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In the later part of 2007 I finally had some funds put together to get myself a proper PC gaming rig again.  I settled on the Nvidia 8800 Ultra as my card of choice.  I bought the MSI version for a massive $589 before shipping.  This was actually quite cheap for the Ultra at that time thanks to it being an MSI model.  And then I strapped a $130 waterblock to it.

Yep.  I upgraded from a $300 mid-range video card to a $700 one.  Even in 2007 the 8800 series was getting a bit dated.  The Ultra was discontinued only a couple months after I purchased it.  It wasn’t a good value for the money so they say.

I’ve been using it for a year and a half now and today is the first day it’s let me down.  I can’t run STALKER Clear Sky at 1600×1200 with full eye candy at 30FPS minimum.  FarCry 2, Crysis, Fallout 3, FEAR2 and GTA4 are all games I’ve recently played with it and it’s done amazing on each and every one.  STALKER:CS is a demanding game with amazing lighting effects and at 1600×1200 it will dip down to 20FPS.  Again, with maximum settings.

Except for AA.  I don’t use or like AA.

The problem seems to be video RAM.  768m just isn’t enough anymore if you want full eye candy.  GTA4 is the most noticible when it comes to video ram usage since it provides a handy little utility for guestimating how much you need.  If you want big draw distances you just need a lot more video memory.

Super fast DDR3 helps when you need to swap textures but it’s still a bad idea.  So I have to run STALKER:CS at 1280×960 resolution.  With full eye candy but less resolution I get the 30FPS minimum I want with averages in the mid 40s.  The video memory usuage drops to 600-800m so mcuh more inline with the card.

Don’t know why dropping resolution drops down memory usage but since it does more power too me.

I’ve noticed that I’m not running the card overclocked.  With RivaTuner and the water cooling I can clock this card to over 720MHz core, 1580MHz shader, and 1250MHz vram.  RivaTuner somehow got uninstalled on this machine so it’s only running it’s stock ‘overclock’ of 660/1512/1150MHz.

The stock Ultra is spec’ed for 612/1500/2160MHz.  So MSI really got some solid numbers out of it out of the box.  But don’t let MSI fool you: the card was NEVER stable at those settings with the stock cooling.  You’d get a lot of pixel ‘glitter’ at those settings though underclocking it to stock Ultra settings fixed that.  So did going to water cooling.

As far as the DangerDen cooler well I think it was a waste to be honest.  I love DangerDen products and I’m absolutely glad someone makes such a massive cooler that can also cool the RAM and power components.  But the thing of it is that you just can’t get much more out of the RAM.  RAM tends not to overclock so well on video cards and even when it does it provides very little performance gain.  Having MORE ram is important.  Does the DangerDen cooler sacrifice GPU cooling abilites for the RAM?  The GPU temperatures are quite high.  Well over 65c after intense gaming.  Thermal transfer from the GPU to the water is poor with this block.  That doesn’t stop 720-730MHz core ranges from being unreachable though.  With a little overvolting I think 730-740MHz would be completely stable.  I would like a better GPU block though.

I still think vram is the limiting factor here.  Who cares about a fast core/shader if you’re swapping textures from system RAM all the time?  If this card had 1GB or more of RAM I think I’d be playing at full res on STALKER.

The bottom line for me is that I’ve gotten a lot of use out of this card.  Being able to run PC games with all the lovely eye candy has sort of made me buy and play a ton of PC games in the past 18 months.  I’m still shocked every time I get a new game and go in to the options screen and crank everything up and watch it not struggle at all.  Did I get my moneys worth?  No I don’t think so.  The water cooling kit was too much for what I got out of it.  And the MSI Ultra, while a good deal at the time, wasn’t priced to compete with the slightly better valued 8800 GTX.

But I still don’t need to upgrade.  The Nvidia GTX 285 can be had for under $400 and it’ll have 1GB of RAM.  It’s a tremendous value for that and it’d be my card of choice.  I get to wait for the next series of GPUs to come out before I start feeling the slowdown.

