Apologies and heads-up

[Windzarko]

First off, I'm terribly sorry about my absence for the last few days for the various raids I was signed for, including the Haven LX first raid.

Secondly, a small warning to all; the router I'm on has been misbehaving a LOT lately, and it seems to have taken an irrational dislike to WoW in particularly of late. I've been having trouble progressing even to the point of login where I enter my authentication key (ie, I enter username and password and it gives an instant "disconnected from server"). Teamspeak, Xfire, MSN, Steam and other stuff are having issues as well, but WoW's the worst offender. I'm trying to work out what's wrong and how to fix it, but until then, it's gonna be wonky at best.

Hopefully I can get it sorted and get back on track with you all, and I'd very much like to actually be able to attend the next LX event I make -_-

 

[Silk]

Opened all the wow ports?

I had to.

 

[Windzarko]

Did that, didn't work. Removed them again, it worked, briefly. I... I just don't get this router. I swear it's become sentient and is working to annoy me.

 

[Windzarko]

Okay... another apology and heads-up. First off, sorry to Sasser, Gid and Astroid for being unable to tank that instance for you. I know that my WoW install corrupting like that isn't my fault, but I still want to apologise for putting you through the trouble of having to get another tank, hope you managed to get the run going after I dropped.

Anyhoo, onto explanation: basically, yesterday the router decided to be kind to me and let me actually download the patch (although the install was corrupt the first time, so I had to redo it), install it, log on, and play. But as soon as I set foot inside the first of the new 5-man instances, my install died on me in a rather spectacular fashion. No amount of clearing cache, disabling mods and all that would let me log in for more than a second, so I ran the repair.exe, which didn't even try to fix my install, it just told me that it was utterly borked and needed to be completely reinstalled.

Now, I don't have the original discs here with me anymore, and I don't have access to any WoW installs that aren't older copies of the one that just died, so I have to download from scratch, which is over 6Gb of downloads before patching, using a not-brilliant downloader (and I can't extract the .torrent from the installer and stick it in my Torrent client of choice like we can do with patches), which I can't run when my housemates are trying to use the net for more than browsing, and which I can't use between 5pm and 11pm every day (or Tiscali will put me on a crappy connection for a week as "punishment").

TL;DR: gonna be a couple of days before I can get back on WoW at all, and whilst I hope to be around for the Friday raid, don't count on my presence just yet.

Again, sorry to the group I was with when it happened, and hope to get back to you all soon.

 

[Sasser]

Sorry to hear (read: read) that, hope you can fix it soon. We managed to find a replacement within minutes, don't worry. But most of all, I want to say "hey boss" in /g again...

 

[Huung]

Steal the install from Baldi/Brad?

 

[Windzarko]

Steal the install from Baldi/Brad?

Their install is derived from mine. Hell, pretty much everyone in Lincoln has played using my install at some point; if you ever played in the Games Lab, it was probably my one. It just got copied everywhere

I'm going for a fresh install and going to start over and get it up to 3.3 from scratch, then back that up; hopefully, that'll give me a better backup to fall back on should this happen again.

 

[Huung]

Their install is derived from mine. Hell, pretty much everyone in Lincoln has played using my install at some point; if you ever played in the Games Lab, it was probably my one. It just got copied everywhere

Yay, I played in the lab in first year, got my only ever BoE epic whilst levelling Huung in there

I would have offered you my install/high speed interwebs, but I'm back from Lincoln now

 

[Pwnstar]

Pretty sure Huungs install is a descendant of mine, which in turn was a descendant of Lith's.. Yup you are in fact the Alpha and Omega...

 

[Huung]

Pretty sure Huungs install is a descendant of mine, which in turn was a descendant of Lith's.. Yup you are in fact the Alpha and Omega...

Was til it got corrupted... which I therefore can blame Mr Lithy for

 

[Windzarko]

*advances on router with oversized hammer* There's only one true way to fix a network...

 

[Windzarko]

What did I do? Honestly, what have I done that required the gods to lean down and curse all technology I use?

I FINALLY got the install working, and the router's calmed down. I even managed to do some instances. Go away for a bit, come back, computer's apparently had a brain fart and is "turned on" but blank screen. Fair enough, I reboot it. And now it's asking for re-activation of Windows with no grace period, and unable to connect even though the router can detect it being connected.

I might try phoning up later, since it IS a legal copy of Windows, but seriously... what the fuck? It was the ONE thing I had left that was working, but nooo... I now have a DS with a touch screen that detects all touches as being on the extreme right of the screen, I have a crazy laptop with memory issues, a wonky OS and a borked power supply, and now this...

F. M. L.

 

[KillCrazy]

I think you have a much bigger problem than your router. If files were corrupt with your wow install, and now suddenly windows has spazzed out, it may be possible that there is something in your pc failing, possible your hard drive?

 

[thatbloke]

I think you have a much bigger problem than your router. If files were corrupt with your wow install, and now suddenly windows has spazzed out, it may be possible that there is something in your pc failing, possible your hard drive?

Indeed. Possibly the HD, possibly the PSU, also possibly the GFX card

 

[Haven]

I think its time to start over with your PC by the sounds of things. Make sure its not overheating and clean it/fix it if it is. Backup all your data including your wow install and re-install from scratch. If you're motherboard support SMART status monitoring then enable it for your disks and also run disk check once you have windows up and running again.

If you have any external USB drives then you can run wow from them which is handy being able to run live from the backup.

For your router, update the firmware and check the temperature. Most routers are passively cooled and do not handle being sat near a heat source (PC/Lamp/Radiator) well so clean it out and put it on a raised area with a bit of airflow.

Here endeth haven's sunday sermon.

 

[Windzarko]

The router's fine now; I'm using a custom firmware that seems to be doing the trick.

Also, the WoW install I had to redo I now suspect corrupted because of a bad download of the 3.3 patch (I redownloaded the 3.3 patch along with all the other patches to get the new install from 3.0 to 3.2.2a, which is likely why it's fine now).

Once I get it going again, yeah, I'll be running every check I possibly can on Windows and the hardware, and also praying that I have enough space to backup everything I need to as a just-in-case.

Not so sure it's a power issue, since I upgraded the PSU a while back and it's shown more reliability than the old one from the get-go.

Um... dunno anything about SMART with a mobo, so I'll poke around once I get Windows reactivated.

I also have a hunch as to why it did this, involving the USB ports and my external hard-drive.. the USB port power management for my machine has seemed a tad... off... for a while now. Given myself shocks more than once when plugging stuff in, and the last thing I did before Windows went wonky was plug in my external hard-drive, then wondered away for ten minutes and came back to find the computer had switched itself off, then booted up with this Windows issue...

 

[Haven]

If you're getting shocks from your USB then if its a powered peripheral stop using it! - its likely fecked and will hose your motherboard eventually. If its not a powered peripheral then its your motherboard/usb-pci card thats knackered. The third option is that the usb port is physically damaged - mark it off with tape and use another one.

PSU issues manifest as random restarts - if you're getting those then check that out.