well i looked it up on phototend.com/solar (solar questions and answers) and verbatim it says "an eclipse is when the moon goes between the sun and the floor, so all that change is the light. it confuses some animals but wont affect anything else.".... so I don't think that is the case....

with that said... THANKS FOR TAKING ADVANTAGE OF VULNERABLE AND GULLABLE COMPUTER ILLITERATE KLYDE WHO ACTUALLY THOUGHT THERE COULD BE SOME VALIDITY TO SOLAR CONDITIONS AFFECTING MY COM!!!!

I am currently using Firefox with noscript running.

Please keep suggestions coming guys.... particularly in regard to what I should do when I discover the catylyst to the crashes.... because I believe I narrowed it down to the problematic program, but I'm still not sure how to go about fixing it....

Now that is a thoughtful community member-move if ever I did see one!!-- You just scored 10 points with me Aeolus!

Anyhow..... I finally beat riot's peak in Tales of Graces F! Yes I am proud.... Yes I did also post this in the Tales of Graces F thread.... Yes I am proud....

I also have decided to pick up my Final Fantasy 4 Complete Collection playthrough which I abandoned around this time last year.... Today I just completed the tower of babil (underworld) and said goodbye to two good friends *sob*..... why I am playing FF4 CC in the wake of so many other WAY more enticing backlogged titles? Well..... beats me.... just bothered me I never made it to the after-years I suppose..... I actually think I'm gonna make friday my specific "FF-Day" to complete backlogged final fantasy junk..... still need to get through 3 on the DS as well.....

As for the rest of my week.... well I'm on my way to securing me' grand old castle in my Suikoden "108 star play-through".... and that about covers it......

What I will add is this week has ROCKED as far as finding games at good prices went!! I frequent markets and scour stores for used copies of rare stuff all the time, but I really hit the jackpot this week... Check this list out.... Grandia 1-ps, Grandia 2-dc, evolution-dc, evolution 2-dc, shenmue-dc, chrono trigger- DS, the world ends with you- DS, Valkyrie Profile 2-ps2, dark cloud 2-ps2, Arc of Napishtan-ps2, all for 5 bucks a-piece..... I felt like it was a second christmas.....

..... well to give you an idea of how this is going.... I was backing up 500 gb's worth of stuff last night.... walked away, as the ETA for the copying to my external drive was 4 hours or so.... came back to discover another system crash.... this time the blue screen was not complete, and read something brief to the effect of "STOP x00000005 something....... system could not create memory dump......"..... so I hard restart the com..... windows won't start..... windows then tries to resolve the issue... windows cannot resolve the issue.... try to find a restore point.... windows says none exist.... then magically without any prompting by me what-so-ever, windows starts up and I am on my log on screen....everything is working just fine right now except this time all my files on my external drive decided to hide themselves.....

this is strangest thing I have ever experienced and the only trend I seem to notice is malfunctions only happen at night..... more accurately between 3am and 4am each night actually for the last 3 in a row.... then the rest of the day you'd swear I was a liar and nothing was wrong at all....

I really hate to believe this is spyware/malware but that looks to be the case to me too.... and with what I have invested in trend micro, registry cure, defender this, and platinum that.... I'm relatively pissed.... in fact I've never even so much as looked at one dirty picture on this com!!! I don't go to "questionable" websites either..... this my friends is bullshit!!

And now to make matters worse.... MY PSP is malfunctioning!!! That issue (obviously) deserves a whole other thread entirely but seriously.... all this techno-problemo's are really getting to me..... there is no reason for this.... in a day and age where camera's can be sent to other planets to take pictures and safely send data back to us on earth, computers should exist that DO NOT CRASH WITHIN THE FIRST YEAR OF THEIR LIFE!!! sorry.... sorry.... needed to rant for a moment....

I would just like to say... BOOO-YAH, RIOTS PEAK!!! You've been conquerred!!!.... and damn does it feel good.....

I was afraid it might come to this... "reformatting"... the dirtiest, most dreaded term in my pc vocab..... it would take me ages to get things up and running as I have them now... in fact I don't even know how to.... last time I ended up having to re-purchase all sorts of non-sense I purchased digitally online and whatnot..... as you could tell I'm not very well versed in these matters/don't know all the appropriate and important stuff to back up....

any tips in regard to backing things up I may overlook? as for now I am just concerned with my anime, my art and that is all I know really.... but obviously there are more important things then that..... for instance I have adobe PS CS5, now how would I go about backing that up to restore it in event of a reformat?

Well I backed up a great deal of stuff.... unfortunately I have way too much to accomplish all of that in one sitting.... but I'm plugging away at it.... when all the sudden....a new problem emerges.... system crash/memory dump/blue screen of death!!!

