Benie's General Blog

Probably not, but Windows 7 has sold me. I’ve proved Bethesda wrong by them saying Fallout 3 is not compatible with 7.

Not only is it compatible, but it’s more stable than it ever has been when I had XP. So far I’ve had not one BSOD or lock up.
I have completed the Wasteland Survival Guide. I got GNR to sing all over the Capital Wasteland. I took care of the AntAgonizer and the Mechanist. I got Ivan back to Arefu during the Blood Ties quest. And now I’m going to Vault 92 to get that violin for that sweet old lady so she can play her music.

This isn’t the best thing since sliced bread. But it’s just as awesome.

EDIT: I said I wasn’t going to do it until I got close to completing the main quest, but I finally did it; installed the GOTY edition to get the DLCs installed. I was confident enough my computer was stable to handle them.

I played Point Lookout. Nothing like new areas to explore, and new enemies to kill. But as the boat guy said, they make the Super Mutants look like Radroaches. Something like that anyway. If it’s not like that, that’s how I put it.

Anyway, it’s a great DLC. But I’m not typing this to talk about the fun I had with them. This is about how stable Fallout 3 is with the DLCs installed.
In Point Lookout, as I was playing spy games, I went into the sub. A few seconds after it loaded came my first SYSTEM LOCK UP.
I tried to wave it off as a first time thing. Since it didn’t happen again for quite sometime. AKA I made it through the other DLCs fine.

However there was more lock ups on the horizon. This one was in The Pitt. Though I can’t remember what I was doing at the time. I shrugged it off by saying “it locked up before in The Pitt with my lock up issue”.

The next lock up happened after I set the nukes to destroy the huge satellite, that I was inside of, in Broken Steel.
When I attempted to escape, and the Virdibird came, tried to get in.. BAM!

And now we have two lock ups that happened just today! Joy.. I swear they’re becoming more frequent now. Next one was attempting to trigger the Head of State quest. Was approaching the gate out of the subway to The Mall. Inches before I got there, BAM.

And the latest was trying to help the idiotic group of slaves to the Lincoln Memorial. Yes, you can completely bypass this but I wanted to protect them. I was bored. 😛
Hannibal was going the wrong fucking way. Checked my map and he was leading the group RIGHT BACK TO THE FUCKING START POINT!! D:<
I yelled at them, and standing infront of the confused, lost idiot of an NPC, only for him to just walk right past me. They met an Albino Radscorpion and "Quest FAILED" showed up.

"FUCK IT" I said. Then I tried reloading my save and tried going the correct way to the memorial. Met a Super Mutant Overlord under this overpass infront of us. Killed it. Tried to loot the body.. BAM again!

UGH! I don’t know what’s more annoying. Hannibal going the wrong way, or my computer acting like the lock up issue is back!
And if that’s not bad enough, there was this one time I was going under this gap in this building, my FPS tanks, music studdering. It wasn’t the fact it made it unplayable, but I could feel the “What in the fuck is this?! My computer surpasses the recommended
requirements! It should NOT be studdering!!”
At least restarting the game fixed it.

There was also this time I was listening to GNR while following along side the slow-ass slave group. Listening to Three-Dog as he was doing one of his Public Service Announcements when I noticed a few Feral Ghouls next to a highway pillar. They engaged. We killed them. But before I could say “What are Feral Ghouls doing up here?”, Three-Dog did his “And now, some music…” and it was silence. Pure silence.

Checked my iPip Player. Same thing. That old lady’s violin station, same thing! Restarting the game fixed it.

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I just don’t understand. Without the DLCs, I had NO problems. Not one! When I had XP, I couldn’t even get past the Super-Duper Mart without a BSOD, and this was with no DLCs on top of it.
This time, it doesn’t BSOD. It just flat-out locks the system up, forcing me to manually restart. But it doesn’t do it at level load anymore.

What’s worse, and I hope it’s not related to Fallout 3. My own god damn screen saver locked my system up once!!

It’s been 6 hours since I turned my system on after removing a nasty Trojan virus, and everything’s still working OK *knocks on wood*.

I’ve been doing an Antivirus scan. It nearly finished when my system locked up. Called the shop and they told me it could be Spyware that’s infecting my system.
After restoring my previous working version of my Windows install, I downloaded every Spyware finder I could, including SUPERAntiSpyware.

Was talking to Fishy about what was going on when the program detected something different from Cookies. A Trojan!
‘Trojan.Agent/Gen-Rogue[Installer]’ was what it was called. I stopped the scanner and told it to remove, and it told me to restart. So I did.

Windows 7 booted up beautifully after that. No black screen. No nothing abnormal! Decided to check the log to see what caused the infection. It was pointing to my C drive backup folder, on my E drive…
The file infected was this “ANTI-MALWARE-APPLICATION.EXE”. I don’t remember downloading this thing.

