Posted: Saturday, January 26th 2008

I've really been feeling the itch to work on the Gu news site GUGaming.Com. But, with the partial failure of all the work that went into he GU Store, I'm a bit apprehensive. Not to mention I'd have to wrangle some area specific volunteers that could do some editing duties. Tall order that.

See, what I was thinking was to use members of the GU community to actually produce/link/write about gaming news in each of a few different sections here in the forums. Then myself and my group of volunteer editors would pick the best written, most GU-like articles and flag them for inclusion on the site. In that way the news site will be tied to the forums just like the comic is. If we're lucky and the site started motoring the editors would become payed positions.

But the whole idea is to make a news site by gamers for gamers. There are others out there that do similar (Destructoid for one). But this is GU.

Submitted by Woody | 27 Comments - last comment by: Livistos

Posted: Thursday, January 24th 2008

Some of you may have noticed the distinct lack of color at GU lately. Some might have also noticed that there wasn't a comic on Thursday (1/24). And where some have probably guessed that it was related to the computer issues I mentioned Monday, only a very few know what actually happened.

Well, my primay drive gave up the ghost. Having suffered through several clean XP installs, and outlived a handful of power supplies, I guess he just finally surrendered to old age. Now, in my mind it wasn't that old. I got it new in October 2004. But for as much hell as I've put it through since then, I probably aged the thing prematurely. It was a Western Digital Raptor 74Gig and it worked like a champ until last Friday (1/18) when it froze up and never returned. It didn't hold anything crucial to GU's continued existance. Though I dread the idea of having to commit to another Photoshop install. One of these days they're just going to tell me "no we can't give you permission for another install" and I'm going to have to rebuy the software.

Anyway, I handed my computer over to a local tech guy and he confirmed what I feared, the drive was just gone. The data on it couldn't even be accessed because all computer the drive was tested on refused to see that the drive was really even there. So, I brought it home, ran some more diagnostics myself, formatted and even zero-filled the drive. It has accepted another clean XP install, but it failed it's SMART status testing. Basically the only safe thing to do is to put it out to pasture. Poor Mr. Raptor he worked so hard for me.

I have another Raptor that was originally RAIDed with the one above but has since been transformed into to storage with fast seek times (go go video game drive). I've backed it up and am going to try an XP install there to see how it rates. Otherwise I may have to purchase a new drive before the site is back up to 100%. I'll keep you posted.

Submitted by Woody | 2 Comments - last comment by: Woody