Saturday (12 Feb) - Computer Woes

Saturday (12 Feb) - Computer Woes

Wildshard is still avoiding the dungeons, but he is going to have to face up that them sooner than later. Even so, he's made progress on his gear through the Auction House. Wild figures it's always better to let someone else farm the BOE gear and Wild can then buy them up. Why else would Happy be doing all that work earning gold?

After the G1 raid leader challenged his raiders to improve their gear at the last raid, Wild did an assessment of his own status as reported earlier. As an update to that, here is where Wild now stands:

Shoulder (i333) - Best upgrade bet is doing the daily normal random dungeon for the 1,650 JPs needd to buy one, but Heroic dungeons HOO and VP also drop one each from a boss. A shoulder upgrade HAS to come from dungeon runs. Wild cannot get around this.

Wrist (i333) - Wild's current bracers are the best he can get with one exception: the Armbands of Change in Heroic BRC. BRC would have to be farmed until the item dropped.

Ring - Wild has like five Cata level rings with varying stats. Two of them are i346, so as far as gearscore is concerned Wild gets credit for it. For healing, though, his second best ring is i333, and a better one could be obtained from drops in HOO and LCT.

Trinket - Wild's +234 int i325 trinket is unlikely to go away, even when/if Wild can get his hands on one of the +321 int trinkets that drop in SC and BRC - unless Wild is fortunate enough to get both trinkets from those dungeons. Wild also has a +285 i346 spirit trinket which Wild will have to use until he can do without the mana regen it provides, which may be never. Wild is ok with trinkets and not worried about gearscore on this slot, but the two drops would be very nice.

Neck (i333) - Wild had several avenues to upgrade his necklace. The surest upgrade was to reach Exalted with Dragonmaw to collect the i359 offered by that faction, although the stat mix on this necklace was pretty poor. Wild is still probably two weeks away from getting there. Wild got very lucky over the weekend, though. The only necklace better than the Dragonmaw rep one is [Dorian's Lost Necklace], which is a rare World drop. Wild has never seen this on the AH before, but one popped up on Friday night. My AH addon told me the going price for it was 11,000 gold. Wild bought it for 5,500 gold. Yes, it's i359, too. Wild can check neck off his list.

Relic (i316) - Obviously, this was my lowest level piece of gear. Better relics can be found in Heroic SC, DM, and VP. For about a week I'd been watching an i346 relic called [Tattooed Eyeball] on the AH. Frankly, the stats were only so-so, even compared to that i316, but it would be a significant upgrade to Wild's spell power and total mana. I was hoping for price drop, too, but the three sellers were not budging. Saturday morning Wild got impatient and told Happy to pay the 2,600 gold to get it. Happy groaned - loudly - but made the purchase. Wild can strike another slot off his list.

The two new pieces of gear raised Wild's gearscore from i342 to i345.

On the computer front things were not as far along as Wild's gear improvements. The repair shop concluded that hardware was not the problem. Everything checked out. The problem was a corrupted Windows operating system (O/S). Since the shop wanted a fortune to fix that, and even with that would leave me having to reinstall all of the drivers and programs I needed, I opted to take my baby home and nurse it back to health myself.

I had three choices: (1) I could attempt a repair of the O/S. That was the simplest method, and sometimes it even worked. The benefit is that all of my drivers and programs would still be there. More often, though, it only partially works, leaving problems that don't crop up until later. (2) Do a fresh install of the O/S. This would wipe the drive, so I would have to be VERY, VERY sure I backed up everything important. A fresh install would clean out two years worth of accumulation of small problems as well as likely improving performance. Of course, I'd still have to re-install everything. (3) Buy a new hard drive and install the O/S on that drive. The only difference between this and (2) is that I would still have the old drive available in case my backup missed something important. One downside is that my computer already has three hard drives in it and things are a bit corwded in there. Installing a new drive is also an extra step and would take longer.

One other option is to buy a new computer. However, the current computer, although two years old, still has a lot of life in it. It would benefit from a more current video card and 6GB of RAM instead of it's current 4GBs, but other than that it's as good as any mid-level computer I could buy today.

I don't feel like adding yet another hard drive to the computer as I already have three terabytes worth of space to work with. And I don't think a repair will fix a corrupted O/S that's probably been suspect since that first power spike took out my power supply. So, I'm going to make doubly sure I have everything backed up, and go with option (2). Pray for me.