More News On my Computer! (+DOOM3)

I’m sure you’re all just checking my site every day to find out how my computer is doing, and well, I’m bored at work, so I thought I’d give you all an update on how that’s going.

After 3 power supplies and 2 motherboards coming from Newegg.com, I think I’m on the verge of having a nice stable machine. The last problem I was having even after I installed the new motherboard that came in last night was the network. Both the integrated nic as well as a PCI one I installed exhibit the same behavior. They flake out and stop sending/receiving traffic pretty often. Only by disabling the interface and reenabling it can I get the packets to resume flow.

It was my genius dad who had the great idea of checking the Asus website for BIOS ROM updates. Well, he found there was one, and in the release notes it says that it fixes a problem with ethernet when a PCI sound card is present (I have a SBLive! I use instead of the onboard sound). So, that definitely would apply to my situation. I wasn’t able to quite get my bios flashed last night before I had to go to bed, but I’m sure I’ll figure it out at some point tonight.

In other news, DOOM3 is a freaking great time. I have been playing it for the last 2 days now, and even at ‘low’ quality settings it’s very engaging. Even with my Athlon XP 2800+ Barton, 1024M PC3200, and GeForce FX 5600 w/128M it seems anything fancier than ‘low’ detail makes the animation get all choppy the moment there is anything complicated to render. This isn’t such a bad thing, though, because the ID Software people did a great job at making it look great even at this detail setting. I hope to take some screenshots (not many) and maybe elaborate on why it’s so great in another post soon.