Last night I decided to order the Limited Edition of Dungeons and Dragons Online: Stormreach.
On Feb 7th I joined their beta program, downloaded the beta version and played it for a few hours. Althought I didnt like it enough (I’m too comfortable to the way things are with World of Warcraft), hey! its the Limited Edition, the one you will never see after the game comes out.
Limited Edition features a special DDO Red Dragon Poster, “Feats Chart”, special packaging and a new in-game item: Boots of Running.
Even if I never even open the box, this could be a collectors version and I could get my money back later. And if I decide to play it, it is going to be right there, within my reach.
Dungeons and Dragons Online promises that you will be able to gather in taverns to meet fellow adventurers, find new allies and quests, and rest up between battles Integrated voice chat which lets you coordinate your team efforts more effectively, that means you wont have to use 3rd party software like Ventrilo or Teamspeak.
Additionally, it offers the following features:
- Unique: Create a unique individual with millions of different combinations of looks, skills, stats, feats, races, and classes.
- Gorgeous: Turbine’s highly advanced 3rd generation 3D game engine brings the city of Stormreach, characters, dungeons, and monsters to life!
- Dangerous: Use your brawn, your stealth, and your wits to survive dungeons filled with monsters, traps, puzzles, and other interactive challenges.
- Fast: Get to the fun quickly with DDO’s exclusive Instaport feature which eliminates tedious travel and waiting.
- Real: Elements like d20 and DM text make it authentic Dungeons & Dragons, lovingly created for the online world.
- Smart: Gain masterful skills and world-dominating powers without endless combat with DDO’s quest-based experience system!
- Fun: Custom adventures for you and your party provide instances to shine as a hero – or a team – without interference from other players. Public adventures provide opportunities for large groups to tackle even bigger challenges.
If I decide to play the game, I will post my review about it and of course, a few screenshots.
Video Games
febrero 27th, 2006
Foto del Lotus Elise del 1998.
Espero que la disfruten
Cómo un auto del 1998 puede verse tan bien? Quiero uno! 
Coches y Carros Deportivos
febrero 26th, 2006
He aquà una foto del carro deportivo BMW Clase M del 1998. Se que es un poco viejo, pero me gusta.
Coches y Carros Deportivos
febrero 26th, 2006
A few weeks ago I upgraded my system to a MSI K8N Neo4 motherboard, a Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 3800+ Processor and a Geforce 6800 video card. I couldn’t be more happy with what promised to be a lightning fast computer.
As with every major hardware upgrade, I decided to reinstall Windows XP and every piece of software. I have used Norton Ghost in the past because believe it or not, Windows XP system restore is the most unreliable piece of software ever written for pc, they should just remove it so at least people would know for sure they have to look for a third party solution. System Restore has never ever worked for me in all those occasions I needed it most.
Anyways, I decided to give a try to the trial version of Norton System Works 2006, specifically the Norton Ghost that came inside it.
Everything was working, my Windows would boot before the first progress bar was completed, all happy. Suddenly I start experiencing unusual delays while booting, like 25 secs or more. Everytime I booted Windows, the 2nd graphic loading screen would just sit there and disk activity would stop for like 10 seconds, resume for 5 seconds more, and stop again for like 15 seconds and then finally get the login screen.
The first thing I thought was that my hard drive was failing, but after a complete disk check I couldnt find the cause of the problem. Also it didnt help that Windows Event Viewer was reporting some warnings:
An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk0\D during a paging operation
and the error:
The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk0\D
Ok, if Windows says there is a paging error, there must an error in the drive somewhere, right?…… WRONG!
I put my sata hard drive in another computer and ran Maxtor Powermax on it just to make sure there were no physical error… none!
I forgot to add that everytime I did some disk intensive operation, I would get the Blue Screen of Death with some info about nvata.sys and nvraid.sys failing.
So I decided to just clean boot Windows. That means using msconfig and removing all services but the ones from Microsoft and also removing everything from the startup.
Guess what? Windows booted like it used to, in less than 5 seconds.
As it was a clean Windows installation, I decided to reformat the drive, reinstall Windows and double check everything after every program installed.
I usually install my system in this order:
1.- Windows XP
2.- Network Drivers
3.- Windows critical updates
4.- Norton Internet Security (Norton Firewall + Norton Antivirus)
5.- More Windows Updates and the rest of drivers
6.- Microsoft Office
7.- Office Updates
8.- MSN Messenger
9.- Nero
10.- Norton Ghost
Right after I installed the version of Norton Ghost that came in the trial version of Norton System Works, my Windows was again spending 30 seconds to boot and the warning in the event viewer was back! aha!
So I uninstalled Norton System Works and the problem persisted. Decided to remove Norton Internet Security an the error was gone! Reinstalled Norton Internet Security and the error didnt come back.
The conclusion is, there is something inside Norton System Works 2006 that is not compatible at all with my configuration and specially with Nvidia nForce drivers. I dont know if this problem spams to other versions of Nvidia nForce but I will sure stay away from Norton System Works 2006 until these problems are fixed by Symantec, Nvidia, Maxtor or MSI, whoever fault it is.
Windows and its annoyances
febrero 26th, 2006
Todos recordamos la tragedia del 11 de Septiembre del 2001, en la cual los atentados contra los Estados Unidos alteraron el curso de la historia y cambiaron de manera radical la polÃtica externa de dicho paÃs.
Casi 5 años después no se ha dado con el paradero del arquitecto de dichos ataques, Osama Bin Laden.
Pero bien, no ese el tema de esta historia, sino más bien un email que recibà con el enlace hacia una animación/video flash según la cual no se estrelló ningún avión contra el pentágono, sino más bien, dice el video/mini-documental, fue un misil lanzado desde lo que se presume fue un avión militar.
Si estan interesados, veanlo y saquen sus propias conclusiones:
http://www.pentagonstrike.co.uk/pentagon_sp.htm#Main
Español
febrero 26th, 2006
