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Carol H Tucker
Passionate about knowledge management and organizational development, expert in loan servicing, virtual world denizen and community facilitator, and a DISNEY fan
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beladona Memorial
Be warned:in this very rich environment where you can immerse yourself so completely, your emotions will become engaged -- and not everyone is cognizant of that. Among the many excellent features of SL, there is no auto-return on hearts, so be wary of where your's wanders...
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last Sunday in June
Today is the 1st day of the week [the last Sunday in June], the 26th day of the 6th month, the 178th day of 2016 [with only 181 shopping days left until Christmas], and:
- America's Kids Day -- remember asking your parents how come there wasn't a kids' day when there was both a mothers' and a fathers' day?
- Beautician's Day
- Descendants' Day
- Forgiveness Day
- International Day in Support of Victims of Torture
- Log Cabin Day -- created in 1986 by the Log Cabin Society and the Bad Axe Historical Society in Michigan
- National Canoe Day
- National Chocolate Pudding Day
- Same Sex Marriage Day -- in 2015 the Supreme Court declared gay marriage legal in the US
- Tropical Cocktails Day
In 4 Augustus adopted Tiberius [the stepson of Augustus, grand-uncle of Caligula, paternal uncle of Claudius, and great-grand uncle of Nero]. In 699 En no Ozuno, a Japanese mystic and apothecary who will later be regarded as the founder of a folk religion Shugendō, is banished to Izu Ōshima. In 1843 Hong Kong Island is ceded to the British "in perpetuity" as part of the Treaty of Nanking. In 1870 the Christian holiday of Christmas is declared a federal holiday in the United States. In 188 Henri Moissan isolated elemental Fluorine for the first time. In 1934 Roosevelt signed the Federal Credit Union Act, which establishes credit unions in the United States. In 1945 the United Nations Charter is signed in San Francisco. In 1960 the former British Protectorate of British Somaliland gained its independence as Somaliland and Madagascar gained its independence from France. In 1974 the Universal Product Code is scanned for the first time to sell a package of Wrigley's chewing gum at the Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio. In 1977 Elvis Presley performed for the last time in a concert in Indianapolis. In 2000 Pope John Paul II revealed the third secret of Fátima. In 2016 @NASAVoyager is 18 hrs 38 mins 55 secs of light-travel time from Earth (2016:178:120000:1L)
The saga of the crashing video card continues -- tech support has now authorized the replacement of the motherboard and possibly the hard drive again. To recap my odyssey:
- the Alienware X51 was built in November and purchased in December of 2012 -- delivered in January 2013. Fortunately I purchased a full warranty at the same time. I did so because the last computer I had seemed to develope multiple issues within two years.
- after multiple calls to support about the graphics performance, which included reloads of Windows and an update of the BIOS, two of the memory RAM was replaced in April 2014 when a test showed they had become corrupted. I start keeping my document and picture files on an external hard drive
- the warranty expires December 2015 and I renew for another year.
- another set of calls and re-installs of the OS and in March 2016 the hard drive was replaced after a test indicated it had become corrupted
- on June 14th the video card was replaced after a complete failure [FPS of 1]
- on June 22nd after two weeks of complaints about crashing, Win 10 has a full clean install. The video card errors start immediately
The question, which has been raised by an interested party who has been following my tweets and posts on the issues, about the adequacy of a 330W power pac for a full-sized midtier graphics card in a graphics-intensive gaming PC has not been answered. I have been told that if problems persist after replacing the motherboard, then it will be escalated to replacing the entire CPU -- something I find rather dubious since the machine is now 3 1/2 years old.
I have to say that the support staff has been pretty awesome. Most of the tech support I have received has been friendly and considerate -- they genuinely tried to help and a couple of the individuals went above and beyond, spending a couple of hours helping me with testing, reinstalling, updating. There have been a couple of incidents where communication was not very good: [1] I am not a tech and failed to tell them something they needed to know, and they didn't ask the right questions; [2] a heavy accent impeded my ability to understand exactly what was being said or get my point across. They are all pretty adept at doing workarounds -- many times after they went in and rummaged about, things would work well enough for a bit that I could function in game and in world after a fashion until the next more catastrophic event had me calling in again. Because I have a warranty, all of the software and hardware support has been free [well except for my time/energy], and when the items have to be replaced, a Dell tech comes to my apartment and does it -- no sending the CPU out for repairs, no trying to do it myself.
Through most of these travails, while I have been unable to consistently log into games or Second Life, I have been able to browse the internet, create and work on documents [never saving to the C drive anymore], etc -- all the things a PC is often used for. If that was what I wanted a computer for, then I would say the Alienware X51 works just fine. Unfortunately it was billed as a gaming PC -- not high end, mind you, but robust enough to handle itself -- and it has never performed up to my expectation in that regard. Despite the high opinion I have of the support staff, given the number of problems that I have had I very much doubt that I will ever invest in another Dell product. One considers the backup when one invests in a new rig, but the intent is not to have to rely on them to the degree that I have, neh?
Stay tuned....
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