Dr Watson & A Sick PC

And by 'PC', I do mean my computer and not a player character. A couple of days ago, I started having problems when right-clicking on an icon to make a shortcut. Dr Watson (drwtsn32.exe) would suddenly fire up and crash my computer. After bringing up the control panel and killing off Dr Watson, I noticed my AVG scan process had started. I checked out the AVG forums and it pointed me towards what I already guessed, that it was Explorer that had the fault and that AVG was reacting to that.

Anyway, after trying many other things to try to solve the problem I decided to reinstall Windows over the top of my existing copy (I don't like doing this as I know it can cause some other issues), only to find out it made no difference. Eventually, after I was about to give up and bite the bullet to do a complete reinstall, I decided to give the system one more going over, and I found another system TEMP folder (C:\Documents and Settings\User Name\Local Settings\Temp) where I decided to delete everything in it. (You have to change folder settings to "Show Hidden Files & Folders" to be able to navigate to this temp folder.) As soon as I did that, the system stabilised and I was able to correct the faulty shortcut.

This morning, however, the results of my installing Windows over the previous version have come back to haunt me, and now I am unable to do certain Window Updates, and I am also having problems running certain videos. The short of it is, I may have to do a full backup and system restore after all, which means another day wasted. If only I had found the TEMP folder earlier. Mind you, to top all this, I think my VGA card is also starting to play up now, as I had graphics corruption on startup (at BIOS level) today until I rebooted. I guess I am going to have to check its fan in case it's sticking and overheating.

The new dual processor computer is looking as though it will be coming along sooner than later at this rate.

UPDATE: I may have found my solution to the first problem here.
UPDATE 2: I fixed some of my video issues by reinstalling a DivX codec. (May still have a hardware issue though.)
UPDATE 3: I take it all back ... It still has the same problems. :( I'm going to test hardware now.

Invisible PC For Screenshots

I was just reading through AmstradHero's Fate Of A City blog and saw his comment about making a PC invisible onscreen for help taking screenshots. Well, the script below allows the builder to toggle between being invisble (and back to visible again) by running the same script again.

To run this script while in game, you have to have debugmode on: Go into console mode (press the button to the left of the '1' key along the top row) and then enter debugmode=1, which will turn on debugmode. Then type rs nameofscript, where the 'rs' part stands for run script and 'nameofscript' is whatever name you have given the script. I currently have the script called 'SS' so all I have to type is rs ss to toggle the PC between being invisible or visible on screen or not. Anyway, here is the script:

void main()
{
object oPC = GetFirstPC();
int iStoredAppear = GetLocalInt(oPC, "APPEAR");
int iAppear = GetAppearanceType(oPC);

// STORE APPEARANCE FOR RECALL
if(iStoredAppear == 0){SetLocalInt(oPC, "APPEAR", iAppear);}

// TOGGLE INVISIBLE
if(GetAppearanceType(oPC) != APPEARANCE_TYPE_INVISIBLE_HUMAN_MALE){SetCreatureAppearanceType(oPC, APPEARANCE_TYPE_INVISIBLE_HUMAN_MALE); return;}

// TOGGLE VISIBLE
if(GetAppearanceType(oPC) == APPEARANCE_TYPE_INVISIBLE_HUMAN_MALE){SetCreatureAppearanceType(oPC, iStoredAppear);}

}