I was thinking about tech company organization the other day and I stumbled upon an interesting thought.  In many ways, working in a development house is like working in a restaurant.  You have customers.  They look at a menu, pick what they find appetizing at that moment in time, and then place the order.  The kitchen springs to life, uses the ingredients and appliances they have to create a meal, and then some one delivers it to the customer.  If all goes well, the customer pays and comes back again for more.  The customer really has almost no idea what goes on in the kitchen and usually doesn’t want to know for fear that they would be appalled.  The customer and chefs almost never communicate with each other unless it’s through a volley of intermediate employees.

Imagine your developers are the guys in the back making the food.  Imagine the development managers are taking the orders.  Imagine the product people or upper management as the customers.  The consumers.

It all sort of fits, doesn’t it?

Customers all want the same basic things.  They want fast service.  They want quality service.  They want reliable service.  And most important of all is that they want it cheap.  It’s easy to tell when when your service is fast at a restaurant.  If you don’t have your food right quick you’ll be bloody hungry!  Quality and reliability are easy to measure too.  If the food tastes like burnt motor oil than they’ve failed on both accounts.

For some reason the customers of the software development world have a much more difficult time of gauging the performance of their ‘kitchens’.  They almost always seem to focus on speed and cheap.  I don’t think they always realize that they’re getting McDonald’s though.

Fast food joints provide a ready supply of expedient food options.  Through clever marketing it even seems cheap.  Your typical fast food meal can cost just as much as eating out somewhere more reputable however.  The real problem with fast food is that it’s completely unhealthy and has a tendency to kill you if you eat too much of it.

Your typical developer is like a fry cook.  You don’t even want to know what this guy would do to your burger.  You certainly wouldn’t want him to take your order cause he’d simply muck it up.  He’s getting paid so little and similar jobs are so readily available that he just doesn’t care about your fries one bit.  So you get soggy fries.  And no matter how bad those fries are you’ll still go back to this place because it’s quite simply a quick fix.

There are nice restaurants though.  There are developers out there who think just like fine chefs.  They want to make something beautiful and tasty because that is their passion.  They design their menu carefully and they charge a lot more so they can go buy the best steaks or wine.  The wait staff is cute and attentive and will certainly know which delightful soup the chef has whipped up.

And the chef will certainly feel a little annoyed if you pour ketchup all over your dry aged filet.

You’d probably like your developers to be chefs and not fry cooks.  You have to give them the leeway to do the kind of work they can be proud of.  Just place your order and sit back and enjoy the appetizers while they assemble something you’ll love.  If the food arrives late and cold than don’t pay!

The sad reality of this, however, is that no matter how good of a restaurant your development house turns out to be, it’s still a restaurant.  Your customers are placing orders and waiting to see what will arrive at the table.  It’s almost always a surprise.  I think this is a terribly ineffective way of building quality software products.

Think baseball team instead.  Everyone has different positions on the team but they still all work as a single unit.  They’re all working for a single goal and the greater good.  They’re playing to win the game.  And in modern times they’re also playing to raise someones stock portfolio.  You can make a lot of money while doing an excellent job and having fun.

Oh sure, every company throws out terms like ‘team building’ but they almost always mean hierarchy building.  And hierarchy is exactly the root cause of the restaurant scenario.  You segregate the people requesting work from the people doing the work and create tiny choke points of failure.  No one ever really seems to know what anyone else wants.  By putting someone over someone else you’ve almost certainly reduced the amount of two-way communication between those people.  Person A might feel intimidated by Person B now.  Or Person B might feel they don’t need to listen to Person A because they value their own opinions more.

I know many development companies have adopted flattened management structures.  Others create things called ‘verticals’ or ‘pods’.  Like communism it sounds good on paper but these types of things always seem to have fundamental flaws.  My personal experiences with pods has been grueling primarily because pods don’t interact well with other pods.

The bottom line I think is that if you have a room full of smart and educated people from developers to managers and everywhere in between, why should communications be one way?  How can one set of people dictating requests to another possibly use the full group’s combined potential?  Bi-directional communication has to be encouraged.  The most junior guy on the team might have the best solution for the project.  The product manager might have thought of a simple approach to a tricky development problem but the developers might immediate dismiss it.

