Saturday I was playing TF2 testing a new audio driver that I had installed the night before. For those that don't know, since I installed Windows 7 on my desktop, I have been having issues with my microphone. I narrowed the problem down to drivers and have been looking to find suitable drivers to resolve the issue.

Well I finally found one it had seemed until TF2 started freezing up intermittently on me. I assume it would be related to the new driver as I have had issues in the past where sound drivers would cause issues in games and the problem I was having after the installing the new driver fit the bill.

So eventually TF2 locks up completely and my computer with it. Sorry to Jimbo for that as we were trying to prime one of the TF2 servers at the time. So I did a hard reboot and find that I cannot load Windows at all. In fact, the screen looked pretty jacked up as soon as I rebooted. Almost instantly I knew something happened with the video card.

To be safe though, I did some further troubleshooting just to confirm what I had originally thought. I began having issues even trying to repair. The Windows 7 disk started seeing Windows on a G drive (which I don't even have). This lead me think that perhaps it was a driver issue or a hard drive issue. I test some other hard drives, but still the same thing. My dad suggested maybe the driver effected the BIOS perhaps since it was a driver from the motherboard manufacturer (onboard sound). Shortly after though I had to give up as I had some other work I needed to do before Monday.

Monday comes though and I talk it over with some of my friends at school and one of my professors and we agree it sounds like a video or RAM issue. Since I had no spare video card lying around that'd fit my PCIE slot, I borrowed my dad's video card from his computer. Lo and behold, my computer boots up fine. Luckily though my brother had a spare Radeon X1800 that he is letting me use (my GeForce 8800 GTS 320 is the one that burned out on me).

Today however, the shitty luck continues. On my way to school, my tire blows out. It is not a simple flat, it pretty much got shredded and totally fucked up. Not sure how it happened, as the guys at Discount Tire say they don't see any sort of puncture. The only thing they can think of is that a possible pot hole caused it. I try to avoid all pot holes of course, but sometimes you still hit them. What makes it worse is my spare tire was pretty much flat itself so we had to put air in that before we could safely travel anywhere else. Luckily there was a gas station near where my tire blew anyways.

While they are trying to fix my tire at Discount Tire, they tell me that it looks like the rim got damaged as well, so I'll have to replace that as well. They didn't have the one I needed on hand, so they said it'd take a couple hours to get it and install it. So I go to school and come back home around 3pm (left the car with them at about 9:30am). The car should have been ready, but it wasn't. Shortly after I get home they finally call us and tell us that my car is ready. However when I go to pick it up, they tell me that it looks like I might have also torn a breakline in the process.

The ABS light is on, but the breaks themselves still work. So we take it this body shop our insurance company suggests, and they tell me it looks and sounds like it is just the ABS indicator wire. They don't do wiring, but he recommended a good place for us to take it. Shouldn't be more than $100 he said.

Hopefully that is all it will be but they are closed for the night so we'll have to try to get it fixed later in the week. A shitty start that just carried over from a shitty weekend...hopefully nothing else will go wrong though. :3