CivV - The Preload

Here I am folks, back from holiday, a little earlier than expected.  I've spent no time whatsoever over the last week gaming, I have however read three books in seven days.  And I'm not talking about little ones, I'm talking about 1000 pages of Robert Jordon's Wheel of Time, the whole of Terry Pratchetts "Unseen Academicals" and a good slice of a C++ book about 3D Terrain Engines... all in all, I've fed my brain sufficiently for the comming autumn season.

And with all this new brain power at the ready I've today preordered and started the pre-download of CIV5 on Steam.

To anyone else out there pre-ordering on steam, ignore the message "An unexpected error has occurred with your order", simply ensure you wait for the payment confirmed email from them, and then restart your machine.

Now, speaking of restarting machines... my Motherboard has had a fault come up today, I thought it was a memory issue until I investigated it.  My board takes four memory modules, in pairs... on the board one set of slots is black, and one is blue... the blue pair are broken.

As in, blue screen of death, beeping at the BIOS, dead as a door nail, broken.

This is my gaming rig.... so I'm currently hobbling about with half my normal compliment of RAM... god help me.

My remedy for the situation is not a simple one though, I'm going to pick up a not so cheap new mobo (which can take all my current parts) and then over the next couple of years save up for a new top of the range i7 based system.  Hopefully by then they'll be affordable.

Because I notice that parts equivalent to the ones I have fitted at the moment, are rather more expensive than one would expect after two years...

Anyway, there's been a wonderful rain storm here today, my preload now states 5.7% and tomorrow I've got nothing to do... the Mrs is on about cutting one of the ever green's tree's out back down a bit, but I'd rather take the fence panels down and torch the bloody thing... hey ho, a litre of petrol is greater than my horticultural knowledge.