diosoth Posted March 8, 2012 Share Posted March 8, 2012 A power outage yesterday surged my HDD and totally fried it. Great. I had to install another HDD. After I'm done with essential programs and sorting through all my backup data DVD-Rs, I have to get back to installing games. That means my recent Oblivion playthrough is incomplete. This time... I'll go with HGEC but I may exclude BBB. It looks nice but I think it was a major cause of performance lag for me, as a screen filled with female NPCs would slow down FPS. I'll stick with Oblivion XP, but I think that rather than DarnifiedUI, I'll use DarkUId instead, for the WZ inventory menus. One of my annoyances with Darnified is the tiny inventory icons, which isn't helpful when I try to rely on those icons when dealing with mod-added clothing and such. It tends to be easier to tell what's what in a store mod if I can see what I'm buying. Plus DarkUI's similar to MapleStory's inventory menus which I'm used to. Granted, my concern now is that this HDD is a WD green, while the one that fried was a WD blue. I do wonder if the slower access speeds will affect me in any major way running Oblivion. I actually used to run this green drive, until I got hit with a rootkit last year and my only option then was to replace the HDD and reinstall the OS from Gateway recovery discs(PC places were quoting between $100 and $200 for "virus removal" and at the time I had zip idea of what specific virus I had). With my blue fried yesterday I was able to take my green drive to a local PC shop, have it cleaned of the rootkit for cheap and use it. I never noticed any major hassles with gaming while using it before, then again I didn't run anything as intensive as Oblivion. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AnimalRiot Posted March 8, 2012 Share Posted March 8, 2012 A slower HDD may be a performance bottleneck for Oblivion. A good rule of thumb would be to install Oblivion on a second physical drive rather than your boot HDD. This frees your installation from the clutches of the UAC (on Win Vista / Win 7) and read/write lags caused by system files on your boot drive. You will want to install it on the fastest drive in your rig since it reads a lot of data from time to time while in-game. I'm not sure how noticeable the lag would be from using your green drive rather than the old one. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Striker879 Posted March 8, 2012 Share Posted March 8, 2012 Another tip on the hardware front is get a decent UPS (uninterruptible power supply), not so that you can keep the computer on during power outages but for the superior surge protection they offer (if you don't buy the cheapest you can find). I use APC UPSes on all my machines. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
diosoth Posted March 8, 2012 Author Share Posted March 8, 2012 Best Buy has a $50 APC supressor/battery unit which I will buy once I have funds. As for a second HDD, right now I do not have one and with prices having gone up am not likely to be buying one anytime soon. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Striker879 Posted March 8, 2012 Share Posted March 8, 2012 I hear you on the HDD prices. I have most of the major pieces for my next machine (motherboard, CPU, memory & video cards). The big expense items I have left to get are hard drives (I need five, four for two RAID 0's and a single for non game programs and swap file). I asked at my favourite computer store about when they thought that prices might start coming back down ... they said maybe 6 months. Maybe next winter I'll be playing on a new machine. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
diosoth Posted March 13, 2012 Author Share Posted March 13, 2012 It's not reinstalling the game that bugs me, it's having to redownload and install numerous mods. I'm looking at maybe another week before I'm even playing the game. And I'll have to go through all those manual .ini tweaks again. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Striker879 Posted March 13, 2012 Share Posted March 13, 2012 And I'm the complete opposite. My OblivionDownloads folder is choked with mods I've downloaded and never got around to installing as well as all those I do use. For a while I was doing pretty good at moving any mod I'd installed to another folder, but I got lazy and now that's a mess (plus I have two characters with different mod lists ... life will sometimes get more complicated for a guy like me). Using Multiple Oblivion Manager - MOM makes handling the two characters a breeze (all the way to two separate ini files if you wanted), but it doesn't help with 'compulsive download disorder'. At least if I ever do a complete re-install I'll have the downloads ... just a matter of trying to figure out which ones I actually used. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
razorpony Posted April 1, 2012 Share Posted April 1, 2012 At least if I ever do a complete re-install I'll have the downloads ... just a matter of trying to figure out which ones I actually used. Striker, if it ever gets to that point you can always use Wrye Bash to examine your save games. It will tell you all the mods that were present and active when they were created. RP Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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