Monday (21 Feb) - Computer Tales of Woe

Monday (21 Feb) - Computer Tales of Woe

Over the weekend my main computer, having been renewed with a complete hard drive wipe and a fresh, pristine install of Windows XP, crashed three times. It crashed twice while in Warcraft, and a third time while doing nothing but copying files. Each time it took several tries to get the computer running again. I'd had enough.

This being President's Day weekend, I figured this was a good time to find a good buy on a computer. I would have thought that any good mid-range computer would be an upgrade to my current computer, which I bought in 2008. Well, what I'd forgoten was that I had been fairly diligent in upgrading the computer over the past two years plus, and the standard offerings came up short of what I already had. I had to go into gaming computer configurations to find something that would actually be an upgrade to my ailing computer. Worse for me was that I was feeling a bit desperate, having spent uncounted hours installing, uninstalling, and fixing things for the past several days with very little to show for it. I just wanted to get a replacement computer that I was happy with, get it set up, and get back to normal. We were also painting Judi's room and doing some heavy duty clean up of the walk-in closet/storage area in that room, so most of the upstairs was in complete disarray.

Saturday afternoon I rejected dozens of potential systems. Most frustrating was that stock systems nearly always skimp on the video card, and that wouldn't do. I ultimately settled on an Acer system that had all of the important components I was looking for, including a decent video card. It's a good system, far better than my old "main" computer. It's also very quiet and saves energy when idle. I probably paid too much for it, but it should last me a good long while.

I then spent the rest of the weekend installing and setting things up to suit me. I'm still not there as of Sunday afternoon, but I have email, and I have WoW. And a system that should work well with the video stuff I do (although that's not yet installed).

I even have some Wild Family news to report. Wild has a new want, and this one is not one that Wild can just tell Happy to go out and buy. There is an element of the Inscription profession that has never much interested our scribe, Philly. Scribes can create darkmoon cards. The cards come in several types, and the type of card created is random. Cards which are collected and assembled into a full deck (Ace through eight) of the same type can be used by scribes to create some pretty nice gear - trinkets, to be specific.

Now Wild enters the picture. He saw a trinket [Darkmoon Card - Tsunami] on the AH that he just had to have. It cost 30,000 gold. No way. Way. NO WAY! I'm not spending 30k gold for one piece of gear, even if there is no other trinket in WoW the equal of the Tsunami outside of a raid. You'll have noticed that the MM guild hasn't raided much. So, what to do? Anyway, Happy would go into hysterics.

The best way to attack what looks like an insurmountable problem is to tackle the challenge in pieces. First of all, the inscription recipe for the Tsunami trinket requires skill 525. Philly is currently at skill 449. First bite out the challenge, then, was to get Philly to skill 525.

Leveling inscription required collecting Cata herbs, and then "milling" those herbs for the ashen pigment that results. The ashen pigment is then crafted into blackfallow ink, which can then be used to make things. JB provided Philly with 12 stacks of cinderbloom herbs to mill. The ink from all that milling was used to make mostly scrolls, and she then graduated to off hands and relics. All that effort got Philly to skill 495.

Once Philly gets to skill 525 she will need to start assembling a card deck by making Darkmoon Cards of Destruction. Each card costs 30 volatile life and ten inferno ink, a rarer ink than blackfallow. For example, the 12 stacks of cinderbloom was milled and crafted into 59 blackfallow ink - and 15 inferno ink. But Philly won't know what kind of card will result, as it's random, with only 20% odds of getting the a card in the right suit (Waves) and even lower odds of getting one each of all eight waves cards.

Just making cards would take forever, though. To speed things up Philly will sell the cards she doesn't need and use the gold to buy cards off the AH as they come available. Cards can run around 3k gold, so they ain't cheap. But if all the gold comes from farming the mats, then all it's costing is time.