This laptop is really killing me. It's weird how it'll randomly whack out on me. If it were a loose connection between the system board and the monitor, I would expect the monitor to go black. Instead, the screen goes white. This leads me to believe there's something wrong between the video card and the hard drive. The video card isn't receiving the right signal, so it goes white. I guess I would think it'd go black if it weren't getting a signal, but maybe it's overloading. It's also a bit unusual that the screen with go white more often when I'm in City of Villains. If it were just a random connection, I would expect it to whack out at the same frequency regardless of what I am doing. But it can't just be a CoV problem because it will flash briefly when I'm not in the game. That another unusual fact. The white will last much longer if I'm in CoV. It's possible that this is a virus, though I don't really believe that. I don't think a virus would randomly stop when the laptop was tilted. But it doesn't always fix itself when the laptop is tilted, so that's not a valid solution.
Looks like I'll be calling HP today. Hopefully I can get it to Laptops Plus tomorrow, and get it back on Tuesday. Then I can submit it on Wednesday to get a new one by Monday. Though I suppose the offices might be closed for Thanksgiving as well ... doh! See, our school has a three strike policy on the laptops. If you have three HP case numbers for the repairs, you can get a new laptop from the school. This is obviously what I'm going to do. I really like these laptops, but they kinda suck when it comes to problems. What is a little unnerving, though, is that CoV has problems with a certain ATI video card. I have an NVIDIA in this laptop, but the new ones have ATI cards. I don't know if it's the problematic card, but still. I'm a tad worried.
***
So I was playing CoV last night and I ran into another sort of problem. Occasionally, a contact will say a mission is going to be tough and that you'll need some teammates. I usually just ignore this, because I can handle mobs fairly well now. Last night was different, though. There was an Arch-Villain in that mission! Luckily, I can run fairly fast; so I just ran away from the fight. Then my screen went white, so I had to log off. I might attempt to solo that mission, except I don't trust my screen to handle it. Jerk screen.
I still haven't trained my character up to 23. I guess I'll put one enhancement slot in my end stealing power, and another slot in my health stealing power. I'm about halfway to 24, but I still don't know what power I want to take. Oh well.
***
Without CoV, I think I'll be experimenting in Visual Studio. My friends and I have already started thinking about what we'd like to do for final project. We're not too sure what the new syllabus will be like. Students used to be able to choose their teams and their game, but the advisory board didn't approve of that. So I guess the teachers will be choosing the game for us, and that makes me worried. See, I'm pretty sure the game will be graded on story, gameplay, and performance. If they give us a game idea, we'll have to flesh out the story, which will suck. If we could make our own, we'd be making a Mech Tactics game. The rest of the team are really into tactics games like Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced. I'm guessing it's pretty similar to Fire Emblem, but I could be wrong. Since I'm too cheap to buy games, I haven't played Final Fantasy TA, so I don't know exactly what they're looking for. So I might be working on random tasks that don't specifically have to do with gameplay. I'm thinking I'll be doing networking. I might be the only one on the team that has had some experience with networking a program, and I still have that program from CoD. I probably have the book here too, but I can't remember which book it is. We're pretty sure that the game has to be 3D, and we think it also has to be networked. We'll see.
posted at 3:05 PM
4 comments
4 Comments:
I'd guess the white flashes are something with your video card, or it's connection to the motherboard. All black could indicate no signal from the card to the monitor. All white, on the other hand, is possibly data of all 1's from the motherboard to the video card. So, the connection may be just loose enough that a data lead is not making a connection and the result is all 1's in the datastream.
Or, maybe, there's a bad section of memory, and the video card is doing direct memory access to load images. Or, maybe the video card cache is flaky. Lot's of possibilities.
There should be a connection from hard drive to video card. Even if you were doing something like playing DVD, the data path would go from the had drive to the motherboard to the video card.
Final Fantasy TA is like Fire Emblem with 3D terrain and without counterattacks. Also, defeated characters will come back for the next fight and you can customize each character alot more.
There are counters...you just need to have learned the right skill. Basically FFTA is kind of like Fire Emblem, but you learn lots of different types of skills depending on what items you have equiped. It takes some time to learn it, during which you gotta keep the item equipped. After you learn the skill though, you can use it even without the item. There some other differences, but its the same basic idea.
When I say DVD, of course, I mean a downloaded video. Duh me.
Either way, the video card is real unlikely to have a disk controller, either hard drive or DVD, which usually use the same controller logic anyway.
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