Technical Difficulties.

I left Lisa Electron off over break. I come back to discover that the problems seem to have gotten worse. I can’t wait a few more days. I’ll have to format the C: drive (or otherwise convince Windows that it doesn’t exist) and try reinstalling the OS. The T: and E: partitions will be fine. So glad I thought ahead to partition when I got this hard drive. I just. Didn’t think I’d ever have to utilize it…

*ahem*

I should get the OS installed in an hour. Though. Reinstalling everything else might take days. I have most of my programs installed on the E: drive, thankfully. Though. Without the registry, and those random dynamic link libraries (dll) in the system32 folder, Windows won’t recognize their existence. I remember the time when Sims refused to install, because it thought it was already installed – but it wasn’t? Something to do with the expansions. So I had to clean out the registry and trick it into thinking it didn’t exist.

Ha ha. Fiddling with computers is the art of convincing them that they’re Buddhist. YOU HAVE NO SELF!

Reinstall complete. Ready Room and Cargo Bay left untouched. First order of business is to get rid of that god damned go button. I must eat now.

9 PM.

This is bad. I thought everything was solved. I had reinstalled a bunch of stuff. I restarted finally. And now the flickering is back. I can only wonder what did it. Time to fiddle.

9:45 PM

After finding System Restore, I kicked it back to it’s earliest point. I effectively lost all progress I had made in the previous two hours in reinstalling things. However, the flickering has stopped. So something I installed within that timespan is causing the flickering. I have this sneaking suspicion that it is whatever the systemchecker for RAD had me download.

Excuse me, I’m going to get TweakUI back up again, and make Lisa look like it’s supposed to. Then I’ll set a restore point so I don’t have to put my IP address in again, and work from there.

11:30

Over half an hour ago, I finally localized the cause of the flickering: The god damn video card drivers. I set a couple restore points, and tried fiddling. The ones on the CD were good. I used them instead of the ones online because, last year, well. The ones online fucked things up. But. I noticed the drivers online now are current as of March 15 or something. So I figured I’d give them a shot. They made things worse.

So. No video card drivers for me. Great.

Sure, everything works. Except. This means I can’t run anything that uses OpenGL. THAT’S ALL MY FAVORITE GAMES. (Well, except for Sims.)