Sunday, November 21, 2010

11/21/10 - I'm Not Thankful for Long Laptop Examinations

Hello everybody, SlimKirby here, ready for another blog entry!

Last week, things really weren’t going that well for me, and to be perfectly honest, they still really aren’t. Since I’m already talking about it, I guess that will be the first thing I discuss.

If you couldn’t figure it out yet, that’s right, I still do not have my laptop back. At this time I am actually writing this entry using a loaner laptop from my university’s computer care place. Now, I know what you guys are thinking; “But SlimKirby, I thought you said last week that you should have everything solved by the start or middle of this week?” Well, it turns out that I was dead wrong, because at the end of the week, nothing has really been solved yet. For those of you wondering “How?” or “Why?” or “What in the hell is actually going on?” I’m honestly looking for the answers to those questions as well, because nobody seems to really know what the heck is going on with my laptop.

I’m not going to talk about the problem again, or rather, how the problem started, so if you are just joining the blog scene this week, I explain the problem to the full extent in the last entry, so you may want to look at that if you have no idea what I’m talking about. Anyway, on Monday morning I took my laptop in for the university computer experts to examine, and right off the bat I got some pretty bad news. The person at the desk said my hard-drive was most definitely failing on the Windows side, but not only that, the failure had already started going towards the Mac side as well. This of course put me in a very uneasy mood from the very beginning, but they did tell me that they were going to do anything they could to make sure that I had the machine back in the evening. So later that day, 30 minutes before the place was supposed to close, I went back and checked in with the computer peeps just to see how things were progressing. They did tell me that they were still running some diagnostic tests, and that they wouldn’t be done until the next day, so I was like, “Ok, but for the meantime, can I at least get a laptop to borrow until this problem is solved?” and they allowed me to use a loaner until Wednesday. This way, I figured I could at least use the computer until Wednesday, so if they didn’t call me on Tuesday, I wouldn’t have to worry about going back to check in again and give them ample time to finish whatever the heck they were doing.

Fast-forward to Wednesday afternoon! I did end up receiving a phone call that day, but because I had an all-nighter the night before working on a big homework assignment, I was not in a very perceptive mood when I got the call (in fact, at that point I was napping trying to get some energy after that night). The lady could have asked “Will you join me in a hostile takeover of America?” and I would have been like “Yeah…no…whatever, bye,” immediately zonking off back to sleep right after. So I went back later that day and got a pretty good status update, considering. They said they were still running diagnostics, but they at least gave me a little more confidence that the problem would get solved. Not only that, but they also extended my loaner laptop until after Thanksgiving Break, just in case the problem didn’t get solved. They also gave me a number I could call to check in every now and then if I wanted an update on the status. So overall, while they essentially accomplished nothing over the last two days, I was a lot less worried than I was on Monday, and they convinced that they were at least doing something to fix the problem and not just hitting the machine over and over again with a hammer.

Now we are fast-forwarding to Friday! I didn’t check in on Thursday, because like Tuesday, I wanted to make sure that I gave them a little more time to work on things so I wasn’t just breathing down their necks the whole time. So I called them on Friday at around noon, and sure enough, the same lady who gave me such a worry on Monday picked up and was all like, “You’re laptop is not happy! We tried this and this and this, and it’s failed 3 times! You are a horrible person for even installing Windows on a Macbook because Apple bribes us with money to say these things!” Ok, so she didn’t actually say the last thing, but that’s seriously what I feel like whenever she is the one talking to me. She basically gave me a “We don’t know what’s wrong or what’s going on, so we’re running even more tests, but if you would like a better update, you can call back in an hour when our expert isn’t eating lunch,” type of update. So I called back one hour later, and thankfully I got to talk to someone who wasn’t that peach (I use the word “peach” now, instead of the actual b-word, because Princess Peach is a b-word! =D). They essentially told me the same thing, but they promised me that they were not going to give up on me and asked for my patience over the long weekend. I liked the person who I was talking to, so I decided to comply and be nice about it. They had been working on it for an entire week, among many other laptops as well, so even if they do work for a satanic company like Apple, they had been putting a lot of work specifically into my machine, so I had to give them a little credit.

