So, Windows 7 is now installed, via an upgrade from Vista which took about 2-3 hours to complete or thereabouts. It's not a huge change, though I'm liking it so far. I had a little snafu when I first tried to install the upgrade and it recommended uninstalling a number of programs, one of which somehow ended up making my D: drive disappear, wtf. It's something to do with a burning program I installed once but haven't used in ages, I think, something that involves removing its drivers affecting the other DVD-ROM drivers or something. So I luckily was able to do a System Restore and then installed Windows 7, and I'll take that other program off later. I don't use it so no worries anyway, really.

It also said I should remove iTunes, but I didn't, and upon running iTunes post-Windows 7 update, iTunes just patched itself / ran its own setup and it's just fine, it even kept the play counts and playlists I'd made before, which is nice.

I'm hoping between this upgrade and (likely mainly) the BIOS flash update from last week this'll solve most of my computer woes. Here's hoping, anyway! Now off to check and see if LOTRO will still work or if I have to reinstall it. Ugh, I sure hope I don't have to do that. Cross your fingers for me!

A colour test thingy from Colorgenics.

( Results below! )

I wouldn't call it scarily accurate or anything for me but some of it rings true. Didn't take very long to do, anyway, hehe.

So far I'm having a good start to the weekend, aside from worrying about my poor wife who's having a hard day. *sends good thoughts her way* I don't know what to do with the rest of the day; leaning towards clearing out old icons and searching for new ones on here, a little digital housekeeping, if you will. I also have an upgrade to Windows 7 to perform, but as I'm signed up for a kin event tonight and things are working well so far I'm going to wait until tomorrow to do that. I had a few chats with Gateway's online support, something I should've thought about doing ages ago, and while the first was rather fruitless (he just told me to update my gfx drivers, which I did, but it was no help with the locking up / shutting down), the second told me that, yeah, there's a known issue with this desktop model doing that. Gee, you'd think the first guy would've told me that, bah. At least this second person sent me a link to the BIOS update that is supposed to fix it, which I downloaded and used, and so far, so good. Of course, after downloading the gfx updates my PC stayed up all night while I played LOTRO, then shut down the next day. After doing the BIOS update it was fine all last night, but, well. We'll see how things go today, I guess.

Not much else to report at the moment. This past week was extremely busy with court appearances every single day, so I'm pretty worn out right now. I just need to relax a little today and tomorrow, since next weekend I'll be on the go pretty much the entire time, so I need to save up my rest now while I can.

Alright, off to clean up my computer I suppose. Hope everyone is having a good start to the weekend, and sorry for the boring update, I'll try to think of something better to write about next time. XD

Mmmm, the weekend, gotta love it. This past week was crazy stressful, due to having court scheduled every day, appointments squeezed into just about every other space, and my assistant being off work for vacation. It culminated in what was a quasi-default application made by another lawyer yesterday, which had me fearing that the judge would agree with him and we'd be kinda screwed, but the other side hasn't done a lot of things, some of which they're accusing us of not doing, so the judge gave us both a firm deadline to file things and move this on, phew. Add to all of that my PC problems, wherein my PC shut down last Sunday and has been in the shop ever since, leaving me with my old one, and some general malaise and missing my lovely wife and, yeah. Glad it's the weekend!

On the PC front, I called the repair place today (after checking in with them yesterday and being told to check again this afternoon) and they think it should be done in an hour or two. According to them, my Norton Antivirus was reaaaaaaaally messed up and was running in the background constantly. I tried to uninstall it because it was being a pain; I only had a free trial when I bought the machine and it expired ages ago, and kept popping up asking me to renew, etc. So I didn't think much of it when the uninstall failed, but according to the repair guy it didn't completely uninstall and was trying to update its definitions / load in the background over and over, causing instability, especially when I'd try to do something taxing like playing an MMO, and that was the problem as far as they can see. So they think the hardware is ok, and that there's no other software problems, plus the network adapter should work now and let me get back online. I'm hoping they call soon and I'll drive up to pick it up. :)

On a related note, I've been using my old PC since then, and the main hard drive is totally on its way out on that (it's like 7+ years old), so I finally stopped being lazy and formatted the newer D drive on the PC, reinstalled XP on it, and have been using it pretty much without a hitch ever since. It even runs LOTRO beautifully in medium/high settings, which is nice, so I've been able to cope without my regular PC.

