Most addictive game ever

4 months, 3 phones, countless hours, I finally did it. I completed Level 100 of the most addictive game ever, Frozen Bubbles. It's beauty lies in its simplicity as well as the fact that it is ideally suited for the limited mobile phone controls.

It's available for S60 Symbian phones here

If you've got a non-Nokia phone, you can get the Java port here.

If you do download, watch out for levels 70 and 80. They're tough to get through, but once you do that, it'll be smooth sailing till level 99. 99 and 100 require a lot of patience and luck!!!

Computer Woes etc

It has been rough over the past few days. I came down with cold and fever on Thursday, which continues till today. Though it was mild, it totally wrecked my plans to take part in the half marathon this year.

To top it off, the new computer that I built had been behaving very badly since Wednesday. It would start up fine, but if I left it running for more than a couple of hours or did anything memory intensive, it would almost always end in a Blue Screen of Death. I tried a number of things likr refixing the RAM, removing the video card and uninstalling software that could have caused the error, but it was all in vain. Finally, as all indications were pointing to memory errors, I decided to run a memory test on the RAM modules, and voila, came up with almost 2 million errors!!! I then did a check on each module individually and identified the culprit, a bad RAM stick. I removed it and have been running Vista with 1 GB since this morning and no lockups. Funnily enough, despite all the stories I've read about Vista being a dog on 1GB, it isn't all that unusable.

Upgraded PC

My old pc, an AMD Athlon 2000XP was getting on in years, it was the slowest processor available in 2004 and though I had no problems with mundane stuff like browsing etc, it was struggling to run anything more processor intensive. I'd considered upgrading for many months, but somehow it was always the lowest priority and I never did. Finally, I got to it last weekend and took the plunge.

I went for the high end this time. For the CPU, I was torn between Intel and AMD. I've been an AMD fan for many years and have been rooting for them to come back strong over the last year or so, ever since Intel came out with the Core2Duo. The prices are that much better on the AMD as well, but the performance difference is significant. I finally decided to go for the Core2Duo E6750, which is the fastest non-Extreme dual core processor available today. To it, I added 2 GB RAM and a mid-range graphics card (Nvidia 8600GT based) and I got one hell of a beast.

Last year, I had made a resolution not to run any pirated software on my pc. I'd gone out and bought an original WindowsXP license and wanted to transfer it to this PC from the old one.
That's when I realised a) I'd bought an OEM version which was non-transferable and b) I'd kept the certificate of authenticity in such a safe place that I couldn't find it at all!! I decided to go with Windows Vista, as I felt that it would be more future proof, despite all the negative press and my previous bad experience with it.

The OS installation went off very smoothly and I was done in a little over an hour. I was amazed by how sweet Vista runs on this machine as compared to my laptop, which is also a dual core with 2 GB of RAM. Must be the faster processor, RAM and hard disk. I'm really excited because now I'll finally be able to play the Orange Box games that I bought recently:-)