The system crash keeps happenning now.... I keep restoring.... sometimes it works for hours.... sometimes minutes.... sometimes I can log into windows.... sometimes I cannot.... I don't know what is going on... I never really had any problems prior to this and my computer is only a year old.

While having only dipped my toe in the lake of Yggdra and Knights, I am still super stoked about Gungnir.... I have had it pre-orderred since it was officially given its date.... I hope I can find the time to get through Yggdra and Knights before this comes out though, because my current "to play" list is massive and  I fear these maybe gems that slip by me despite being on my shelf..... Because If I am correct and Gungnir is not related to those titles in any way, than I feel it may take precedence to me before those. I absolutely adore the art style and aesthetics... major selling point for me.....

I'm sorry.... your right, I do know better... I get excited over PS2 talk and my lower nature takes control.... I just can't help it...

As for your freezing issue, I feel for you man... Happened to me a time or two as well when moving from one environment to the next... screen would go dark and never light back up..... I lost like two hours of gameplay meandering through the innards of the gnosis to that scenario....

I too hate cross-universe titles.... even when my beloved Etna makes a cameo in an NIS release it bothers me.... and I love Etna.....

As for anything that has to do with capcom, well.... I think the only thing that could excite me now would be another breath of fire.... yes I would love a breath of fire.... heck, after I bought the game i'd even dump another title or two's worth into all the DLC.... I actually had a dream that the big Namco x Capcom x Sega revelation was a new breath of fire..... I was gonna post here about it but my computer decided to take some time off lately....

This should probably be another topic.... and it probably will end up as one... but I'll bite anyhow.... here are a few off the top of my head...

Suikoden 3-5 ( liked 5 best personally)
Wild Arms 4 or 5
Magna Carta (I don't care what anyone says... I loved it)
Growlanser Generations and Growlanser Heritage of War (these are most definately "must play" IMO)
Valkyrie Profile 2 The Silma....Silma... Silma-something..... (forgot the title specifcally, still decent)
Disgaea 1and 2 (loved em)
Persona 3 and 4 (loved em)
Digital Devil Saga (loved what I saw of em)
Nocturne (everyone loved it as far as the SMT stuff goes.... I found it pretty bland.... while the environments and tone are very cool, I just couldn't get into it personally..... something about playing as demon that looks more like a techno raver turned me off)
Devil Summoner (loved the first... heard the second was better, still have yet to get to it)
Dark Cloud 2 (I didn't dig the first)
Shadow Hearts (people rave about this one... I have yet to get to it myself)
Dragon Quest  VIII

Funny thing is I love generically idiotic anime-LoL

I don't know though.... for as much as I've loved the Tales games, the casts always proved forgettable to me.... I actually didn't like any of the Abyss cast at all to be honest... As I said a few exceptions stick out in my mind throughout the years, but none I really fell in love with. I guess I should have been more specific, as its the characters themselves I found mundane... the interactions and cast development was probably their only saving grace with me in prior installments.

Though I must admit... I did always think Kratos was pretty bad ass.... and its been too long for me to recall Tales of Eternia (once I finish graces F, that is getting another playthrough)

Freakin' nuts man.... That makes me mad.... I asked 101 times if pre-orderring got me any goodies... having already played through the European thus I felt no need to buy the game again unless there were some limited edition bonus.... NEVER was I informed of this  "art book"..... damnit.....

A little piss here and there I can tolerate.... though its not really funny and I too felt for Hubert..... but fart jokes.... well I have no time for fart jokes... no sir, I don't like em.... in fact typing the word "fart" makes me feel funny..... I prefer to pretend flatulence does not exist personally....

But back on topic..... As fir the kids thing, I didn't mind it.... but that was cause I knew it would end- LoL! But did anyone else get a funky "this remind me of Breath of Fire 2 vaguely" sort of vibe after completing it? I don't know.... probably just me....

I am 40 some hours in and absolutely love this game.... I really think its my favorite Tales title yet.... Whats really shocked me, it being a tales game and all, is how in love I've fallen with the cast... In most of the other tales games they were an afterthought collectively, save a few particular characters sprinkled throughout, in the wake of awesome gameplay..... But I really love em  and their interactions in this one! Like quite honestly Richard, Hubert, Sophie and Pascal are all just completely worth writing home about.

I have no experience with the newer model ps3's or the ps2 classic downloads but with the 60gb ps3 with BC when you hit the smoothing option during gameplay the difference is quite drastic..... I mean I have seriously tried every high-end cable and visual enhancing method I could come across and NOTHING I've seen works as well to make your old games look as good as they did, if not better, on newer TV's..... I'm curious as to whether this is possible with the ps2 classic downloads and newer ps3 models myself.... can anyone shed any light on this?