Today's plans include more relaxing, with a potential raid tonight, depending on how many people show up for it. We have almost enough signed up, along with 4-5 tentative sign ups, and if a few of those people show up / if more people get online, it'll be fine. Other than that, nothing new to report. There's a Hallowe'en party in the city tonight but I'm feeling under the weather and blah, and have work to do tomorrow afternoon, so I don't think I'm going to go. Plus it's a costume party and I don't have one, I have no idea of what to wear, and I should save up my money.

It's been a pretty frustrating weekend all around, mainly due to stupid computer problems. The new machine keeps locking up on me in LOTRO, it's extremely frustrating especially since the weekend's when a lot of the bigger events go down and that's the worst time to have an unstable set-up. I'm hoping the new graphics drivers I installed last night will continue to work well; after it locked up a second time last night I searched for new drivers on a whim, as I only put up-to-date ones on a few weeks ago, and sure enough there was another new set from just 5 days ago. I installed those and it worked fine without a hitch for 4-5 hours or so last night, so I'm hoping that's a good sign. We'll see how it goes tonight as there's a bit more to do (one smaller raid at 5:30pm my time, and a continuation of last night at 10:30pm my time that I can attend for a little while). I just hope it holds up; it's extra frustrating when it prevents you from enjoying both your major form of entertainment for the weekend and the main way you stay in contact with your wife, ugh.

The cooling fan I ordered came in on Friday but when I brought my machine up to install it, it wouldn't fit. I'm not entirely sure it's a heating issue now, since I've had the side off of the PC and a fan blowing directly into it and on the gfx card and it still locks up. I'm thinking it's either a hardware (good lord please say it isn't) or some other software problem, and as stated above the new drivers held up well enough last night, so we'll see. I asked them to look into new gfx cards for me on Monday and find one with a better built-in fan that's not too expensive, though the thought of buying another new gfx card after just buying a fricking entirely new system less than 2 months ago is also frustrating, heh.

Other than that, I did finish a book I've been reading for awhile, which was number two in a series of two books. That was nice, to finish that up, even though the ending was a little meh. I may go and read for awhile now before the 5:30pm action, I've still got a bunch of books I'm in the middle of that I should get back to reading. That may help relax me a little too, that and a continued smooth performance tonight would be awesome.

This week's not too bad, work-wise, no court at all, and I've got a ticket for Blue Rodeo at the George St. Festival on Thursday night so there's that to look forward to as well. And I thiiiiiink next weekend is a long weekend, maybe? Though now that I think about it, it may be a civic holiday out here but I believe I have court in the city, dammit. >.< I think it's an Aion weekend too. We'll see what happens at any rate. Hope everyone else had a good weekend!

It's been a pleasant weekend so far, and things seem much, much better than they did since my last post, heh.

I had a nice, relaxing Saturday, which saw me make a car rental reservation for my pending September trip to Philadelphia, yay! On top of that I managed to get a really, really good deal on a top of the line GPS system to use when I'm traveling. Last time I used a program on my BlackBerry, which cost a lot more than I thought since I had to pay for 'net usage time, and also my phone kept randomly restarting too, so that didn't help. This new unit, a Magellan 5310, should last for a nice, long time, and will be way cheaper in the long run. So yes, lots of progress on the September trip already, which is great news. :D

After that, believeitup and I got to do some raiding with our kin in LOTRO. Which... it was fun, overall, but we didn't get as far into the raid as we wanted. As in we didn't even beat the first boss, d'oh. Things just weren't working for some reason, but that's the way it goes, sometimes. Tonight we're going back in again, and hopefully it'll be better. After the raid!fail, we grouped up to do a few runs in another, small instance, and both of us logged out in the wee, small hours of the morning. It was a nice, busy night in LOTRO, which doesn't happen all that often to me lately, so that was a good thing. :) Next week is Aion time, so it was good to get in a lot of LOTRO this weekend since there won't be as much next weekend. The only downside to the night was my stupid computer acting up and locking up on me twice. I also lost my internet connection too, but I restarted the modem and that was fine. I played with the settings a bit in game, and it seemed ok after that, so here's hoping it stays fixed.

