Celebrating Birthday with BSODs and Risking a Deep Fired GPU

March 8th, 2010 marks my 20th birthday. No cakes or whatsoever, since I don't actually find celebrating my own birthday to be something significant. The day just passed on normally, although I do get the occasional wishes as I meet people. And my Facebook page got stormed that day with all those wishes, rapidly filling up my wall. I'd appreciate all those wishes even if I don't give a damn.

Instead here, right on that day the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) makes an appearance on my PC for the first time since I've upgraded to Windows 7. Given the clue, 0x0000007f, I found out that the culprit was the new ZoneAlarm firewall I just installed on 7th. The previous COMODO Firewall appears to be too paranoid even at relatively low security settings that it often interrupts whatever I'm doing. Windows Firewall seems to be the main target for hackers, so I need an alternative. But as I found out that ZoneAlarm has issues with Windows 7 x64, I'll have to revert to Windows Firewall.

At first I thought it was the NVIDIA driver 196.75, which is reported to cause malfunctioning within the cooling fans, ultimately leading to some deep fried GPUs. I installed it right on the day it was released, and the next day my classmate came to deliver the news about the driver. Way more horrifying than all those horror movies I've seen (they failed to give me a real scare), I immediately downgraded to 196.21. I was pretty lucky as my roommate played Dark Sector on my PC with 196.75, and nothing bad happens. Still, can't risk frying my own 9600GT. Guess I've learnt here not to try new stuff on day one. Try it on day ten instead.

Two days later comes those BSODs which horrifies me, given the scary news. But a sigh of relief since I don't have to crack any more money for a new graphic card, and all is well now. Revo wasn't so lucky though, his 8800GT fried, but for a different reason. Probably going for GF100 this time.