I was minding my own business, killing a few mobs on LOTRO in Mirkwood* when my screen went beige.
As in "the entire screen turned into one single beige block and the computer began emitting a BRAAAAAAP sound" sort of beige.
Having seen this sort of thing before I knew what it meant: my PC's video card decided to give up the ghost.
"But I clean the damn thing regularly!" I exclaimed, shaking a fist at the screen.
My wife heard me from the other room, even though she was in the middle of a tight game of Mario Kart online. "What's going on?" she asked.
I recycled the computer in a futile attempt to recover the thing, sighed, and walked over to the tv room. "I think the video card just died."
"Weren't you just talking about..."
"...thinking of upgrading parts of the thing? Yes, but--" I turned and shook my fist in the general direction of my office "--NOT NOW!!"
"So... what are you going to do? What does a replacement cost?"
"About $150 or so. I'm going to see if the motherboard has Intel integrated graphics capability so that we can limp along for a month or two."
A few hours --and one abortive attempt to try to use the old NVidia graphics card out of our previous PC**-- later, I managed to expose the previously hidden DVI connection for the Intel HD Graphics 4000 and get the machine back up and running.
I figured it couldn't hurt to try LOTRO, since it's a pretty old MMO, and fired it up.
That was a mistake.
I had to lower the graphics quality to "low" in order to get a fairly smooth (if you want to call it that) experience in Mirkwood. I quickly realized this wasn't going to work, and switched to Civ IV instead.
Civ IV worked better, until the graphics froze, locking the system.
This happened multiple times until I threw up my hands in disgust.
"Well," I told my wife, "you can watch videos, but don't try to tax the system too much, or it'll just die on you. It's something we'll have to deal with for the time being."
Alas, gaming is about to be shelved for a while.
Not that I don't have things to write about --I do-- but it would be nice to actually, you know, play something after a long day at work.
Somewhere, Murphy is laughing. I'm sure of it.
*Yes, I finally made it to Mirkwood. I'm kind of aware that the Moria questline will go back and forth for a while, but I don't know how it'll ultimately end up. We'll see, I suppose.
**The machine bitched like you wouldn't believe, so I gave up.
As in "the entire screen turned into one single beige block and the computer began emitting a BRAAAAAAP sound" sort of beige.
Having seen this sort of thing before I knew what it meant: my PC's video card decided to give up the ghost.
"But I clean the damn thing regularly!" I exclaimed, shaking a fist at the screen.
My wife heard me from the other room, even though she was in the middle of a tight game of Mario Kart online. "What's going on?" she asked.
I recycled the computer in a futile attempt to recover the thing, sighed, and walked over to the tv room. "I think the video card just died."
"Weren't you just talking about..."
"...thinking of upgrading parts of the thing? Yes, but--" I turned and shook my fist in the general direction of my office "--NOT NOW!!"
"So... what are you going to do? What does a replacement cost?"
"About $150 or so. I'm going to see if the motherboard has Intel integrated graphics capability so that we can limp along for a month or two."
***
A few hours --and one abortive attempt to try to use the old NVidia graphics card out of our previous PC**-- later, I managed to expose the previously hidden DVI connection for the Intel HD Graphics 4000 and get the machine back up and running.
I figured it couldn't hurt to try LOTRO, since it's a pretty old MMO, and fired it up.
That was a mistake.
I had to lower the graphics quality to "low" in order to get a fairly smooth (if you want to call it that) experience in Mirkwood. I quickly realized this wasn't going to work, and switched to Civ IV instead.
Civ IV worked better, until the graphics froze, locking the system.
This happened multiple times until I threw up my hands in disgust.
"Well," I told my wife, "you can watch videos, but don't try to tax the system too much, or it'll just die on you. It's something we'll have to deal with for the time being."
***
Alas, gaming is about to be shelved for a while.
Not that I don't have things to write about --I do-- but it would be nice to actually, you know, play something after a long day at work.
Somewhere, Murphy is laughing. I'm sure of it.
*Yes, I finally made it to Mirkwood. I'm kind of aware that the Moria questline will go back and forth for a while, but I don't know how it'll ultimately end up. We'll see, I suppose.
**The machine bitched like you wouldn't believe, so I gave up.
Ahh, that sucks. In-built graphics are really useless for gaming these days. You can browse the web and watch videos, but anything else is just too much.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I knew that the old Intel integrated graphics was worse than the AMD equivalent --I'd deliberately chosen the A10 processor and its corresponding integrated graphics for just that reason-- I just didn't realize just HOW much worse. I was perusing data last night and found the 4000 was several graphics card levels below the AMD equivalent on the laptop we'd bought 4 years ago. "Ah, that explains a lot," I mused.
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