The Team Fortress 2 kill cam has always seemed to be a pretty pointless feature; you get killed and are then given the privilege of taking a snap of your killer. Okay, it’s useful for getting achievements and also allows you to pinpoint the location of your foe, but when some people keep moving around it’s kind of useless.

Until now…

Yup, this is a snap I got of Mr. Errkal yesterday. Sure I died, but it also shows that I pumped his heavy full of holes, almost took him down and what’s that… our spy was about to get him? Excellent! Now I can sleep at night!

I’m currently writing this on my laptop as I am updating my main machine with Windows updates after a rebuild. I had to do this after a bizarre issue occurred involving my Antivirus/Firewall software. I found that if I disabled it (a requirement for streaming to Media Center on the Xbox) my internet performance went out the window. I tried a few different things but none of them worked.

Anyway, after rebuilding my PC I did what you normally do: grab the latest updates and the graphics card drivers. This went according to plan, but after rebooting I was presented with a black screen, yup, nothing but black. The monitor was definitely on because I got no signal errors, Windows had loaded because I could hear the startup chime. WTF was going on? I loaded the thing into Safe Mode and checked out Google only to be presented with thousands of results of the black screen of death, all of which related to a Windows update issue that popped up in November 2009.

I tried several different things, I uninstalled the video drivers, tried the previous version, nope. Uninstalled the updates, nope. And then it suddenly hit me – disconnect the HDMI connection from my graphics card. I rebooted the machine, did it work? YES!

… the bloody thing had only gone and selected my TV as the default monitor…

And to think I was throwing my TV controller up in the air and catching it while thinking about the potential driver issue. It’s official, this user is a tool.