Seeing as my brother is somehow going to make Diablo 3 cooperate with his old-as-fart machines (else I let him borrow Yggdrasil), looks like I get to play, too. Why not, eh? And simultaneous Mac version release, hot.

Blastoise and Dinah are standing by with their installers… Only a half hour until I find out what the fuss is about. I’ve heard the Diablo series described as “Blizzard does PSO,” to which I would say “WELLTHEN” and… yeah. :P

Once more Blastoise is back, and in proper form. Awesome card is awesome and low-powered (good lord, that 570 was a greedy jerk, eating up not only two six-pin connectors but an additional two pins, where this 550 only demands a single six-pin connector) and everything is all clear across the board. Blastoise is running on 270.61 and most importantly he’s got dual monitor mode back. YES. I’ve missed that so much.

No driver failures, no blue-screens in CoH or WoW, no green-outs on YouTube, no broken textures… good. STAY THAT WAY. Please?

And as it turned out, the raid got bumped to Monday anyhow. So even if I did have problems, it wouldn’t have held me up for anything I had plans for.

Uh… well that just happened.

I woke up to a BOX!!!1 on my side-table. It was my video card, of course, but like hell am I going to crack open Blastoise until I’ve nibbled something, because Yoshi+ empty stomach + robo-surgery = faceplanting on dusty desk with potential to inhale extra case screws = NO.

And then… I get summoned downstairs (!) with Dinah (!!) for an experiment: the installation of a curtain over the puppy gate. In theory this would stop the Berserk Cacophony of WOOF that gets triggered whenever I come downstairs for whatever reason (usually to take pizza delivery). This also comes with the bonus of keeping Evil Stepfather from staring at me like a creeper.

I wanted to do the card swap while there was daylight because Blastoise’s case is painted such that it sucks out artificial light (but not natural). But… this sounded worthwhile, and I kinda wanted a change of scenery for the day anyway, even if the most likely end result was that I’d just sleep on the couch all day because it’s not often I get to sit on a real couch. :P

…which is exactly what happened, albeit interrupted by my cat jumping on and shuffling around on top of me, that little purrbot. Though… I DID get pizza and discovered I actually have the Blu-Ray version of the first Men in Black. I think it came with one of the Blu-Ray drives I installed. It was still in its shrink-wrap and cardboard insert, haha!

Anwho, experiment is a partial success. Dogs can’t go berserk at the sight of me, but incidental (and unavoidable) noises like doorbells still set them off. Well, it’s SOMETHING, I guess.

Blastoise gets cracked open in the morning. Hopefully nothing goes bad and he’s up and running before raid time. :P Cripes I miss dual monitors.

Blastoise’s replacement video card (the EVGA GTX550) hits tomorrow. A step back from what I was packing before, but, hell, according to seraphzero it works and, slightly more importantly, I get my dual monitors back so I can freaking roll Instant Ramen and other stuff again. (Note to self: Driver #270 or GTFO)

In other news, even though I have all these games and projects backlogged, I am inexplicably bored out of my mind. Do not want! Also incredibly lonely and such, but that’s not new. >_>; Where’s my cat, I need some purrbot time now…

Well, poop. Blastoise just can’t win when it comes to games.

Ever since I cleared the first Mass Effect, it’s been back to the usual MMOs until I can get the dude another SSD or something to act as additional app storage. Only then I started having driver issues up the nose, and it only got progressively worse until today.

The 285 driver made YouTube pretty much unusable (most videos would “Green Out”), but 296.10 was even worse– couldn’t play games OR run any kind of video without Blastoise totally upending himself and forcing a hard reboot. Running the beta driver (300-something) kinda stabilized things but not by much. So I went back to the 270 driver that the card came with.

Plan B entailed diving into the settings for underclocking. Now… OCing/UCing is territory I don’t wander into since I figured it’s best not to try to reinvent the wheel, but this particular card (the Galaxy MDT GTX570) is factory overclocked, and it was suggested I manually ratchet it back to the default clock speed. That appeared to work for City of Heroes on the short term, but had catastrophic results for WoW, which would just crash outright after character select.

Oh hell. This had to happen on a raid night, too. Thankfully Dinah the Badass Ninja MacBook is always ready to step in, but…. yeah.

The fact that I’m even having to take such arcane measures to whip MMOs into submission (and they’re pretty low on the gaming food chain) should be signal enough that something has gone REALLY bad in this card. At least unlike the previous, I still have basic Windows and video playback usability, but I’m a couple days out the return window at Amazon so I’m kinda SOL there. :(

At this point I would just say “f you nVidia” and go back to ATI, but I still don’t have any love for bloaty Catalyst. Aaargh. I’m already looking at having to pay the Stupid Geek Tax again since this will be Blastoise’s second video card replacement and this form is barely 5 months old.

On the flipside? Whatever I loot this time will give me back twin monitor functionality. Good lord I’ve missed that. T_T