Mekablog

Just thought I’d post an update to my computer situation for all 3 of you who read this stuff.

I called the Alienware tech support guys a few days ago (Monday, I think it was). It turns out I may not have to send away my entire machine to get serviced. Apparently lots of people who bought the m9700 were having problems with their wireless hardware. It was causing all sorts of problems including BSODs (imagine that). So I finally got my new wireless card today in the mail and installed it. And it works! Hooray, for the first time in over a year I can actually use my wireless The tech support guy I talked to said that it was possible that the wireless could also cause the odd problems I was having with other things (like the Vega map editor BSODing/crashing when I try to paste something, etc). So he wanted me to take care of that first and foremost to rule it out. However, this does not seem to be the case. The wireless works great, but I’m still stuck with my other weird problems. I’m happy that I got the wireless taken care of, but frankly my main concern was figuring out why in the hell I’m getting this other weird crashes and errors. Yesterday I found out that GIMP will crash as soon as I open the ‘File’ menu and WMP completely refuses to play any videos (however Winamp plays videos just fine).

So today, after I got the wireless card installed and working, I asked the tech support people what else I could try to diagnose the problem. I told him I thought it was either the video card or possibly the RAM/chipset causing the problems. He suggested that I try to run the memory diagnostic test again (the one that I did with Supergod) with one stick at a time (I have two, 1GB sticks in this machine). Apparently having both in can sometimes cause inaccurate results, so I’m going to do that again. He also suggested that I run 3DMark06 to see if it’s a video card related issue. My gut is telling me it doesn’t have anything to do with the video cards (since I haven’t had any other noticeable problems out of them). I really think it’s RAM-related or something deeper than that (possibly with the mobo).

I was going to run the tests tonight and then post my findings in this post, but it’s already pretty late and I’ve got to get up early in the morning to go out of town. So it’ll have to wait a bit. But when I do get some results, I’ll make yet another boring post about it Wish me luck!