Retro
Topic: Computers
"Never throw anything away. Ever." -The Doctor

This is more than simply justification for my pack-rat approach to housekeeping. This is a reason to archive. Keep your old files, documents, and so forth. If need be, simply copy them to a backup media, such as a CD or DVD, and keep them available. You'll be glad one day. Someone will say to you "What? Teri Hatcher never posed nude in a Superman cape!" And you'll just smile and break out the archived image, tsking at the person's glaring blind spot for Teri's penchant for cheesecake shots in order to promote whatever cinematic effort in which she happens to be taking part. She could be handling the lighting, and she'd still pose for cheesecake shots. She strikes me as the kind of woman that, in high school, wore tight, revealing clothes to get nerds to do her homework for her. "But Bernie... if you help me, I'd be so happy... I'd show you my... appreciation..." And she'd smile winningly as another slide-rule jockey's glasses steamed up, and a No.2 dropped from numb fingers and cracked on the floor...

*ahem* But I digress.

You just never know when one of those old files is going to come in handy. An old .wav file that's the perfect startup sound, or maybe a font that's perfect for the presentation, whatever you may have.

Ghostwolf's computer had been having severe problems with Everquest 2, in that, after their last patch, she could not enter her character into certain kinds of places; instanced small rooms, such as her apartment, or crafting instances. Whenever she tried, she got the Blue Screen of Death, explaining that there was a non-recoverable error in file nv4_disp.dll, where the file attempted to access a page in a non-paged area blah blah blah big number words words words practical upshot, you need to reboot. We tried updating her driver, and discovered that it was a bit out of date, but not horribly so. But that didn't help. The same error would occur every time she attempted to access such a location in-game. She was getting annoyed, and a little frustratedly desperate. I didn't know what to do. I had decided that we needed to upgrade her video card* so that it could catch up with the driver. It's a GeForce 5500, overclocked. I'd rather it were a slightly higher numbered GeForce. Maybe a 6600 or something. We were discussing options.
I'd also noticed that the tray icon for her Zboard was no longer in the tray. Her drivers were not installed either, and sliding the EQ2 keyset into the board no longer automatically started the game. Indeed, it didn't function at all, and if you returned the normal keyset into the board, it had stopped working as well and you had to reboot. I reinstalled the driver and restored Zboard functionality, but the tray icon was still missing. Clearly, something was wrong.

I decided to retrofit the video drivers. Fortunately, I have 7 versions of the video drivers for NVidea's GeForce line, of varying ages. I decided that, since the problem started with the driver prior to the one installed, I should go back to the third most recent driver. I installed that.

Not only did her EQ2 problem go away, but the Zboard icon returned to the tray. She's happier now.

This isn't the first time that retrofitting a video driver has resulted in better performance in a certain game. One example: Unreal Tournament 2K3 had a problem, also with GeForce chipsets, that was resolved by downgrading the video driver. Now, these games (EQ2 and UT2K3) advertise that they work best with NVidia. It's their preferred graphics chipset. So you'd think that they'd do better testing with those chipsets. Apparently, Radeon users don't have these problems. At least, I haven't heard of them.

But the main point I'm trying to make here is that I resolved my dilemma with an archived file. I won't get into the whole "find a fortune in Grandma's attic" concept, although that'd be cool too. The key point here is that storage might get a little expensive, but recovery is priceless.

If you ever meet anyone from The Learning Channel's show "Clean Sweep," tell them I said they can kiss my ass.

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I still believe this. I'm all about upgrading, not so much if it is needed, but if it is possible. I have no justification for this. Fortunately, I don't need justification.

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