Today I got to catch up on sleep and when I got up I downloaded all the new drivers I could for both my video card and my sound card. I tried to update the drivers for the headset / mic, but apparently they're already up to date. Hopefully that and the tweaking I did in game last night will prevent my computer from locking up again. So frustrating because it's a brand new machine, and also because so many other people are waiting on you when you get booted, grr. But yes, we'll see how it goes tonight. Other than that, I've not done much all day. I meant to clean up a little, oops, but instead I've watched tv and puttered around online. It's been nice and relaxing, though, which is the whole point of a weekend, right? Right. And the best part about it is that this is a long weekend, so I get to do more of the same tomorrow. :) I do have some plans, though; may go into the office in the afternoon to catch up on some desk work, and if the boss is there I can talk to him about a few things too, plus I have a few other plans that I won't go into here, but I do plan to be at least a little productive tomorrow.

So, yes. That's my weekend so far, I hope everyone else is having a good one. :D

Experimenting with Linux Mint once again. The first attempt at installing it made my computer fail to boot at all, oops. Luckily I was able to reformat that partition and just reuse the bootup disc I'd downloaded and it took on the second try. The last time I installed this it was Linux Mint 4.0, aka Daryna, but now they're already at 6.0, aka Felicia. This version seems to run smoother with my new graphics card, which is good, as that was the main reason I gave up on Daryna. I left my laptop at work but I'll be installing Mint on that for the dual boot option too; maybe it'll make the ol' laptop easier to use, as Vista is such a pain.

Alright, time to reboot this machine back into Windows, here's hoping that still works. There's no reason why it shouldn't, as Linux is on the other HD, but who knows. Here's hoping it works fine! :)

Back if anyone cares, hehe. Stupid wireless was incredibly annoying... it stubbornly refused to work with a 128-bit WEP encryption key, after trying forever, but switching it to 64-bit on a whim made it work immediately. Grrrr.

Anyway, that's done. Last night I was away anyway, went out for supper within 30 mins. of getting back from work, then spent the night at a friend's house as he, his wife and I watched scary movies to celebrate Friday the 13th. Good times! I drove back today after lunch and spent the last several hours working on stupid network crap, but I should be around later tonight. Right now I want to get out of the house again for a bit before it gets too late; after wrestling with these machines all afternoon and knowing I'll likely spend a good deal of tonight on them, I think a break is required.

internet dow, posting from work, have too much to get back to, may or may not be around this weekend. :/

Ok, at work now, where the 'net connection is fine. We have a different ISP here, one that's not available on our street, unfortunately. Mine's still not working at home, after all day yesterday and so far today. I can get online, but all that works is MSN (not AIM or Y!M) and a few select webpages. Even then, they're weird, like I can access LJ and read things, but it almost never lets me post. GJ seems to work fine. And I can't access Hotmail / Yahoo! Mail / Gmail. Very weird.

Anyway, since it's super fucked up, and I was in court all day yesterday, I never had a chance to check my mail / post this entry, but it looks like I won't be around today or this weekend unless I can get on my sister's computer while I'm in the city. I was able to last weekend with little to no problems, but I won't be on until after midnight or later my time, which is like 10:30pm EST or later. It shouldn't be a big deal, I don't think there's anything urgent that needs to be done. But if there is, or if you want to leave me a message or something, best reply here and I should at least be able to read it, if not reply. Hopefully this will all be fixed soon. >.>;

So, the stupid 'net connection went out on me last night around 11:30-11:45pm, and didn't come back on until today. Boo-urns!

Work is going ok today though, which is nice. And I'll be heading into the city tomorrow, whee! It mightn't affect my online too much, as I'll be at my sister's place and she has the 'net there. We'll see, I won't be on as much in the afternoon / early evenings as I am now though. We'll see. Going to the city tomorrow until Saturday, then home until Sunday when I'm driving back. Good times.

Um... damn, I had more to say, but I always forget it when I get on to update this thing. Oh well, it couldn't have been that important, I suppose.

Oh! aberrantgirl! We need to talk about a retainer. :)