Weekend (6 Feb) - Chaitee Destroyed My Computer

Weekend (6 Feb) - Chaitee Destroyed My Computer

It's Saturday afternoon and I am doing a check of my hard drive. That check has been in progess for most of four hours now - it's 52% complete. I'm writing this on my "old and slow" computer.

On saturday morning Chaitee was in Darkshore. When I logged on, having Chaitee in game and in Darkshore was the farthest thing from my mind. Daethbot logged in a little later and said Hi and asked how things were going.

Well, I wasn''t sure, since what I thought I was doing this morning was cleaning out and organizing the horde side bank. How that task wound up with Alliance toon Chaitee in Darkshore is a long story. So of course you know I'm going to tell it.

But first, excuse me while I go off to do a honeydo. I may not have a weekday 9-5 job, but that doesn't exempt yours truly from Saturday chores.

When I came back to the computer the disk check was at 54%. Definitely taking it's time.

Before we get to Chaitee, it was JB who was the first in game on Saturday morning (after Happy and Lost did their AH business, of course; oh, and after Melasahnd and Rakta did some neutral AH work). Ok, so JB was the fifth in game on Saturday morning.

The day before, JB, Philly, Sis, and Lao all collaborated on a project that ended with most of the pre-cata jewelcrafting mats being used to make the pre-cata purple gems. With a bunch of those gems crafted, a large chunk of old, lesser gems could be vendored off to make room for the better ones. If you've already forgotten, the plan was to clean up and organize the horde side bank. All well and good.

The disk check was up to 60%.

JB decided to take the bit of bank cleaning a little further. A rather significant number of bank slots across all four tabs were mats for the cooking profession. Just about everytjhing imaginable, from eggs and wings to meat from just about every animal that walked on Azeroth. And the fish! Gah!

Well, it was stinking up the place and something had to be done. Of course, that stuff would not be vendored. No! This was stuff that could be used. Nobody was using it, which was why it was still sitting in the bank - but that was a mere detail. It would not affect JB's plans.

JB set out to count, categorize and assign action on every piece of rotting flesh and hacked up body part. She checked the cooking abilities of every member of the Wild Clan, both Horde and Alliance. Someone had to need this stuff, and JB was determined to find out who was going to be the recipient of all this dripping largesse.

Well, all politics and behind the scene deals aside, the "winner" of JB's food bank was Sista. Sista didn't know that she was the chosen one, but again - small detail.

It was time for action. JB still had one detail to attend to, however. Nearly all of the cooking materials on hand were for recipes beginning around the 175 skill level. That was a bit of an inconvenience , since Sista was at only skill 61 in cooking. What to do, what to do?

Well, there were these crabs. They roamed all over the shores of Darkshore, and the crab meat and crab claws just happened to make pretty good cooking at the level Sista would need. Someone had to go out and kill those crabs. Sista could do it, but she was already a lofty level 35 and killing those Darkshore crabs wouldn't get her a single exerpience point. JB needed a better volunteer, one who could benefit from all that crab killin'.

Enter Chaitee. Level 20 Chaitee was at just the right level - high enough to make the killing fast, low enough to get some nice xp from the effort. When informed of JB's plans, Chaitee egerly accepted. She was monumentally bored just sitting in Stormwind. Chaitee wanted to be fully equipped for the journey, so Rakta had to give up her heirloom bow, and Mery sent over her chest, shoulder, and trinket heirlooms.

The disk check was up to 65% now. Still slow, but still chugging along.

Chaitee was ready to go. Almost. See, Chaitee had not done any cooking at all. Couldn't she take just a little time to get the basics done? Without waiting for an answeer, Chaitee headed for the tavern where the cooking trainer hung out. Well, to be perfectly accurate, she had to ask at least three guards how to find the place. But she did, and made flour and spice bread to get to 40 skill in cooking. Chaitee thought that was great fun. She loaded up on more recipes and then raided the guild bank - the Alliance guild bank - of whatever cooking mats it held. Coupled with some mats left over from her leveling days with Java, Chaitee got up to 60 skill, right up there with Sista.

Chaitee was in Stormwind City, by the way. So she had to take the ship in Stormwind harbor over to whatever that lonely coastal town is called on Teldrassil, and then talked a flight master into carting her to Darkshore. Chaitee and her combat pet Tazzy then walked the length and breadth of Darkshore, killing those crabs, and anything else that caught their attention. Chaitee DINGED! to level 21 and collected enough mats for her and Sista both to keep leveling their cooking.

Chaitee wanted to head back to Stormwind, meet up with Sista, and share the spoils. She splashed her way to the boardwalk in the little darkshore town of Lor'Danel and asked the flight master to trake her home - and that was when the computer froze, and the mouse, and the keyboard, and Windows refused to reboot or reload, and that's why I'm writing this on my old backup computer and watching chkdsk tic off the percentage completed on the likely mortally wounded hard drive.

The disk check was at 65% when I was called to dinner.

After dinner Chaitee gave the "old and slow" computer a chance to continue the project. She returned to Stormwind and Sista joined her shortly thereafter. Chaitee's excellent work provided the means for Sista to reach skill 181 in cooking. Sista quickly got into the spirit and decided to take on the next leg of the project. Even as Melasahnd and Rakta were preparing to start transferring mats such as Red Wolf Meat, Tender Wolf Meat, Bear Flanks, Small Flame Sacs, and Mystery Meat, Sista was making her way to the other continent.

After a bit more than six hours run time, chkdsk reported that everything was fine now. I was dubious that "fine" captured the state of that hard drive.

The chkdsk had been executed by using the Windows boot disk using the command line only. About all I could say about that was the core memory seemed ok. There was only one way to find out if the hard drive really was operational and sane. I rebooted the computer from the hard drive (instead of the boot disk) and asked Windows to go into Safe Mode. I was pretty shocked when the computer did boot properly into safe mode. This was too good to be true, but I wasn't wasting the good fortune. Not sure how long it would last, I started backing up files onto another drive. Once all the really important stuff was taken care of, I decided to do a full boot. And it worked. The hard drive is operational again. I don't trust it, though, and I haven't attempted to run WoW on it. Just running normal programs causes strange sounds to eminate from the computer. It's either the hard drive itself, or it could be the power supply. I'm hoping it's the power supply. I just had that replaced recently and it was still under warranty.

Since it looked like I was not going to be using my main computer for awhile, I mirrored my main computer WoW configuration on my backup computer. WoW runs slower and is prone to lag, but should be workable. Except for dungeons and raiding. Which puts Wild's Wed/Thurs raid plans in jeapardy.

I'm not complaining, though. A lot of work is still ahead. But it could have been oh so much worse.

The rest of Sista's weekend story is coming up.