MIA: Kraut and Xandamere? [Archive]

View Full Version : MIA: Kraut and Xandamere?

JAMiAM

24 Oct 03, 01:58

Has anyone heard from either of these two gentlemen recently? They seem to have disappeared from the boards and from active play, at least with respect to our DnO games.

Is it my deodorant, or more precisely lack thereof?

laszlo.nemedi

24 Oct 03, 02:45

tigersqn

24 Oct 03, 03:06

Me three for Xandamere

viridomaros

24 Oct 03, 05:02

same for me xandamere as well as kraut
really strange because xandamere reigstered in a tournament on the blitz
and it was supposed to be a fast tournament, i sent to him a lot of mails from different addresses without any replies, for kraut i had a game of normandy rommel 44 running in his favor but no replies anymore too
may be was it the same person using two pseudos? :hmmm:

CyberRanger

24 Oct 03, 06:11

Me three for Xandamere

Add me to the Xandamere list! I know he had to take the LSAT in early October, which was keeping him busy.

Mantis

24 Oct 03, 06:15

Haven't heard from Kraut in our EA game for awhile now, and don't believe I got a reply to my last message to him some time ago. I know he was having system troubles, and using a laptop or something to get on the boards and play smaller turns. Maybe it crapped out on him or something?

As for Xandamere, I don't have any games going with him, but I did talk to him through an email recently, so he's still twitchin'!

So no, James, it wasn't your fault; but if you don't apply a little deodorant, I'LL be the one MIA! :eek:

:D

MikeJ

24 Oct 03, 06:37

Is there any way to make James go MIA? He's upsetting my strategic calculations in EA :(.

Mantis

24 Oct 03, 07:25

Ya, but that'll cost ya!

MikeJ

24 Oct 03, 07:37

What'll it cost me? Please don't say a Persian front for Barbarossa :(

Kraut

24 Oct 03, 09:14

Here I am!

OK, after a few weeks with no Internet I finally got my connection back and are online again. After 11 weeks of waiting I even got my mainboard back, only to discover that my old mainboard fried my CPU as well when it blew up, problem is that prozessors usuable by my mainboard are no longer for sale... ah, the wonders of capitalism :D

Anyway, I can at least be reached again by e-mail and will continue my PBEM games. :banana:

viridomaros

24 Oct 03, 09:59

nice to see you again kraut :D
well now you can finish me in normandy rommel44 :o

Becker

24 Oct 03, 10:05

whats the deal , i need more enemies,

virdimaros was destroyed by my parachutes in berlin 1945

viridomaros

24 Oct 03, 10:07

hi becker nice to see you again too
i'm waiting for your second turn of iceland invaded ;)

Becker

24 Oct 03, 10:09

Ok,i will launch a new blitzkrieg in iceland if that is what you want :D

laszlo.nemedi

24 Oct 03, 10:44

These Belgian like speaking each other in English :D in any thread :D

Becker

24 Oct 03, 10:58

yes,whats the problem
we aint so nationalistic like the french or english who only want to speak in their language (not all of them) ,we are multi cultural and not narrow minded

tigersqn

24 Oct 03, 10:59

Hmmm, that's ironic. :crosseye:

It happens to be Xandamere's B-Day today.

Happy B-Day wherever you are. :coolban: :drink: :coolban:

laszlo.nemedi

24 Oct 03, 11:44

yes,whats the problem
we aint so nationalistic like the french or english who only want to speak in their language (not all of them) ,we are multi cultural and not narrow minded

And I like it! :banana:

Hmmm, it was no intention to offend you! :o

JAMiAM

24 Oct 03, 16:20

Anyway, I can at least be reached again by e-mail and will continue my PBEM games. :banana:
Does that mean that we're back on for our DnO game? Do you need a resend?

JeremyMacDonald

26 Oct 03, 01:12

Mantis

27 Oct 03, 09:57

What exactly went wrong, Jeremy?

CyberRanger

04 Nov 03, 16:34

I've still had no success getting a reply from Xandamere. Anyone else doing better?

