Woes and more woes

My laptop hard drive got inexplicably wiped, so my son installed W8.1. Being used to W7, there was a learning curve, but it wasn't too bad.

Then my hard drive inexplicably crashed again, so my son now put in a hard drive and reinstalled W8.1. However, he warned me that this drive isn't reliable.

Thankfully I'll be able to order one in a few days as soon as my Paypal transfer goes through. No, I'm not going to some computer store and paying an arm and a leg for something I can get online for a fraction of the price. Yes, it's new-other, which means a drive that was removed from a new, unused machine during an upgrade to a bigger drive. This one has a capacity of 320GB, plenty big enough for what I want it to do. The company is just selling it at a huge discount to get rid of it and make a little money. It will be shipped in an antistatic bag and bubble envelope. I discussed it with my son and he said as long as they deliver it like that it should be fine. So if the seller is still selling them in five days, I'm ordering. If not, I've transferred enough that I know I can get another one if it costs a bit more than the one I'm watching.

No, I'm not telling you which one I'm watching or where, you'll have to guess, can't make it easier for someone else to buy it out from under me.

Something weird about DA

DA is Dragon Age. I've played Origins and 2. Recently (like, less than a week ago) my laptop hard drive got wiped out. Don't ask me why or how, I don't know.

Anyway, once everything got settled with a new (W8.1) OS, I installed my games, updated my video card and when I tried to play DA Origins, I got the error message that some components were missing which were related to my graphics card. Now those components were in the graphics card folder, but when I compared the dlls from DA2 to DAO, those components were missing from DAO. Now, what was I to do? I'm no computer expert, but since those particular dlls had to do with graphics and weren't game-specific, I got the brilliant idea to copy them over from one to the other. Now, not move them over, copy them over. This means that I had to right-click the dll I wanted, select copy from the popup menu and then right click in the other folder and choose paste. Of course I had to give admin permission for something like this since it's in the Program files, but that's just an extra click. Once I copied all the missing files over, DAO then launched as intended. Yay me.

Also, if you play Dragon Age on the computer, and you want to enable the console, please go into your settings (which are in the DA folder in Documents, not Program) and change the hotkey for the console to F6 instead of `(tilde). The reason for this is it is very easy to accidentally click that tilde key when using your quickbar 1 button. You simply need to go to your Bioware folder in Documents, find Dragon Age, then Settings, then the Keybindings,. Once it opens in Notepad, scroll down to OpenConsole: Button_GRAVE, delete GRAVE and replace it with F6 (or whatever you prefer) and then close the window, clicking Yes when it asks you if you want to save.

It's as easy as that.

Another helpful tip for Oblivion

Do not, under any circumstances, allow your horse to be 'blessed' by a wayshrine. It's only possible to do if you get your horse on top of it and then make sure it is between you and the shrine when you activate it. However (and I read this on an Oblivion wikia) doing so not only cures your horse of any diseases it may pick up on the road (from attacking animals and such, same ones your character can pick up), it also gives your horse an insane boost in speed.

I know this because I just put Prior Maborel's Paint on one to see what happened. I thought the warning was maybe a tad overstated, but it's not. In run mode, the horse is so insanely fast that it literally runs off cliffs before I can turn it. In walk it's probably as fast, or faster, than the black horse.

So, if a wayshrine can make the paint (the slowest horse in the game) so insanely fast that it can't be controlled, just imagine what it can do to the black (the fastest horse in the game). Oh, and the effect is permanent, not like the blessing if it hits you.

Therefore, if you want to be sure of keeping your horse free of diseases, my suggestion is to get to a spellmaking altar (either the Arcane University or Frostcrag Spire) and make a custom cure disease spell that works on touch instead of on self. Naturally, you'll need to go to a chapel somewhere and buy it from the spell vendor, and then get your restoration to at least 50, but then you can just cast it on your horse from time to time to keep it healthy and disease-free. The reason I'm saying this is that you can't tell when your horse has been afflicted with a disease, unless you notice it isn't healing as quickly as it should. Therefore just hit it with a cure disease once in awhile.

While I'm on the subject of your horse, you should also make yourself a custom restore health spell for your horse as well (just make sure it's on touch and not on target or self). If you get your restoration up to 75, you can make one that restores 100 points of health for 1 second. Yeah, it costs a lot of magicka to cast, but it will be worth it after you find your horse to be down to very little health after it's attacked by a minotaur or an ogre.

So, happy hunting in Obilivion.

Saving Oblivion on the PC

Sure, you can hit the esc button and then Save and let the computer give it a number, but then if you want to change characters (if you have more than one), then you'd have to either remember which number the character was saved under or mouseover the saves till you found the one you wanted.

Another way is to bring up your console and type savegame <name>, where <name> is the name you want to save it under. You won't need to use the <>, just name it. I generally use the name of my character as the name of the save. If they have a first and last name, I'll make one save with their first name, such as Tevyn, and then make another save labeled TevynS, as his last name is Syndelias. Then to save progress, just hit your esc button, choose Save and then I'll generally use the bottom save to make a new save. In other words, I'll overwrite one of the two saves.

For special quests, such as Through a Nightmare Darkly, I made a special save called Dreamworld. I always save my progress in TaND there for each character.

So, there's my tip on saving games when you have multiple characters so you can find them easily.

