I’ve now got EVE Online working under that older desktop.  A couple of tweaks, and it’s smooth like butter.  Uh, except for sound.  That’s still in the works.

Capsuleer’s Log

Warping through twelve jump gates to get across Metropolis.  I’m seriously hoping that the training agents on this side of space – even though they’re also Pator Tech School – don’t hate me for my long lapses between missions in Embod IV.

Huh.  So Todifrauan VII, the system that houses another Pator Tech School station, is low-security.  How sweet is that.  While I’m biting my nails about my ship getting blown to bits, I’m still distracted by the variances in jump gate construction.  All seem to act the same – swallow the ship in a wormhole, shoot it across space, leaving a trail of light as wake – but there are fundamental differences in construction.

I’ve arrived at Pator Tech School in the far-off Todifrauan system.  I cross my fingers and bring up the station’s agent manifest.  Level 1 Agent is available to me.  Level 2 Agent is not available to me (expected).  Lo and behold, there is a Training Agent under Agents of Interest!  Excellent!  Wait, that name looks familiar.  Embod IV?  *Jaw Drop*  Will he talk to me?

*Shifty Eyes*

He will!  Here we go again, warping across fourteen gates back to Embod IV’s Pator Tech School station.  I’m pretty sure that this guy trains in combat.  At this pint, I’ll take what I can get.

So Nikki’s laptop is dead until we can get it serviced.  This will involve dealing with big box stores and “certified” repair centers, and shipping it across country.  The idea of this does not wow me.  So, in the meantime, she’s using my laptop, and I have thrown together a desktop system or two.

A little while back, I received a Dell and a Compaq desktop from my good friends George and Trase.  The machines were given with the intention that they go to use for something that wasn’t sitting in their garage collecting dust.  Into my SETI@Retirement Home project they went.  As they’re Pentium 4 boxen with a decent amount of RAM, I pulled them out and re-worked them.

The Dell takes a particular kind of RAM which is far too expensive to upgrade, so it ended up with Edubuntu, and is pending a setup in Hunter’s room.  The Compaq took normal RAM for its type of motherboard, and I had a gig lying around, so I upgraded it from 2x256mb to 2x512mb, and added a 256mb Nvidia AGP video card.  Ubuntu seems to like the card just fine, and in between job hunting and chores around the house, I’m updating the kernel so that EVE Online will do something other than freeze and stutter under Wine.

I did miss the feel of my first-generation Microsoft ergonomic keyboard.