Avoiding conflict is not always the best solution.  But the real trick here is to maximize ideas while minimizing conflict.  In the end I don’t know the proper solution.  And I’m certainly not saying that I work for McDonald’s.  But I’m fascinated by the various attempts at company organization I’ve seen first hand.  I’ve seen the ups and downs of many different kinds of structures.  But what I see the most is company after company always falling back on the old standby of ridged org charts and middle management.

I think the offices of the future are going to be much different than that.

Things I Hate:

Invisible walls.  This is supposed to be a wide open game so why can’t I jump over certain walls or get close to others?

World layout bugs.  Objects through walls, trees floating several inches too high, etc.  These are all things that take away from being totally engrossed in the game.

Incredibly bad car physics.  You do A LOT of driving on this game but it feels so stiff and completely unfun.

Everyone is an enemy.  Surely this isn’t realistic.  Where are all the innocent people to kill?

Enemy respawns.  If you clear an area and go back to it a few minutes later it’s completely rebuilt and full of enemies.  Why not have a much slower respawn rate?

Repetitive audio.  The music is interesting but surely they could have more variety.  Enemy voice acting seems out of place with too many ‘white’ actors and repetitive.  Might as well use the Wilhelm scream.

Audio ESP.  I hate games that change the audio to indicate an enemy is near before I see them.  It’s like cheating.

Can only track one mission at a time.  This wouldn’t be so bad except that missions will randomly take you to opposite ends of the map.  This means a lot of boring driving or re-killing countless guard posts.

Enemy AI.  It’s passable but there are some real problems.  Enemies *always* go far cars it seems.  Kill the driver and the gunner goes to the driver seat.  Enemies are given amazing accuracy.  Shot gun headshot from a mile away.  Right.  They run around a lot which is good but if you fire a gun they’ll STOP and LET YOU shoot them.  Bleh.

Bugs. Game isn’t crashy which is GREAT.  EA could learn something from Ubisoft.  But certain missions don’t work correctly.

Saving.  On the PC after many full saves it now takes the game well over 4 minutes to actually pop open the save dialog.  And the Save Boxes in the game world which make sense on the console versions of this game don’t fit at all on the PC.

Things I Like:

Fire physics.

Gun unreliability and break downs.

Main character voice acting.

Weapon choices.  There is a lot of strategy in this game.

Varied terrain.

Diamond hunting.

Data warehousing has become a sort of personal quest of mine.  I’ve been using computers since I was four and in those few decades I’ve managed to create, acquire, and loose countless precious bits of data.  It’s disheartening to have lost some projects I created in my pre-teen years that I know I poured my soul in to at the time.  And all because of a bad floppy.

What’s worse is that I just recently lost more of this precious data in the past few weeks while upgrading my fileserver.  It’s hard to say just how much I’ve lost.  It’s hard to notice when a rogue file or two goes missing over the years but it happens all the time.  On linux with some historical backups a quick diff or rsync can find problems like that.  Cygwin and Windows doesn’t really work quite as nicely.

So currently I have been sorting through 9 year old backup CDs trying to look for things that have gone missing.  I had been thinking it was silly to keep hanging on to a binder full of ancient CDs but I proved myself wrong today.  In fact I found quite a few little nice surprises that I had thought lost forever.

Windows XP is a terrible tool for archiving or backing up data.  Vista is not much better.  I really wish this thing could be Linux.  Heck, I wouldn’t even mind dual booting if I thought Linux could be trusted with live NTFS partitions.  I don’t mind Ubuntu hacking it’s way through one of my NTFS USB drives but my lovely RAID5 array is another story.

NTFS and Linux is getting better though.  It’s a lot less of a struggle to get it to WRITE to NTFS anyway.

