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New Job, and More Computer Trouble

Well, second blog entry, and a lot later than I had envisaged to write it, but a lot has been taking up my time recently.

First and foremost is my new job, in London, which is means about 2½ (or more) hours worth of commuting each day, but this has given me the chance to read a lot more books!. The work is good, and at the moment, I'm just rebuilding a website in PHP, which was originally made in ColdFusion. This is the second such project I've taken on (had an ASP to PHP conversion in my last job) and everything is going well so far, although I pretty much to learn ColdFusion as I went along!

Christmas took up a bit of time as well, what with the usual, but I think I will be sad to have to take down the decorations tomorrow.

One disappointment I've had lately is with a graphics card, that despite my best efforts, refuses to work with my motherboard. I've done everything I could think of, from updating the BIOS, to tinkering with various settings, but no luck. The unfortunate thing is, I know the card works. I tested it in a different board, and all's well, but alas, when I try it on either mine, or my brothers board (which is the same as mine), there is no output whatsoever from the card.

The worst part about this? I can't play World of Warcraft until I get it working! To make matters worse, I've twice been stung by the wonderful (?) service called Windows Update. I had W2K on one machine, and decided to update it to ensure I could play WoW, but this had the unfortunate side affect of killing my USB devices mid-startup. Tried overwriting this with WinXP, and fell into a situation where it was asking me to login with a password, but forgetting I'd not actually been given the chance to enter one at build time! A second XP build worked, but an update actually managed to completely trash a hard disk, to the point where not even a low-level format worked! At this point I was slightly peeved, and threw the hard disk out the door (quite literally!) "Enough was enough" I thought, so I installed XP for a third (and final) time on a spare drive I had kicking around, and performed the updates myself, a few at a time. Without loading all the motherboard drivers, etc, I still managed to hit a whopping 22 restarts (I kept a tally!) which left me agape. I mean, in this day and age, when even some Linux distributions can install and run without a single restart, how can Windows need so many, when Microsoft tout it as so superior to anything else? Well, hopefully that should be the end of my troubles. I'll give it another go at getting this graphics card working this weekend, and then watch as I slowly lose what little free time I have left to what is possibly the most addicting game ever...