Kraut

04 Nov 03, 16:45

I've still had no success getting a reply from Xandamere. Anyone else doing better?

nope, didn't heard anything from him either for a month or so.

tigersqn

04 Nov 03, 17:02

Nope. I've sent several e-mails with no reply.

JeremyMacDonald

05 Nov 03, 10:17

What exactly went wrong, Jeremy?
Oh my...just how long do you have? Get a coffee before sitting down for this post.

Lets see...I had gotten a new motherboard with RAM a new chip and a new Graphics Card over the weekend. Gotten them when I had been over at a friends who reviews computer hardware for a living. So he has all sorts of goodies just lying around. Though the truly hot items won't get as far as his buddies as he and his co-workers will have nasty shout outs on just who called dibs first with regards to smoking hot Graphic Cards etc.

Still by the time I had moseyed over to his place these components had now entered his reject pile (well actually they had become homeless from any of the various computers in the house and migrated over into the corners of the room to live).

I had come into some money and was looking to replace the entire system in any case but was convinced that a better system would be to take these parts, which where a significant improvement over what I did have, and this would allow me to replace some other peripheral components and I could then use them for 6 months and then go for another upgrade ultimately getting a viable PC for longer.

Anyway I brought these components back to my place and on a Monday morning after making sure that Pelle backed up TDG I went for the plunge...checked my last email and switched off my old system for the last time.

I slotted in the new board etc. Well not to long into trying to set this up I realized that my old AWE 64 sound card was not going into this new board. It used the old ISA slots and the new motherboard had no ISA slots at all. So I gave up for the evening. Next day was Tuesday and I went off and bought a new Audigy Sound Card. It slotted in fine and I booted up the system. I immediately started having troubles because I was using my old hard drives. I could not get my new operating system disk (Windows 2000) to boot because I was having problems with my old CD ROM. I eventually went into the Bios and tried to tell the system too boot from the CD ROM. I also changed a few other settings while I was there. Particularly I told the system to set off the alarm if the Fans are not working. Anyway the next time I went to boot the system it started but shut off within a few seconds. It kept doing that. The moral of the story is never change more then one setting in the Bios at a time...that way at least you know what you did that broke the system. Here I was not sure but when I examined my old case I realized that while the CPU fan was working the case fan was not and presumably had not been working for a year or more. The only reason my system had not fried was that I really don't put my video cards through much in the way of paces playing mostly TOAW and other strategy games and my old CPU was a Celeron 466, which ran famously cold (it was really popular for over clocking but I never tried over clocking it).

Well this sent me back to the store the next day (Wednesday) and this time I bought a new case...I also picked up a DVD player as I still did not have one and they are practically giving basic 16X ones away. I also grabbed a 40 GB Hard Drive. That way I would not have to deal with Hard Drives that already had junk on them plus new Hard Drives are faster then the old ones and while 40 GBs is not massive by any means it was twice the storage space I had on my two older HDs.

So now I went back home and reset up the system...but whatever I had done to the Bios it was not the fans that where the problem. It still would not boot. Just kept shutting off after a few seconds. I did not have the tools to flash the Bios so I eventually gave up on setting it up. At this point I had to wait to get more funds transferred to my account but by Saturday I again went to the store. This time I bought a new Chip, a 2.4 Gigahertz Pentium 4. Pretty fast though not smoking fast. I also picked up some crappy motherboard. This was because I wanted to use my friends old PC 133 RAM which he had 512 Megs of, and anyway I did not want to buy new RAM yet. I will save that for 6 months down the road when the system chokes on something.

Anyway I then went through another day of trying to set the new system up with a new motherboard. This time it would not start. I would hit power the CPU Fan would jerk (so power was entering) but that’s all it would do. Took me a day at least to decide that maybe these weird pins that came with my new case might be useful in some way. I had been screwing the motherboard into the back of the case with basic screws but decided to use these weird pins that raise it about a half inch from the back of the case. That actually worked. I must have been loosing the power because the power was running out into the case itself and dispersing.

Then I finally got the system to boot up and there was much rejoicing. But I soon realized that 1) I could not connect to the internet because I no longer knew what I had done with my broadband connection installation disk. Without access to the internet I could not get drivers for either my sound card or my new Graphics card so sound did not work and I was stuck with 16 colours and some really large resolutions.

