..that my pc was fixed and it is now thanks to work!
I bought my current system about 4 years ago for about £700 (top of the range back then of course) and I was always having problems with it but seeing as I was on Windows 98 I just accepted that as the problem and eventually learned to live with the crashes and error messages. A few years later I'd moved onto XP and I still had the problems but I'd changed some hardware so I figured it must be something to do with drivers, so I spent a lot of time trying to change that to no avail. The problems were always there but I had other things to worry about so I just left it how it was, occasionally playing games dealing with blue screens or 'desktop-kicks' in between parts.
Recently I was actually beginning to come to the end of my teather with the thing so I asked around to see if anyone could help out (I'd asked before on various message boards but no one seemed to know what the problem was).
Anyway work said that they'd take a look at it, so I took it on wednesday for the experts to mess about with it. We tried changing drivers again, moving the graphics card over to another machine to prove that the card wasn't the problem, disabled the sound card and graphics vice versa. Eventually one of my collegues pointed out that the RAM may be faulty so I tested each 256 stick to see what would happen and then for the first time in since forever, I was able to drive around the streets of GTA III for a good hour with no problems, thus concluding that the RAM worked but there was something up with the connections.
Finally they suggested that it may be a dual layer DIM setup which meant that rather than having the sticks in slots 1 and 2 they needed to be in either 1 and 3 or 2 and 4. So we tried that, stuck them in 1 and 3.. and voila.. problem solved!! You see you'll think I'm an idiot, but until recently I was never much for delving into the inside of a pc, I didn't want to touch the components in case something happened (daft I know..). I'd never of guessed in a million years that it was the RAM at fault, it really is amazing how big a problem such a small thing can cause.
On the downside, my social life is really going to go down the pan now, but on the plus side... the VERY BIG plus side, I can run just about anything with no problems at all (even Doom III). I've got about 15 odd games I haven't been able to play until now so I'm pretty spoilt for choice and then of course there's the stuff I HAVEN'T got. So yeah, I'm pretty damn happy at the moment, there aint really anything that can spoil this as well...I still sit playing for hours thinking that there's gonna be a blue-screen, but it doesn't happen anymore. I've also ordered a new motherboard and 3.2ghz CPU, more RAM and a 160gb HDD so soon I will be catching up with you bastards! So now I'll be able to actually get HL2 running, possibly medium detail or something, I wont fuss, Hell.. Doom III looks great on the lowest setting IMHO..
Ok, I'm done- you can laugh now.
