Is where I level my geek-fu

Amongst the things that I love are my computer (not in an unhealthy way thanks!) and the internets. When I manage to learn something new in regards to both that makes me happy. I like learning new things period so learning something new about stuff I'm really interested in is a bonus.

I've mentioned in another post that I have been experiencing some nasty frame rate issues in 25 man raids and I'd been looking into updating my PC. I had the plan in train when Emelin's PC decided to die a nasty motherboard failure kind of death. I swear it was a plot since it meant that Emelin's PC got rebuilt and I had to spend the weekend listening to him drooling over the awesome smoothness and beautiful appearance of the game with everything cranked up whilst I dealt with staring at the floor during the Tidewalker fight with every setting down to try and deal some decent DPS.

You can be certain that Monday morning I immediately proceeded to arrange the upgrade of my PC! I am lucky enough to work in an industry where I can get my hands on hardware at a cheaper cost than retail and prevail on an awesome helpful workmate to help me rebuild my PC. I opted for an Intel Core2 Quad CPU, gigabyte motherboard with both DDR2 and DDR3 slots (for future upgradability) and 4 x 1gig sticks of DDR2 RAM. I'd recently bought a new Gigabyte nVidia GeForce 9600 GT card so I naturally hung onto this. My mate installed the hardware for me and in an absolutely unheard of unbelievable act of god was able to reboot into Windows afterward - so no reformatting/reinstall needed. Crazy! There was one small hitch however - I didn't have a spare IDE cable for my DVD burner - solution grab a new SATA one. This is where my opportunity to improve my geek-fu came in as it was the end of the day and I was to pick the burner up on my way home and install it myself and then install the motherboard drivers.

Computers are generally like cars for me - I know how to drive them, I know how to maintain them but I'm not down with the stuff 'under the hood'. For me this was the equivalent of learning how to do an oil change - not rocket science but not something I was familiar with. So now I know the difference between IDE and SATA cables and would feel comfortable installing something like this again. Yay me! I can also happily report that after a few bumps I got my baby up and running again and was able to log into WoW, crank all the settings and enjoy frame rates of around 90 in Shatt. Of course the real test will be this weekend in TK. Fingers crossed!

Can I just say that, although I will always consider game mechanics more important than shiny graphics in a game, warcraft looks really gorgeous when you can see all the nice graphical touches. Yay! Shiny!

The other area where I was able to level my geek-fu was with a little CSS. I think I've mentioned before that I work with a bunch of web-designers and that, plus having my own blog, is causing a little design-fu to rub off on me which is great. I was able to use this power for the good by helping Grizz with some small formatting changes on his wordpress blog. All hail the power of Firebug!