Over the course of the next week I would get really good at solitaire...If I ever go to Vegas I will definitely play Vegas Solitaire...if the money I made playing this version of Solitaire for pretend on my system is any indication of what I would win in Vegas I could come away with a modest sum of winnings every night. Not enough to buy a new Condo but at least I would not loose my shirt.

So I now spent two days tearing my room apart for the installation disks. I also called my provider and they said they would send me replacements but they where coming in from New Brunswick and it would take at least 5 days.

Never did find my original copies of the installation disk but two days later the Land Lords son returned from Hungary and he has the same provider as I do (in fact I had such good luck with mine that he got it because I never had any complaints). I went and saw the little brat to see if he had the disks but he is at least as disorganized as I am and could not find them. He soon gave up and was telling me to get lost so that he could 'talk' with the pretty young girl that had made her way over to his place upon his return from across the pond. I think that’s what he tells his mother they are doing as well. Seemed pretty urgent to get rid of me even when I reasonably suggested they could talk while I had a look around for the disk. I was just about to leave due to his insistence that talking while I was around was not kosher but spied a pile of CDS sitting up on top of a wardrobe. The top on was some music CD but I grabbed the pile from the mid point and lifted...there was the installation disk...I thanked the brat and took my leave.

I went to install the program only to find that it would not bring up the fancy shmancy installation program with such low resolution. Once more stumped I wandered off. The next day I decided to try and put my old graphics card back in and that worked...further more Win2000 had drivers for the old Riva TNT that it just did not have for the new Geforce 2. So now I could install and after talking with my provider to get my old passwords etc. I finally got on the internet. I managed to download drivers for the Geforce etc. and in fact everything was cool for about 1/2 and hour. Then the system started to crash. I banged my head against walls for the next three days trying to figure out what the problem was. The system was working but so unstable that I was lucky if it ran for 15 minutes before automatically rebooting. There is nothing one can do with a system that’s going to for sure reboot within the next 15 minutes if not earlier. I did however find one way around that. If I played solitaire and did not run anything else in the background it would remain stable.

I tried everything I could think of. I ran tests on the RAM etc. but they came back clear and yet the system was worthless. I was on the verge of going and replacing the motherboard again (it was the cheapest and most suspect purchase) when I finally managed to get the internet to run for long enough to download AVG (a free and very good virus hunter). I managed to run this and was shocked to find that K had 850+ virus on my system. Basically the minute my system had touched the internet I had come under attack. I formatted the new Hard Drive and went through the setup again. This time the minute I hit the internet I downloaded AVG and started it running. Sure enough I was under almost constant attack. I soon installed Zone Alarm. Its a bit of pain to have to use it as it sometimes blocks things I want and its always asking me if I should let this or that in or out and half the time I don't know what the hell the program its talking about is so I go with gut feeling.

What I really can't understand is why my old system never had any troubles. Admittedly there seem to be two significant differences between the old and new system. My old system was Windows 98 and not Windows 2000 and I used Mozilla on the old system as a browser and here I am using Explorer (mainly because I can't get Mozilla to install).

MikeJ

05 Nov 03, 21:20

Yikes! Sounds like a problem I had after a format... while I was patching Windows and installing software I somehow managed to pickup a trojan that was scanning my hardrive and spitting out passwords and such in an IRC channel.

It might be worth your while to get Norton Ghost the next time you do a clean install. When you do, upgrade Windows with the latest patches, install your anti-virus software and any other PC security software you want, then make an image. In the future it will take you all of 6 minutes to load to a fresh install (plus the time it takes to save whatever you want to save off the old hard drive).

laszlo.nemedi

06 Nov 03, 01:21

...
It might be worth your while to get Norton Ghost the next time you do a clean install. When you do, upgrade Windows with the latest patches, install your anti-virus software and any other PC security software you want, then make an image. In the future it will take you all of 6 minutes to load to a fresh install (plus the time it takes to save whatever you want to save off the old hard drive).
Thanks MikeJ, what is a very good idea!

JeremyMacDonald

06 Nov 03, 13:16