Free Candy For Everyone

I took my beloved Macbook Pro in to the Apple store yesterday for an attempt to discover why it gets so hot it could cook bacon. That left me without a computer last night, and this was completely unacceptable. I decided to boot up my PC that has been pretty much sitting idle since I last spoke about it. Yeah, it kinda gets neglected.

After installing about a million updates for Windows, I tried to get World of Warcraft in a working order (while I haven’t spoken about WoW in a while I might possibly be more addicted to it right now then I’ve been in a long time, but that’s a topic for a later date). I decided to remove all my old UI addons and just start over since everything I had was so out of date. I was quickly hit with the dreaded User Account Control prompts. “Are you sure you want to do that?” quickly followed by “Do you want to allow permission to do that?” Um, yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. After clicking about a million boxes just so I could delete some files I was getting frustrated.

Then I installed the WoWAce Updater. This is a nice program that will auto download and install addons for you. You just go in and select them and then it does its thing. Well, it was just erroring and erroring. After some searching on the forums I found that I needed to change the folder permissions on the Addon folder it was trying to download to. Hmm, ok, but I’m an Administrator, shouldn’t it just work? I check the folder permissions and admins have full permission, wtf? I decide “hell, I’ll give Users full permissions too.” And that seemed to do the trick, ok, cool.

I load up WoW and my screen explodes in a overload off too many addons, with error boxes popping up left and right. Hmm. I check and ALL MY OLD ADDONS ARE STILL LOADED. I search my harddrive, they’re not in the World of Warcraft Addon folder anywhere. HOW ARE THEY RUNNING? I poke around some more and find a backup directory of old addons in a random folder no where near the game, which I delete. I run the game and they are still all there. I search my ENTIRE HARD DRIVE for those files and they are NO WHERE. So now I’m getting pissed. I blame Vista.

I decide to remove my entire folder for Addons instead of just bits and parts. So I try to move it to my desktop. After clicking a bunch of times that yes, I really want to do that, it then pops up a dialogue telling me I don’t have permission. I AM AN ADMINISTRATOR!!!! I do some searching, change some permisions, and try again. And fail again. I AM AN ADMINISTRATOR!!! Vista doesn’t care, it’s “keeping me safe”. I try changing some other stuff after reading online but ultimately, I do what I should have done from the first, I turn off User Account Control. Thank you. It’s quiet now.

I move the folder and reboot WoW and no addons at all, that’s an improvement! I carefully copy back in everything piece by piece, waiting for it to find deleted addons, but it never does. After maybe an hour or more of fussing, I’m finally in game and ready to play. But boy am I tired.

Ultimately, the performance of my PC is lacking. I mean, that’s alright, it’s probably over 3 years old, it’s amazing it’s still viable at all! But I think I might upgrade the video card and that could be sufficient to keep it working well enough for a few more years. Provided I can find a copy of Windows XP to downgrade to.

I decided it was time to try to bring my Dead PC back to life. My original thought was that it was a hardware failure - a fan was dying and that was causing it to not boot. But I was able to boot into Windows in Safe Mode, just not normal. So my first attempt was to repair Windows.

I have my original Windows XP install CD so I put it in, selected Recovery and figured I’d get something helpful. Um, no. It brought me to a DOS prompt with no info. I decided to just try re-installing Windows. So I got that going and it started copying files and doing its thing. Then it asked me for my CD key. Um. I couldn’t find the stupid piece of paper - the Certificate of Authenticity - anywhere. After a frantic search everywhere I decided to give up. So I rebooted my machine and quickly realized I was hosed. The machine was halfway into the install process and Windows was in no state to boot up.

Fortunately I had recently purchased a copy of Vista for that machine. I hadn’t found the time to install it, so here it was, my chance. I opened up my Vista copy and proceeded through that install. After the painfully slow process completed I actually have a machine that boots.

I quickly realized just how accurate this Mac ad is.

OMG. Seriously. It asks for permission to do everything. And once you’ve given permission to a program it doesn’t seem to remember it. It just keeps asking every time it starts up. That’s just silly.

Other than that, not much to report on the upgrade. I backed up my iTunes library, I tried out using my Xbox 360 as a media extender to stream music from my PC.

I’m not convinced the hardware is completely solid. There still might be something wrong with a fan or some such. But not quite sure how to go about checking out the hardware. For now, I’ll avoid using it more than need be. But it’s good to have my PC in some sort of working order again.