Computers are good at remembering things for us.  From letters we sent to ex landlords to what music we used to listen too and pictures of people we used to work with.  My computer remembers my past a lot better than I do.  I try to focus on making new memories rather than spending time living in the past.  It’s possible that this choice means it’s actually more difficult for me to retrieve older memories.  If you spend enough time dwelling on the past it’ll seem much more clear.  I think that in a sense having an “off-mind” memory storage device is quite beneficial.  If only they were reliable on the cheap.

Amazon S3 is not cheap but it does protect my memories from fire and theives or any other sort of disaster that might befall my house.  It’s money well spent I think.  But like burning CDs or using backup tapes it takes quite a bit of thought and energy.  Archiving anything requires a lot of patience and technical knowledge.  Your average computer user simply doesn’t backup their data properly.

Of course now that the web has become very cost effective one can upload their pictures to Flickr or Snapfish or any number of gallery products out there.  You can probably RAR up your text documents and shove them on to RapidShare or something.  But people have the tendency to unwittingly back things up to the web and this is a trend that should definitely continue.  Archiving data really should be this natural.

For me the problem is sheer quantity.  Home videos and huge print quality photo files and CD and game backups start taking up gigs of space.  I have 3.5TB of storage in my file server and the more I have the more I tend to fill.  The RAID5 array has redudnancy but nothing a power surge or virus can’t wreck in an instant.  So I have backup DVDs.  It can take days to compress and burn just a few dozen gigs worth of data.  So I backup more regularly to portable USB drives.  But this is problematic since Windows XP doesn’t have any good backup utilities to properly handle this.

The real reason I lost data in the move is because In order to back up 2TB of data you need 2TB of backup storage.  I had 1.25TB.  I backed up the most important things, so I thought, and assumed the rest would be safe on the RAID5 array.  After the crash I made sure to buy a 1TB drive for one of my external enclosures and I’ll be sure to be buying more of those.  I really need the ability to have full backup somewhere.

And since I wouldn’t want to squeeze even 1TB in to Amazon S3 I need to consider getting some sort of fireproof safe for the backup drives.  Heck, I’ve even considered hiding a hard drive somewhere in one of my cars.  At least if my house burns down or is robbed I’ll probably have the car with me.  I just don’t know how a hard drive will survive in the car with all the moisture and vibration.  I regret throwing out all those silica gel packets now.

The fun comes from my old Atari 800XL system.  I’m still working on preserving the files I generated when I was eight.  It takes some special hardware to get the data on to a PC but I have managed to get some of it uploaded.  It’s still another time consuming process but one I hope to start in to again soon.  Those old 5-1/4 floppies rot pretty darn quick.

You can read more about it on the discussion thread here.  Long story short, because resellerratings.com felt that I was infringing on their trademark by using the words “reseller ratings” to describe the activity on one of my subforums.

Activity that consituted about half a dozen posts and maybe a few thousand views since the sub forum’s inception.

So they bullied me and threatened me in to legal action until I changed it.

So it’s changed now and that’s the end of that chapter.  But the moral of the story is important here.  Corporations are slowly stripping away our civil liberties.  Bloggers have to watch what they say or risk receiving cease and desist letters.

Donate to the EFF today :)

I was feeling up.  By flashing the 1740 and 2320 controllers with special configurations which prevent them from acting as boot drives I am able to have them active on my motherboard at the same time as the ICH10R.  I also discovered that while the 2320 does not work at all from the second PCIe x16 slot it does work fine from the first one.  And I was happy to discover that the 2320 will read the RAID5 array the 1740 made.  I got my backplane installed and my hot swap trays mounted up with the drives and a fresh install of Windows XP and everything was working great.

And then I decided to do an Online Capacity Expansion.  I wanted to go from three 1TB drives in RAID5 to four 1TB drives.  I started the rebuild process and it all seemed to be going swimmingly.  An hour later I came back to check the process of the rebuild and…

The computer went to sleep.  It went to sleep in the middle of the capacity expansion and the RAID controller couldn’t cope.  The failure alarm started to go off, the rebuild was halted and I couldn’t restart it.  My only option was to reboot the machine.  It came back up, the original array was inaccessible but the OCE started again from 0.0% automatically.  I thought that maybe it was a good sign.  Maybe it would pick up where it left off and just make things work again.  I let it run for 14 hours to finish doing whatever it was doing.

