2018

PC Woes

stargrace March 24, 2018 No Comments

I’ve been saying I’ll get back into streaming for a while now. Set up at our new place, our schedule is a bit flexible since my husband does shift work, but I wanted to eek out some time here and there to get a stream in. Unfortunately, the issues I had with my PC kept expanding and it seemed like no matter what I would do, I couldn’t fix them or narrow down the problem.

It started out simple enough. I had the movers take my computer tower, but they didn’t insulate it or even wrap it up. They just tossed it into a box along with a bunch of my son’s toys. The travel was in -40C weather for two weeks, and I completely forgot that this could have an adverse effect on my water cooling system.

When I started up my computer after the move I was experiencing some serious lag. I would lag while gaming, I would lag while typing. I ran memory tests and disk drive tests but everything came back normal. This marked the beginning. I upgraded the CPU, the motherboard, and the RAM. I reinstalled windows. My lag was cured and I could game again but then other oddities started to happen.

Once every two days or so I would have a BSOD, and a dump file would fail to be created to give me more details. I’d have random video game crashes that referenced memory, and a few other variety of crashes. I was getting a message about my CPU fan and PC temperatures but I didn’t understand why because what I could physically see was all fans working. I installed a program to monitor the temperature and found that all 6 cores would boot up at 85C and then if I did anything at all, they’d jump to 100C and stay there. Well, that wasn’t good.

I was also experiencing an odd bug of white noise when my mic was on mute. I had no idea where it was coming from.

So I got a new fan and heat sink, then my husband bought me a new fan for my case with fancy LED lights. All of that was installed and the temperature warnings stopped – but the BSOD did not. The white noise when my mic was muted also went away.

When I opened the case to install the case fan, I was unable to get windows running. It kept telling me that a component couldn’t be reached and that I should hit escape or F8. Neither of those did anything. I popped in my USB stick that has a media file of windows 10 and tried to repair, that wouldn’t work.

I decided that my SSD was probably the culprit, and I removed the SSD. I tried to install Windows to one of my two remaining drives, but the USB version of windows was also corrupted (even though it was brand new and I had just used it the previous week) – so I had to make a new media file. THEN I installed windows.

That was two days ago, and so far I have had zero issues. Of course right now I’m keeping things incredibly bare bones, I have discord, WoW, and that’s about it. I wanted to make sure the computer ran well for a few days before I started installing other things like xsplit.

This whole ordeal has taught me a few things, like next time we move I’ll be taking my computer with me. Thankfully our items are covered by our movers and I can get reimbursed, but spending a month trying to troubleshoot these issues has been a real pain. I’ve had multiple good friends helping me out, offering advice, providing tech support and showing me what tests to run – for that I am grateful. I’m not a very tech savvy person but I’m a quick learner and I like to think I can at least handle the basics of my own PC.

Now that it appears things are finally solved – lets get to streaming!

Expanding my Gold Making Empire

stargrace March 18, 2018 No Comments

Flipping items and selling battle pets has been kind to me over the past three months, but I wanted to expand a bit and explore other options. I’ve been hanging out in the WoWeconomy discord for a few weeks and I’ve picked up some really amazing tips that I’ve been trying out on my home server (the one I actively play on). Flipping and battle pets don’t do well on that server, so I have a second server for those sales – it was time for me to find out what DID sell. Every server has SOMETHING that sells.

The first thing I did was purchase a handful of lemon herb filet recipes, using one for myself. The fish were going for 7g – but the food was going for 246g each, so for a 14g cost I was raking in profit. I bought 7 recipes for 25 fish each, and sold them for 4-7,000 gold. I have only sold two so far, I’ve been spacing them out so as to not flood the market. Now that the Darkmoon Fair is over for this month, those prices will go up. I’m the only one selling the food on my server (for now). They’re not fast movers, but they do move. I’ve also been selling bear tartare, which is a fantastic food for doing old dungeon runs and other types of farming as it gives you a speed boost.

Listening to the goblins in discord taught me some pretty important things about crafting which I had not realized before. Things like unique profession combinations that work together. Other terms that they used was ‘craft swap’ which is just a fancy way of flipping.

This is what I focused on next. I mined ghost iron ore with my warlock who is still level 100. Then I turned that ore into bars. I traded those bars to my alchemist who turns them into trillium, and then takes that trillium and transmutes it into living steel. I have two recipes for living steel, one is a daily and one can be used multiple times a day but has a secondary component – spirits of harmony.

My alchemist has the transmute special, so on occasion I can proc between 1-3 living steel for each combine. Living steel sells for 2600-3500 each piece. I ended up creating 26 pieces. That’s almost 70,000 gold if they were all to sell. Why are players still looking for these items? They’re used in a handful of crafted mounts. I don’t happen to have the recipes for the mounts, but I do like supplying others!

The spirits of harmony are probably the hardest things to get. They sell for 375g each, and my husband happened to have 100 of them stockpiled from Pandaria days which REALLY helped me out. Even using three of them the profit of turning them into living steel was incredible. I used half, and am selling the other half. The “best” way to farm these spirits at the moment is to enter Heart of Fear and clear the first hallway and up to the first boss (but don’t kill the first boss) then loot and re-set the instance. You can enter 10 instances an hour account wide, and it takes approximately 2 minutes to clear. You get between 9-15 motes per run, which is almost a full spirit. Farming is slow, but it’s still one of the best methods.

I also ended up prospecting 1200 kyparite that was collecting dust in the bank. These prospect into the gems required for the jewel craft panther mounts. When all was said and done, I made 50k in the past two days, but I haven’t sold the 26 living steel pieces yet (those I just created this morning) so I should get quite a bit more (hopefully).

It’s not a perfect system and still needs some work and I’d like to keep branching out as I figure out what sells and what doesn’t on this server, but for now it’s nice to be making some decent money. My WoW account is paid until May 9th, and I’m hoping to earn enough to keep that going. Having two separate servers that I’m working from is a bit of a pain as my income is split, but one server or the other should be able to earn the required amount in the proper amount of time.

Of course there’s also the easy methods of making money like class halls, but I haven’t finished (or even started) Argus on everyone for that to be profitable. Only one of my 110 characters has it completed. I’ll get there. Eventually.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!