Recently, I dropped a little over $200 in computer parts to turn my cougar machine into something a little better equipped to watch movies and television shows. I felt a good deal of accomplishment in sorting through the hardware, and swapping out the guts of the cougar machine for some faster and stronger components. Just when I thought everything was going to transition seamlessly, it turns out that my really old wireless card simply did not work with one, Windows 7, or two, any 64-bit systems to begin with.
Begrudgingly, I dropped a little bit more money on a new wireless card additionally, and now the cougar is up and running again, and ready for the next steps in becoming an efficiently functioning media box. So far, I am pleased with the performance out of it, and in fact, it kind of sucks because now all of my older media files that were acquired in the ages when 380-480p were acceptable resolutions, look putrid on my new setup now. Regardless, this is a project that is complete in the meantime.
Recently, I dropped around $50 for an Xbox wireless adapter. You know, that little piece of hardware that anyone buying an Xbox nowadays doesn’t need, because current Xboxes come with the adapters built in. But for people like me who have perfectly fine working old white 360s, well we need to drop a little bit extra on an adapter to enjoy the luxury of wireless connectivity.
For the last few years, I’ve had a 50 ft. CAT-5 cord literally stretched from my bedroom where the router is, down to the living room in order to connect my Xbox, but I simply got tired of it and other circumstances. At this point, I didn’t expect to even have to pay $50 for an adapter, considering they’re parts that are slowly becoming extinct, but apparently there are a lot of people in my same boat, so there is still somewhat enough of a demand to warrant even 50% of the original retail price.
I learned that there is no MAC address imprinted on the physical adapter itself, but instead a USB MAC address; however, this was unknown to me, and there I was thinking I got a dud, and I needed to go through the headache of busting some heads online to rectify the situation. But it turns out that the only way to obtain the wifi MAC address, is to acquire it from your Xbox while it’s plugged in and in its settings. So upon learning this and fixing it, my Xbox runs pretty well on the wireless, despite my trepidation in going wireless, due to skepticism that the connectivity wouldn’t be as good as when it was hardwired. Regardless, this is a project that is now complete.
For the last year or so, the battery in my Xbox controller has been more or less dead, and the only way I’ve been able to use it to play games was to have it wired into the USB to keep it powered. I dropped another $30 on the Nyko third-party wireless batteries plus dock that my big gay homo of a brother has been bragging about over the last few years, and now that nuisance is solved, and that’s now another endeavor that is now complete.
I complained a lot in regards to the financial means necessary to complete all these little projects and modernizations to my living quarters. But now that they’re all finished, I don’t know what to do now. I’m bored, and these things, as much as I balked about the costs of doing such, did a fine job of keeping me occupied and mind active at solving problems or researching solutions. Needless to say, on this beautiful Sunday afternoon, I’m frankly bored as shit.
It’s a good thing I’ve got the zombie run to look forward to next weekend, or otherwise I might go crazy with this feeling of boredom lately.