It didn’t work.  The result was an incredibly broken array with a weird size and busted partition tables.  I’m really bummed.  I have most things backed up on to USB drives.  I didn’t really loose anything I can’t get back from bittorrent.  But I’m just more annoyed than anything.

I can’t even START getting data back on to the array because it insists on ‘initializing’ itself.  Whatever that means.  It contains no data but it’s going to spend all day parity checking itself for no apparant reason what so ever before I can format it.  It still says it’s a 2TB array and not a 3TB array for some reason so yeah… whatever it’s doing I have to let it do.

So much for my idea of letting my fileserver sleep when I’m not home.  The stupid Highpoint controller doesn’t deal well with it for some reason so I can’t risk it crashing again on a rebuild.  Crap.

Well, I installed the RAID controller in either of my two PCs and it pretty much keeps either from POSTing.  That’s a total bummer.  I tried to next day another one from the Egg but if I get it before the weekend I’ll be surprised.  It sucks to have to wait and spend another $N in shipping.  But on the other paw, I needed to order a 24p ATX power cable extender and an 8p EPS power cable extender.  The new Enermax PSU I installed doesn’t quite reach from one side of the cube to the other.

I’m more than a little worried about this configuration though.  The Highpoint 1740 still refuses to work on the Asus P5Q3 board even after firmware updates on both.  I still get the “No enough space to copy PCI ROM” error.  It just sucks that my ancient IC7 can run the 1740 and use it’s onboard Intel RAID, but the ICH10R on the new one won’t play ball.

Even if the 2320 works where they 1740 fails, I’m not sure it’s going to read from the data array on my three hard drives.  I could destroy the array simply by plugging the drives in to the different RAID controller.  Sure, it’s backed up somewhat.  But it’d be a bad thing none the less.

Meh, I’m sick of thinking about it.  I need to find a better solution to this problem.  I really might have to get a new motherboard :(

I continued the buying spree, I mean, doing my part for the economy.  Microcenter is evil.  Their prices are usually competitive enough to warrant not buying online.  Their sale items are usually great deals.  And sometimes I really like just being able to look at products in meat space.  Instant gratification and all that, even if I have to deal with dreaded sales tax.  I’d rather pay my 5% to UPS than the state I think.

I went in for a new RAID controller.  I’m using a Highpoint 1740 right now.  It’s a PCI 4 port SATAII RAID5 controller that works quite well and has Linux support.  I’m happy with it and it even supports online capacity expansion.  I have this second x16 PCIe port staring at me though so I wanted to get a x4 or x8 PCIe version of the HighPoint card.  Maybe even one with 8 ports.  The Highpoint 2310 looks like what I want.  Microcenter didn’t have this or anything close unfortunately.  I did end up buying the 2300 model there.  It’s essentially the same thing as the 1740 but only PCIe x1 which means it probably won’t be any faster or better than the 1740 I already own.  PCI is 1Gbps and PCIe x1 is 5Gbps.  But for the same price I can get the 20Gbps one so… I’m going to take it back and order the 2310 from NewEgg.  Or the 8 port 2320 maybe.  So hard to decide…

And I would like some faster throughput.  I’m using RAID5 which has ugly write speeds but stripe like read speeds.  And I bought another 1TB Western Digital 5400RPM “Green” drive.  So I’ll have four of those on the array and that will certainly be more data than a PCI slot can deliver.

I bought two 1TB drives actually.  I needed another for a USB enclosure because the 250Gb drives I have in them now are very old, dying, and are not large enough to easily back up the data I need to back up.  These 5400RPM drives run much cooler and are a great fit for an external enclosure.  Plus I can use eSATA with my P5Q3.

Against seemingly better advice, I’ve decided against just running with software only RAID even though my new motherboard has more SATA ports than I can count.  I really don’t like setting up RAID in Linux and any performance gain I can get out of a decent controller card is ideal.  Plus I like the thought of taking these drives and controller out of this computer and installing them in any other computer and not having to mess around with it too much to make it work.

