC is pretty much operational. I’ll deal with any other problems as they come.

http://kotaku.com/5062303/invade-stormwind-you-and-what-arm++-oh-that-one

When you can’t convince 35 other people of your master plan to attack two Alliance capital cities, you really only have one alternative: Do it yourself. “Bradster” does. He owns that rig above — 11 computers that run 36 World of WarCraft account simultaneously. His infrastructure costs (to say nothing of his utility bill) weren’t itemized, but he unashamedly admits he pays $5,711 per year in subscription fees to keep together his one-man raiding party (family photo of that on the jump).

The more I look at that pic, the sadder it seems. For example, the majority of machines shown in the pic are laptops. They’re most likely not low-end laptops, either, because each appears to be running a minimum of two instances of World of WarCraft. In addition, the mice are actually medium-to-higher-end trackballs, and not the kind of mice you’d get by default with PCs. Also, not only is the internet bill going to be insane (due to the needed bandwidth for thirty-six concurrent sessions), the electricity bill has to be pretty nuts too. I’m not talking about just the power needed to run those machines. I’m also talking about the power needed for the A/C to keep that room at a bearable temperature. Speaking as someone who’s been in a room full of computers running off of standard A/C, it tends to get pretty hot pretty damn quickly.

Normally I wouldn’t begrudge someone their hobby, but at this cost, this just screams “overkill” to me. I keep thinking that at this amount of money, it’d be much better spent travelling the REAL world instead of getting yourself lost in a virtual world.