Wow! (pun intended, read on ;)

For the second time in two days I find myself installing the World of Warcraft from scratch, including the downloading of several patches, some of which are close to 500Mb in size.

With the Burning Crusades expansion coming out tomorrow night (technically Tuesday morning at 1 minute past midnight ;) I was seriously attempting to upgrade my computer. At the very least I needed substantially more hard drive space as the 7Gig free on my 40Gig hard drive just wasn't going to cut it.

Remember a few months back when I tried to dual drive my system and it refused to boot back up for me until I'd left it alone to sulk? Well, neither I nor it learned our lessons. I decided to go the route of an external hard drive, like those cute little flash drives you can buy, but this external hard drive is a little bigger. About the size of two 1"-thick sandwiches laid side-by-side. But when I got the external hard drive home I discovered I'd bought a Firewire only version, and my PC does not have any Firewire sockets, so I ordered a PCI-Firewire card from Newegg.com which arrived Friday night.

Saturday morning I got up, cracked open my PC and installed the PCI-Firewire card, then booted back up. The lights came on, drives whirred, keyboard lights came on, but on my 19" LCD screen there was nothing. I turned it on and off and the LCD said "I got nothin'!" actually it said "No Signal" but that's essentially the same thing.

Several times I tried rebooting, both with and without the Firewire card, all to no avail. Then I decided to try my old ATI Radeon 9600XT video card, on the off chance it was my new NVidia 6200, and my system booted up. Of course it did so after I'd removed the Firewire card. So I powered down, reinstalled the Firewire card, booted back up and...nothing. What the F**K?!?! Seriously. What the F**K?!?!

I reinstalled my old video card, and still had nothing.

I pretty much spent all day (except for a few errands Liz and I ran) trying to get my computer working (again) with a larger hard drive, and now I not only didn't have a larger hard drive, I didn't even have a computer, period.

I finally gave up and played a bit of Super Mario on JE's DS and decided to unlock World 7 for him, which involved going into World 4, which is when I discovered he'd bypassed World 4 and gone straight from World 3 to 5, so I had to do several levels of World 4 and in fact ended up completing it, World 4, that is; I'm up to the final castle (I think) in World 8, but haven't been able to get passed Bowser to drop him into the fiery pits of hell and save Princess Peach (hey, Peachy-baby? Heard of women's lib? Heard of equal rights? Heard of empowerment? Do you like being a permanent victim? Geez, woman. How about next time Bowser (or Baby Bowser) comes to kidnap you, you punch him in the nose like we've seen you do in Super Smash Bros. Melee! Er...sorry, got carried away there).

Then I decided that seeing as my old ATI video card was working, and JE's PC had an AGP slot, I'd give JE a new video card, which I did, and his computer booted up just fine & dandy. (Why his, Lord? Why not mine?). Then I figured that seeing as his computer now had a turbo-charged video card in it, I might as well install World of Warcraft, which I did. Then I had to download the patches. Five of them, I think. Totalling close to 2Gig in size by the time they'd all downloaded, with installations taking 10 minutes (or longer) between each download. From the time I inserted the first disk to the time I was finally able to log into WoW and not need to download a new patch I think it was 3 hours, maybe even 4.

I was able to play WoW on JE's PC, but it was nothing like WoW on mine. I still ended up PvPing in the Battlegrounds and earned 2/3 of the Honor Marks I need for my Tiger Mount. I play a Dwarven Hunter in WoW but I love Tigers. Unfortunately it's the lanky, pansy Night Elves who get to ride Tigers; Dwarves have Battle Rams for their Racial Mount. I have a Battle Ram, and I like him, but anyone who knows me knows I love Tigers, so I simply must have a Tiger mount for my Dwarf as well. PvP was interesting, to say the least. While JE's PC will run WoW, it's not an optimal machine for such an activity. Several times I logged into the Warsong Gulch battleground, and before my own character had loaded and I could see what was going on, I was dead. Other times I'd get in just fine, and then I'd mooch around on the roof of the Alliance Base. I pretended I was on defense, and I sort of was, but I wasn't being very good at it. I still managed to take out a few of the Horde players, earning my Dwarf a few Honorable Kills (for shooting someone in the back from a ledge high up above them where they couldn't see me unless they were looking up there ;)

Liz laughed that I wasn't able to take an evening off from playing WoW, but of course she was there on her PC playing her Age of Empires III ;) To me WoW is not just a game; like most MMORPGs it's a social experience. I've made a lot of online friends playing WoW so often I log in not just to play the game, but to chat with people. One of my oldest friends in WoW got his account hacked several months ago and lost a lot of the items he'd acquired over the last year or so. He pretty much quit playing while Blizzard looked into replacing his items, but his case was not successful, and he's only logged in once or twice in the last 5 to 6 months. I was amazed at how much I missed him, especially when he logged in last week and I was able to chat briefly with him. He logged out shortly afterwards though. Having his items sold (stolen & the gold sent to the thieves account) but never restored has greatly reduced his enjoyment of the game, and he couldn't stand to be logged on, staring at his naked character. I can't really blame him. I know of a few people that this has happened to, and the word they've used to describe logging in and finding their characters naked and their items sold is Violated. As ridiculous as that might sound, you invest a lot of time in your online character, so it really would be greatly disturbing to log in one day and find that someone else has been on your character, sold all of the gear that you've spent months, if not years acquiring, then sent themselves the gold they got from selling your gear (which would actually go to a temporary account before being sent on to a real account with the temp account then being deleted, yes, virtual money laundering).

So, all of that, to say that this morning Liz and I went to Fry's to check out new computers for me. The computer we were interested in was not available, we were there barely 30 mins after the store opened and they claimed to have sold out of that particular model. I think it was a classic (illegal) bait & switch, but as the PC I ended up getting was considerably better than the PC I was interested in, I'm not unhappy that I couldn't buy my initial choice.

I decided not to install my old hard drive in the new PC, not even to make it a dual drive, which means I pretty much have nothing on this computer. I had to download Firefox and reinstall WoW, again, as I said, for the second time in two days. This time I went to a third party site where the patches downloaded considerably faster, so I've now installed and full updated WoW in approx. 2 hours.

After visiting Fry's we went on to Burlington Coat Factory where Liz was shopping for my mum. Actually she was shopping for the flower girls for my mum's wedding later this year. We ended up tootling around most of the day, visited a second Burlington's :P then on to Marshall's, which is next door to Trader Joe's which is where I get my Weetabix breakfast cereal. We even stopped at Daphne's, which makes pretty good Greek fast food that is almost as good as what you'd get in a real Greek restaurant.

Today has been a funny day. It started out bloody cold. When I logged in to Liz's PC around 8:30am it was a few degrees above freezing. The day ended up getting so warm that we discarded the coats and sweaters we'd needed when we set out on our travels, but now, at 7:20pm, it's once again a few degrees above freezing. My new PC is no help. The old PC used to be a toasty, warm little box and despite being on the northern side of our house our Family Room was still often one of the warmest, but now it's bloody COLD!

Liz just had the awesome idea of sending out for spicy Malaysian food. Unfortunately that means she's sending me out, into the cold, to get the food. Wish me luck!