I know that I promised some map screenshots a few posts ago, but things have grinded to a screeching halt lately. They’ll come sometime soon though, I promise :wink:
So I recently bought and built my very on computer recently. My bud Super Jaime, who is a wiz at these things, helped me find the hardware I needed for my budget/needs. So I bought the parts a few weeks ago and they arrived pretty quickly. Fast forward to about a week-and-a-half ago. I was in the process of moving to a new room in the house, so the computer parts had to sit in the kitchen until I could get around to putting the thing together. Also school had started, so that was delaying me. I finally got all of my furniture and belongings in my new room, so I quickly settled myself in and mentally prepared myself to get the computer put together. That next day I set out everything I needed to start building the thing and then went at it.
Thanks to Super Jaime, I had a handy guide to go off of, which was an enormous help. My biggest fear was inadvertently destroying or messing up one of the components. I have a bad habit of destroying things, so I was wary of each step I took. The build was about as nerve racking as I thought it would be, but I eventually got it together after a bit of trial and error (when I make my official post with pictures, I’ll go into more detail). Up to the point where I was finally able to get it to boot into POST/BIOS, that was probably half of the day gone. At this point I find out that my OS disk didn’t burn properly, so I was stuck with Windows XP for a bit. My plan was to redownload the OS, burn it, verify it’s integrity, and then wipe the HDD and install it. Well things didn’t really go as planned from that point on. As I worked in XP, I started getting lots of errors and random BSODs, so alarms started going off in my head. By this point I’m thinking I must have ESD’d some component accidentally and my mood starts to sour. Well long story short, after cross-checking the BSOD error code and doing some troubleshooting, it turned out that I had a bad stick of RAM. More than likely it was DOA as I’m 95% sure I touched the case before handling any components to discharge any static that built up on me. So I get my RMA from Newegg and ship the thing off for a replacement. And that’s where I’m standing right now. I’m back to my 13-year old box for doing school work and light web browsing. Thankfully I don’t have to use the awful out-of-focus CRT monitor that came with it; I was able to hook up my brand new 24.6″ HD Samsung TV/Monitor. The thing is super sweet (the monitor, that is) 
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Right now I’m waiting for the part to reach it’s destination of somewhere in the middle of California; I think it should be delivered by tomorrow. Provided there aren’t any problems with the exchange, I should have the replacements in by this time next week. Maybe sooner, but that’s what I’m guessing. I’m surprised my patience has held out this long; I picked a bad time to ship something because of Labor Day and what have you, so it took a little longer than it probably should have. At any rate, I’m still able to do my school work just fine (so far) given the age of this computer, so that’s what really counts. Beyond that, I’ve been pretty bored since I can’t really work on Vela Pax or Supplice 
. Although I’ve been playing through some map sets for inspiration and to keep my mind busy. I actually just finished playing through Espi’s Back to Basics and I’m working on Scythe II and Suspended in Dusk again. I also recently play-tested Jade Earth by Jodwin. It’s a really awesome, huge map and you, my loyal readers, should most definitely check it out once it’s released publicly.