Diablo Addiction Returns

The geekhouse has returned to the addiction known as Diablo. At least once before this evil has threatened the sanity of our modest establishment. The last time wasn't pretty, I suspect this one will be no more attractive. So anyway, being the good little sheep that I am, I decided I wanted to play Diablo too. So I bit the bullet and reformated the other partition on my laptop... I've been through this many times. I installed Windows on a hundred machines during my stay at the tech services dept. of a local corporation. I'd been through this. But its never fun. This time I brought the box up in under an hour. Windows 98. On my laptop. I felt dirty. But I knew that if I plunged forward, Diablo was my reward.

So I brought the beast up. In the process I had an array of troubles. It wouldn't find my CD-ROM drive half way through. It just copied all the stuff from the drive. Then it could see it. How is this fair? But I muscled forward. And after a dozen reboots to get sound working, and that directX thing installed, I was ready for Diablo.

But higher forces had worse things in mind for me. The CD refuses to read on my drive. It reads on every other machine in the house. My roommates mock me by playing it when they know I can't. The Drive is OK. I just installed Windows from it a few hours earlier for crying out loud.

So I try some things. I try an older version of DirectX. I reboot a few more times. I even crash the whole machine. Finally on a whim, I swap CD ROM drives with Kurt.

Now it works

So I'm irritated because now I gotta call the dang company and get my laptop's CD-ROM drive replaced. Hell the left half of my keyboard has started dying. The d, x, c keys and the spacebar flake. Especially the d and x keys. I can't login without the d key. And how many types to I write 'x' in a given day? Hell, Ctrl-X is my send email key. From X11 to linux to unix, I'm hiting that key more than its fair share.

But I've got Diablo. And I create a charachter. I play several levels. I engage in group warfare with several of my roomies. A few days pass. My charachter matures. I get various wacky items and kill various monsters and gain levels. You know the deal.

And then the hands of fate strikes a cruel blow. Just as I got a really nice bow, I'm cruising along, and the thing crashes. It just stalls, with my little rogue in the middle of the screen and some little excerpt from the soundtrack stuck in an endless half-a-second-long loop. I scream. Loudly. Various words spout forth from my mouth.

But that isn't the worst part. Now I can't even run Diablo. The damn thing just crashes. I click the icon, it runs for a few seconds and goes down. I don't even know if my charachter was saved. Sometimes it gets through the title screen, but usually it just freezes. Once it just randomly rebooted. I love this system.