Technical Issues

Friday, July 2 2004

Yeah, I decided to reuse an old template for this month. Can you really go wrong with a red, white and blue background for July? I don't think so and I didn't feel like picking a color off the top of my head right now. Hopefully, you guys can make due with an oldie but goodie for a month.

Choosing a new background color means testing it and I did enough testing yesterday to satisfy me for a while. For some reason that might be related to Melissa's "Pern" game, DirectX completely failed on the machine. I couldn't run any of my Blizzard games or use the internet answering machine. You'd think a problem with DirectX would be pretty easy to solve since I seem to have about a dozen copies of it around. You'd be wrong just like I was.

This started off innocently enough. Dad called and I didn't get a message. He usually doesn't actually leave one because I'll see his phone number anyway. Therefore, I ignored the error message because I figured it was something to do with the service's server. Unfortunately, I couldn't load "Warcraft III" because it said there was a problem with DirectX.

Since "Warcraft III" actually includes DirectX 8.1, I figured it was no big deal. I'd just reinstall it quickly and be done with it. It wasn't that easy because the installation process decided that I already had a working copy. Removing every trace of the program didn't help since the installation wizard still detected it. I decided to uninstall and reinstall the game.

Every Blizzard made game I have includes some version of DirectX so I decided to install it from another game. This didn't work despite the fact that I uninstalled and reinstalled every game. (The first thing I tried was rebooting but it didn't do anything.)

I was about to lose my temper with it all and it was looking worse. Since DirectX wouldn't reinstall, I had to wonder if the sound card had died. I couldn't think of how to test it because it won't work without drivers. (I suppose I could have checked to make sure that the computer detected the presence of a sound card but I was really hoping it was the driver.) The computer would be more or less useless without a sound card and I'm not in position to afford a new one.

So, I went pouring through documentation and found a reference to Microsoft's site. Things were bad enough that I was willing to deal with the Evil Empire, itself. There was a new version of DirectX out and I decided to download it. It was going to be a 45 minute download and I wasn't going to interupt it for anything short of a total emergency. Of course, I still couldn't get my phone messages. Hopefully, no one would call.

About ten minutes into the download, I got a call from a number that I didn't recognize. The caller ID gave it a name but that didn't mean anything to me either. This person had left a long message and I had no way of getting it. In order to bypass my usual impatience and frustration, I went downstairs to watch TV. Happily, no one else called.

The message turned out to be important but not time sensitive. Melissa is starting a program of being an Avon representative and it was her recruiter. I returned the call for her because she wasn't home and that was finished. No, I will not be attempting to hawk Avon products through this site for purely practical reasons. It's a local thing so me putting it here would be utterly useless.

After all of this, I attempted to post yesterday's entry and that server crashed. I believe the expression is "quit while you're ahead." At this point, I figured I was ahead and just decided to go to bed.