Death to Video Cards...and Sound...and HD graphics...and...shit

I had a date with Alienware last night. Lasted 3 hours. No Barry White, no candles, no romance. And I still got screwed.

Anyway, so I'm on the phone with Luis, describing my very sporadic video/sound stuttering problem. He's insisting that its GPU overheating. The night before, with the aid of Dennis (An extremely cool Alienware tech) I replaced pretty much all of the drivers, upgraded bios, directx, flash, you name it. He stressed the gpu for a few minutes, and found it to be ok. Tonight though, was a different story. After 3 hours of installing and uninstalling, running tests, analyzing fan speeds and temps--Luis came to the conclusion that I had overheating issues. And no sound--something he did deleted all sound from my computer, so it has to go back now.

I'm not gonna pretend that I'm computer tech savvy. Maybe it is an overheating issue. However, the sporadic nature of the problem, sometimes occuring even upon startup, would leave me to believe that its not. Oh well, they're replacing the cards, the OS, and whatever else they deem necessary. I hope its just a faulty card. It's gonna be a 3 week process. I hope its less.

Jumped on the trusty old macbook. Had to download the last patch, and update my addons--but my latency is far better on OSX, even if the graphics are comparable to playing Zelda on the old NES. I don't know how I did that for so long. I levelled to 80 on a 13 inch screen. Man. This is gonna suck.

/QQ


P.S. I'm in the process of making Hazl a shirt ( a real one he can't DE); cause for some reason he likes to DE the stuff that he's wearing at the time (he's on item #3, btw). For a slogan I've got:
"I DE'd my other shirt."

Anyone have any suggestions for a picture?