Repair

Going through the motions of deleting all my Oblivion saves, starting the game again and playing around with it to make sure the "vanilla" game itself was not messing up, and then installing and playing with each plugin one by one... did not really solve anything. The game just likes to hang. Admittedly it has only done so the once and I did not check to see if it came up with the same "game version corrupt flagrant error" message as before.

But that's because the computer wouldn't start up properly for about an hour.

Which leads me to think along the lines of "overheating". However no hardware reports, at any time, that it is in danger of overheating. I've monitored the system's temperature and nothing seems awry. Most vexing.

So at the moment I'm putting it down to a hard drive failure of some sort and I'm using a fall-back 80GB SATA disk rather than the 500GB the PC came with. If the problem persists then I'll know from whence it stems. If not I'll just get another big hard drive and install it alongside the 80GB one (maybe use the 80GB for Windows and applications and use the other one for games).

The suckiest part is having to install all the drivers and updates and applications and utilities that I had on here before. Not to mention find the discs for things like Paintshop/Photoshop Pro or my Wacom. And transfer the entirety of My Documents from the old HDD to the new one via USB drive.

If the hard drive change does not fix anything then I'll have to test each individual piece of hardware. I don't think it's the sound card because this problem was present when I was using the onboard sound (conflicting IRQ addresses - urgh!) a while ago. But that doesn't narrow things down too much and replacing each part one-by-one to find the culprit may end up being a very expensive strategy. Especially if I have to try replacing the processor or graphics card. I may end up getting enough components to build another computer.

Oh yeah it's D&D this Sunday. That really crept up on me. Must be something to do with the "Easter" break. Of course I haven't set up Office 2003 yet and until I do that I won't be able to write, print or edit any documents stored there without using Wordpad and having my eyes bleed as the inferior program attempts to translate columns, horizontal rules, and page indexes.