Lies, Damn Lies

The return of the blue screen of death

Before I get down to the anecdote, having a look at the lancet report, I feel quoting the 100,000 death figure happily to be a little uncertain. There is quite a wide confidence interval for the amount of deaths. But it is certainly VERY high- the survey excluded several places because they were seen as anomously high......

Anyways, yes, I hadn't seen the blue screen of death for a long time(if you don't know what the blue screen is death.... do you never use your computer? Its the blue screen that appears with an error message and refuses to ever go away....), but today it made a long awaited return. Half Life 2 was the lucky application to cause it to do this. See, I decided to try it before I bought it, as there was a high possibility that it would not work. So I installed it. This took ages.

Brilliantly, if you attempt to install Half Life 2 without counterstrike, it will fail. Theres a bug in it so it messes up when you attempt this... but not until you've almost finished installation. Bastards.

Anyways, so I install and load it. I fiddle with the graphics options... and it crashes. So far so good....... So I load it again and set it as I like, managing not to break it this time. And start the game! Wooh! OK, first thing I notice, the sound is really poor.... for some reason it doesn't like my speaker system, which seems unfair- normally its my graphics card that messes with it! But I can survive- I'll turn on some subtitles (which then show an entire, huge conversation I couldn' hear, and appears to be happening somewhere a large distance from me...). The game looks.... ok, on my machine, with the lighting being bizzare. But its Half Life 2! Slowed down Half Life2, but still. And then, it hits. The blue screen of death! Randomly, for no reason, its strikes, the results devestating.

I'll wait til Fred gets this new computer of his.......

posted by Mr K @ 5:33 pm