Oh Great, More News

I received my new graphics card in the mail on Monday. It's an ATI Radeon 9600 XT with 256 megs of RAM. After testing many games (Battlefield 1942, UT2004, DOOM 3, Far Cry, Thief III: Deadly Shadows, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic), I can say that it was a good purchase. I'm so happy that I can play DOOM 3 and Thief III now!

Life was great. Until . . .

Yesterday I needed to free up disk space to install a game, so I uninstalled DOOM 3. As it was unistalling, Norton Antivirus kept popping up saying "Waiting for a scan of (such and such a file)." After a few occurrences, it stopped. I later decided to uninstall another game, and an error message popped up saying that the Installshield iKernal.exe was corrupted. I attempted to uninstall a few more games, and the same error message appeared. In addition to no longer being able to uninstall anything, I couldn't install anything for the same reason. I was very screwed. I think that somehow Norton corrupted the file by trying to scan the crap out of everything. I don't know the reason for sure, but I blame Norton. So at 3:30 PM, I began searching on the internet and on Microsoft's site for help with the problem . . . alright, this is getting boring . . . I basically followed all the instructions I could find on how to fix it, and nothing worked. So I decided to reinstall Windows XP. I backed up all my important files by moving them via our wireless network to our family PC, and burning the files on CDs. This process took a very long time. I formatted my hard drive in the meantime (a two hour process), then began the installation. Once it was complete, I spent another few hours getting my wireless network running again and installing Windows updates and drivers. So, I basically worked non-stop from 3:30 PM until nearly 1:00 AM. I still had a few more updates to work on this morning. The point of this terribly drawn out, utterly boring narrative is to explain why my Friday night sucked.