I redid the scan and noticed the same Trojan pops up again. This time on my F drive. Same folder structure and file name.
Where did this file come from? How was it able to work itself perfectly to fit in my C drive backup folder?
Nevertheless, it’s gone and my system is running normally again. I should be grateful that I was able to remove this thing. Not all Trojans are this easy to remove.

I’m not even 100% certain I’ve seen the last of this virus.
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In other news, Valve has released a very… strange update to Portal. We now have these radios, like the one in the first test chamber when you wake up. Except these have a light that stays red until you hit a point and begin to hear a strange sound. On top of it, there’s a new achievement for it. 26 radios. Can you find them all?

The signals could possibly be pointing to “HL2: EP3 release date here”. These signals can actually be converted into pictures. Some point to the Borealis.
All of the sounds are named “Dinosaur” for some strange reason.

Minecraft, coding, my computer, and angry. Four things that should not mix. Especially what just happened 15 minutes ago.
I wanted a way that something would automatically make a map backup. Angry helped set up a script to do this.

However the script isn’t perfect. It launches, trying to find the server even if Minecraft isn’t running. He had me put a few things in.. things I believe caused a five-alarm scare.

Started as a typical late Monday morning. Browsing Facepunch. Listening to Pandora. Angry’s in bed. Right at 3:30AM, my system locks up for no good reason.
I try to do a restart, notice how much longer it’s taking to boot. See a black screen. No desktop. No nothing, except my mouse cursor.
I click the left mouse button, both screens flicker, keyboard locks up, mouse is stuck with an hourglass cursor, but not frozen.
Then I see this transparent white overlay covering both screens.

Everytime I attempted to restart, same..fucking..thing! I panic, grab my cell phone and try to send a voice txt message to angry, pleading for assistance. I know he’s asleep, but I was hoping when he’s in school, he’ll use it and hear my plead, knowing I’m fucked and have taken my computer up to the shop.

What was good is Windows was still working in Safe Mode. I tried to disable angry’s files from executing, hoping that would stop this. Couldn’t get the Schedule Tasks window to show in Safe Mode.
So I tried moving his files to a temp folder, thinking that if the scheduler doesn’t find the file needed, it won’t launch and stop this.
I was wrong…

Again, to Safe Mode. I notice the popup to the right, saying I could restore my system to an earlier state. It recommended I selected the one after I updated Paint.NET.
Did it, system restarted… saw the desktop! YES!!

My nerves are still on edge from the ordeal, and I’m concerned it may happen again. But this system backup was before angry had me make changes to his files. And now that I got the scheduler disabled for the backup task, it shouldn’t happen.
If it does, I’ll be forced to take it up to the shop.
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UPDATE: It’s still doing it. Turned on my computer this morning, same thing I got. Called the shop. They told me they probably won’t be able to get me in today.
Angry responded to my pleading voice txt, saying he’ll try his best to fix it when he gets home from school.

I tried an idea by inserting my burned Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit DVD into my drive. Attempted to do a repair. It recommended I do another system restore, so I did it. And now it seems to be working OK.. for how long I don’t know. I’m doing Antivirus scans and everything else I can think of to isolate the issue. I’m hoping it’s not necessary to take it up to the shop and just fix this on my own.

I really don’t know if this is angry’s doing at all. It could be a virus. The fact the program in question launched perfectly before I ran Minecraft, is baffling. That’s why it has to be something else. Something I downloaded by mistake.

One odd thing about this. When I was doing the Windows Repair, it listed Windows being on my E drive instead of my C drive. Yet in Windows Explorer, there’s no WINDOWS folder on my E drive.
And then there’s the ironic thing. After my system “recovered” from.. whatever this is, the Action Center flag icon popped up and recommended I back up my files.
I try, and when it lists the drives, it doesn’t show my C drive being in it. Yet it does in Windows Explorer. Also lists my E drive as the recommended destination for the file backup.

It’s nothing big, but it surprised me when I logged into Facepunch today. An announcement post stating I’ve ‘been made’ a gold member, when it was a few months ago.

I’m guessing the reason is to welcome new goldies that don’t know about the change.

Here’s what it looks like;

But I’m still thinking of the “what if”‘s, and it’s kinda driving me crazy.
How did I come up with the money to pay for Windows 7? I didn’t. In the Gold Forum of Facepunch, there’s a guy giving out free, genuine Windows CD Keys.
The fact he’s a college student, and paid a certain amount of money, he can legally do this.

So I PMed and got a key for Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit, and an ISO for it.
I got the ISO on a DVD-R, and have been writing down a step by step list to print out using father’s computer once again, to be used for tomorrow. But my brain keeps being filled with “what if”.

Such as; “What if the key is wrong?”, “What if the installation fails?”, “What if my computer isn’t 64-bit compatible?”, “What if my games start crashing after installing 7?”, and one important one…”What if Fallout 3 still BSODs on me?”

If only I could see into the future and turn these “what if”‘s into “this will” or “this won’t happen”‘s.
But I guess the only real way to know is to take one foot forward into this and go.