First things first, I was able to get a pretty picture of my compy in action just to prove that it does indeed give off quite a glow (actually more than the last pic I posted showed). Behold it in all its glory here. Yes I know it's grainy, that's what I get for taking a photo of a bright computer in a pitch dark room and then scaling the photo down.

Anyway, this actually happened like a week ago, but I've only just now gotten around to blogging it. XD

As the title says, I believe I came fairly close making computer have some serious problems. I take that back, it actually had a serious problem. I had been fooling with the boot settings to try to kill some processes. My system takes a few minutes to initialize the wireless after booting. Not a huge issue, but it was annoying enough that I figured I'd see what I could do. I believe the lag is caused by the nForce 4 on my southbridge (which controls the PCI-E buses, the PCI buses where my wireless is, ethernet, etc.). The nForce 4 chipset has a hardware firewall built in, not inherently a bad thing seeing as it's kinda hard for a hacker to get in when the port goes into physical lock-down (not software). The thing is, I get the impression it automatically expects a direct ethernet connection initially, not wireless, so it tries to figure out where the direct connection is before getting to the wireless, thus the lag. I could't find a method for getting rid of the firewall, and it does this even while disabled, so I went with the next best thing - cut off the process. Well the problem is that there are several vital processes between it and the video card (as well as several generally superfluous ones). I did my research and determined the most likely process and confirmed that it was safe to kill. I kill that boot process and restart to check the effect. Well now the dumb thing doesn't turn off. Explorer shuts off, meaning that XP is partway there, but it just sat with a blank background. I think that what I actually just did was knock out more of the southbridge than I intended (leastways this is my suspicion, I have much more expertise dealing with video cards than motherboard setups). It still managed the PCI/PCI-E fine (hence why the display/wireless was alive), but it couldn't turn itself off.So I did a hard shut down. Upon booting it does the standard "Do you like this change?" questionaire. I said no and reverted. Only one problem: Because the process had been killed when it booted, it was still off, meaning that it wouldn't shut down again (it needed to shut down fully to change the setting). More hard shut downs offered the same result. The shut down didn't allow it to apply the reversion, so it kept on booting with the same error. I now had a computer that booted with the same issue as before, but that wouldn't turn itself off.

Then, I found an ingenious solution. All it needs to do is save the settings, right? Is there any other way to save them without requiring a whole shutdown/boot sequence? Then I noticed a little option in the start menu - Log Off. Logging off does indeed save the system settings, but doesn't restart the system. I logged off, clicked the button to log back on (there's only my account on here), and lo and behold, the settings were changed it has worked perfectly ever since. So I think I'll be nice to the boot settings for now.

Other than that, it's been running like a charm. Running FEAR (maxed with 1440x900) at 200 FPS in-game with a whopping 2,418 on the main menu. XD It'll hit over 100 sometimes on Lost Planet too.