So here I am, one week after I originally had the problem, still not really sure what the problem even is. I still can’t record, I still can’t do any of my homework that involves programming unless I go to a computer lab, and I still can’t continue to dominate the randomly-generated world of my most recent Civilization II file. It sucks, but those are the cards I have been dealt with for this week, and unfortunately I might have to hold on to these cards for a few more weeks as well, if the problem continues. I have definitely decided that when I’m home over break, I am going to start talking to my parents about getting another laptop because I’ve had it with the problems of this one. As I said before, it’s a great laptop, but it just has too many problems that I shouldn’t be dealing with, and doesn’t provide me with the necessities that I need for a laptop. Plus, it has the whole hard-drive space issue I think I mentioned in the last entry. It would be so much easier if I had a desktop computer, but I couldn’t exactly make much use of that either, considering I’m still living in dormitory residence halls. Maybe after this year when I start doing commutes….

So besides that though, things have been going all right I suppose. Last Friday we actually had a LAN Party at my dorm, and at this party they had a Super Smash Bros. Brawl tournament and a Mario Kart 64 tournament (amongst other tournaments as well, but none of which worth mentioning as far as my game library is concerned). I did enter both tournaments and was actually satisfied with my Super Smash Bros. Brawl placement. I got seventh place out of 32, and had every possibility of advancing further than that considering my two losses (double elimination) were extremely close matches that came down to one lucky strike. Oh well, I guess I will just have to own them all next time. ;) For those of you wondering, I used my main man Diddy Kong in the tournament as a tribute to my most recently completed Let’s Play. =P As for the Mario Kart 64 tournament, I don’t even want to talk about that because that was the most disorganized piece of garbage of a tournament I’ve ever seen. I’m not going to go into details, but tell me if this makes sense; 1) All of the matches were 4-Player matches, 2) Each round was just one race, 3) If you aren’t first, you’re eliminated, 4) One elimination, and you’re out (single elimination). Who in their right, non-ignorant mind would make a Mario Kart tournament based on that? That’s so freaking stupid, considering quite a bit of the game is luck-based. In fact, that’s so stupid, I’m not even going to explain what would have been the right thing to do and end the paragraph here.

Another positive that came out of this party was that I also entered a raffle (I got 3 free submissions into the raffle because I attended and entered two tournaments), and actually won something. I only entered one of the three drawings because they only had a PS3 game, an Xbox360 game, and a Wii game, and since the Wii is the only system I own of those three, that was logically the only one I could get any use out of, so all 3 of my tickets went to that one drawing. And sure enough, the next morning when I woke up, I had an e-mail that said I won. I went downstairs to claim my game, and the game ended up being “No More Heroes.” Besides hearing the name of the game before, I had no idea what the game was actually about or what it consisted of, so last evening I actually sat down to play it for awhile. My first reaction, after playing 2 hours of the game, was pretty much the following: “Holy crap, that’s a lot of blood! O_O” NMH might just be the bloodiest, goriest game I’ve ever played, and I’ve played the Grand Theft Auto games. Safe to say, I was a bit surprised at what I first saw. Not to say I’m completely against blood, gore, and violence in video games, or anything like that, it’s just not what I’m normally used to. I’m more used to seeing goombas getting flattened, and octoroks vanishing after a quick swipe of a sword. Aside from that though, the game doesn’t really seem like a bad video game, but again, I’ve only played a very small portion of it. If I really feel like it, I might cover it in a future “Game Chat” discussion, but a lot of my viewers are pretty young, so in that regard, it’s probably not a good idea unless I “Viewer Discretion” the hell out of that discussion.

Aside from the LAN Party, not much has really been going on in the world of college. Classes and projects are slowly, but surely winding down. I have a nice 3-day break coming up for Thanksgiving this next week, so I’m looking forward to that, especially since I get to see and spend time with my always wonderful family. And then, before you know it, Christmas time will be upon us once again, so hooray for that! =D


Once again, I’m afraid I’m going to be kind of brief with this entry, so no game discussion this week, or Youtube discussion for that matter (not that it would matter, I haven’t exactly posted anything anyways). Hopefully I get some better news this next week with my laptop, and hopefully I can start posting videos again. If not, once again, I am very apologetic with the wait, but there is nothing I can really do about it. I hate not being able to upload just as much as you guys hate not being able to see any my uploads. I might try to figure a few alternatives out as well, but once again, there are no guarantees. I'll also try to have some game discussion up next week as well, considering there are a few games I want to talk about, plus I should have Donkey Kong Country Returns by that point as well. I'll also try to give an update on what will be happening with my Youtube stuff, whether I get my laptop back this next week or not.

I’ll talk to you guys next week for another exciting (hopefully) entry from the mind of SlimKirby!

Later folks!
-SlimKirby

1 comment:

  1. Nice read, it kinda sucks that your laptop isn't back up to speed, but I guess that's life. Maybe for Christmas, Santa could bring you a new one =P

    Anyway, hang in there Slim!

    -GrandPyromania

    ReplyDelete