I’m rebuilding my windows box finally. It really hasn’t seen the light of day in a couple years, although I did some work on it back after someone spilled whiskey soda down the blow holes. The fans have been gone from the blow holes for a while and the video card had been a total loss. Otherwise it was the same. It’s been slow and swappy for a long time, and more recently would only stay running for a couple days before everything would start shitting the bed.

Well, with NWN2 out, I figured it was time to lose myself in an RPG. Especially one with sidequests. I went out to Computer Stop and bought a Seagate 250G 16MB Cache SATA2 drive so I didn’t have to reinstall on the 80G IDE I put in when I built the box to save some cash. I got an external usb adapter for the drive (i’ve got piles of these now) and a 1G Kingston ram pack. I had 512MB of Corsair XMS, and it was tough pulling it for some medium grade Kingston stuff, but I need the RAM and it’s not like this is the beast it once was. Nothings overclocked anymore either. Alas though, after driving to Circuit City and seeing Kenny from Strategy and then over to Best Buy, no NWN2. It’s all pre-sales copies. How stupid is the gaming industry? I’m sitting here looking at the list of games on Steam, recalling how as a delivery platform it’s such a great technology and hating atari for their box set release. On the other hand though, I found this Direct2Drive place and NWN2 is downloading on another machine while I rebuild the software installation here. It should be done when I get up tomorrow as long as I don’t tell Steam to start installing packages.

Today went along pretty slow at work. I wandered around Bellevue getting some hardware and spent the time up until Battlestar Galactica came on cleaning out the dust in my shuttle and coming up with a quick solution for the bad heatsink fan on my video card. I did end up turning the fan on the “ICE” unit (shuttles cute little radiator setup) to blow out the back of the cast instead of in. Without the blow hole fans I don’t think the benefit was worth it. I have the case off anyways though as I’ve got a 90mm fan sitting next to the cast acting as the fan for the video card. I’ll take a picture as soon as I figure out where I left the batteries.