Training Sneak

I covered this a bit in an earlier post, but I've found a good way to train it. When you go to Bravil, you'll hear rumors about a ghost called the Forlorn Watchman. Asking about it triggers the quest The Forlorn Watchman. When you go out to Bawnwatch camp to wait for him, sneak behind him when he walks away from the camp. He won't see you, and you'll only have a few critters to whack on the way to his next destination. He'll go just past Fort Irony and stand to look out over the bay. Speak to him to trigger the next part of the quest. There's a tree nearby him with a rock next to it that makes a nice place to sneak in place, just back into it so you can see when he disappears, and then sneak until he does. Then sneak over to Fort Irony. If there's an enemy down there, sneak onto the ledge above them and then just continue to sneak to your heart's content. You'll level it in no time, especially if it's a major skill. Just be sure to walk-sneak and not run-sneak, since the enemy might hear you and seek you out.

Another good place to train it up at is on the Bloated Float during An Unexpected Voyage. Once you kill Lynch (the first bandit you encounter), you find out that Graman-gro-Marad (the Orc bouncer) is locked in the closet at the other end of the deck you're on. Lynch has the key so just loot him and then go over close to the closet and start auto-sneaking (whichever key makes them auto-move) into a corner. You can do this as long as you like and level it up. I like to get to at least 50 as quickly as possible since that will let me sneak in any boots without penalty. Before lvl 50, the weight of your boots had an effect on being discovered. If you're really patient, take it up to lvl 75, where you can run-sneak without penalty. I like to do An Unexpected Voyage early on because it gets me a full set of leather armor (minus shield/helmet, but I'll already have a leather shield) with a Blackwater cuirass, which is better than a normal leather cuirass. And since I rarely have a character use heavy armor it's perfect to use for females if I want to skip the chainmail stage of the game (chainmail for females leaves her arms exposed and I just don't like that from a RPing perspective.).

So why would I even pay for a night on the Bloated Float when I can use the abandoned shack nearby, or just take over the Marie Elena? Well, from a RPing perspective, and if I'm playing female, she wouldn't want to share a shack with two males (two males live in the shack). And, say, it's the first and cheapest place she runs across to get a night's sleep at since she also wouldn't want to sleep in the open on one of the beggar's bedrolls on the docks either. For a male, well, he just feels like having a drink and then decides to spend the night when he has a few too many ;). Yeah, he'd have enough gold by then from selling the stuff he got from escaping the sewers. And you know guys, they'd want to celebrate their freedom.

I even took off my fortify sneak boots I made and put on another pair so I could see when it was getting to Expert. (Yeah, I was already at around 65 sneak when the ghost disappeared).

You can probably do stuff like this during dungeon-crawling if you're patient. Sneak around enemies for awhile, then kill them and move on.

Miscellaneous Useful Enchantments

You can enchant resistance to disease, damage or magic as well. These would be good enchantments to also put on armor pieces. Any creature in the game can give you a disease and the only way to get rid of it is to use a cure disease potion or chew an alchemical ingredient with cure disease as its first effect (such as Mandrake Root), or else get your Restoration up to 50 and buy the Cure Disease spell. This is especially important if you're going to be hunting vampires regularly, as you can contract Porphyric Hemophilia from them, which is the vampire disease ingame. If you find you've gotten it, get rid of it quickly with Cure Disease or at any Temple Altar. (If you don't have any bounties or much infamy, that is)

Having some resist disease/poison enchantments give you some protection, so if you run across any, use them. Also, anything that reflects damage is fantastic. You can equip it and then watch lower-class enemies such as rats and mud crabs kill themselves when they attack you because the damage reflects back on them. Unfortunately you cannot enchant things with reflect damage or spells, but you can find things in dungeons sometimes, or get them as rewards for quests, so be on the lookout.

Seriously. I once had about 66% reflect damage (total, of three enchanted things), and when rats would jump on me, they would die within three jumps. Same for mud crabs. Goblins would take a little longer, but if I kept my health up while they attacked, it would be fun to watch them eventually kill themselves. Or bandits or highwaymen. The list goes on.

More Useful Enchantments

A lot of the time you'll find pieces of jewelry already enchanted with useful enchantments, either on dead bodies or in chests while you're exploring dungeons. But if you find that you need something now (such as something to help you breathe underwater or see in dark places, for example), then you can enchant pieces of jewelry or clothing with appropriate spells. You just need to have the spell in your inventory and have the necessary skill level to use the spell, and of course, access to an enchanting altar.

So, what am I talking about? For all of the things below, you only need a filled petty soul gem as the effects are constant.

Breathing underwater: Enchant any ring, necklace, piece of clothing or armor with an underwater breathing spell.

Walking on water: If you want to skip across the water, enchant anything with a water-walking spell (I find shoes are good for this)

Seeing in the dark: Well, a light spell enchantment would work, but if you're a sneaky type, there's a big chance that you'll be spotted, so I suggest using the Night Eye enchantment instead. The downside to this is that everything has a bluish cast, so it's hard to tell where the dark corners are to hide in.

Now, for spells that might need a more powerful soul gem.

Feather: You can make feather clothes by using soul gems and the Feather enchantment. Or....

Use Grand soul gems and enchant  some jewelry with Fortify Strength, which will also allow you to carry more, and also gives you more oomph when fighting. Maybe enchant a whole suit of Bound Armor with that for a nice boost to carrying power.

So, you see what I mean about useful enchantments. And I haven't even listed half of what's out there, just the ones I use most. I'm sure you can use your imagination and come up with other things yourself.