The last waste of money, I mean, economic stimulus was the BFG 9600GT.  I absolutely needed a PCIe video card (even though I have a perfectly good PCI Nvidia 6200).  BFG has a nice warranty and with the rate of failure I seem to have for video cards that’s okay fine with me.  I needed to go Nvidia since it has better Linux support.  And heh, better Windows support for that matter.  Also if I run any Cuda apps, such as F@H GPU client, the 9600’s moderate speed will work nicely even though I won’t be gaming on this card.

So I have quite a bit to do this weekend.  I’m just waiting for my backups to finish so I can throw the new kit in.

Purchasing a KVM isn’t an easy task.  The brand names aren’t necessarily well known, the prices vary wildly for the same features, information isn’t forthcoming from many of these overseas manufacturers, and product reviews are often very negative biased.  I guess they just aren’t a mainstream product yet.

The review bias is an interesting phenomenon.  You’re average junky CPU cooler will often have a zillion positive reviews for no good reason what so ever.  People are just more liable to be happy with certain products than others regardless of the actual quality.

I purchased the IOGEAR GCS1762 KVM a month ago and I really dig it.  The price was a little steep but at least it came with cables I didn’t need.  I purchased much longer cables to run to my Cube which sits about 3-4m away from the LCD and keyboard.  This doesn’t seem like a very large distance but companies are cheap with cable lengths these days even though you can get extra long chinese cables for very cheap.

This assumes you know which polarity of cables you need to buy for your KVM.  And it’s not always easy to determine this unless you have good product photos.  You also need to get a KVM with replacable cables.  It’s a crime when cables can’t be detached.

My old VGA KVM, also an Iogear, worked just fine but VGA over a 4m cable is incredibly blurry and hard to deal with after a while.  But it was at least USB.  And it didn’t have any emulation.  And that’s a good thing.  I don’t know what problem emulation is supposed to solve.  But emulating a missing monitor, keyboard, or mouse really just seems to cause problems for most people.

If you don’t emulate a keyboard or mouse than at worst you might get a ‘Press F1 to continue’ keyboard error on boot which you can maybe disable in BIOS anyway.  The most typical issue you run in to without emulation is a slight 1-2 second lag time when you switch PCs before the USB devices re-register.  Having dealt with this delay for many years I can assure you it’s never been an issue.  Even when I was in the middle of a game.

Monitor emulation doesn’t seem to have a purpose.  Without it, my computers simply boot up in their ‘last known good’ state.  And everything just works.  When a KVM has monitor emulation, if you boot the PC and that PC isn’t selected on the KVM, the KVM tells the PC that you have some bog standard VGA monitor.  Windows responds by setting the resolution to something that is wrong.  And Vista/Nvidia seems to INSIST on putting the Start menu on my second monitor, the one not attached to the KVM, because I assume it wants to put that on the monitor with the largest resolution or something.

I have to go in to the Nvidia control panel and fight with it for about 3 minutes before I can get everything to show properly on the primary display again.  Why the Start menu EVER moves off the primary display is beyond me.

When a KVM emulates a keyboard, sometimes the extended features of those keyboards don’t work.  The media keys, the scroll wheels, the volume controls, the lights and LCDs, etc.  You might not notice unless you have a Logitech G15 but well I do.

The GCS1762 doesn’t seem to have much in the way of keyboard/mouse emulation but it can be gotten around by using the standard USB ports on it instead of the ones labeled keyboard and mouse.  It does have the annoying VGA emulation though and that really bites.  If I don’t remember to have the right PC selected when I boot it, the video gets totally screwed.  But it’s my only complaint.  It switches fast, my images are crystal clear, and I can even switch via keyboard commands which my old one couldn’t do.

It also has a serial port on it for updating firmware.  I can’t imagine what you’d need to do that for but perhaps you can find a firmware that disables emulation.  That’d be worth a look.

Anyway, if you’re in the market for a KVM, Iogear isn’t a bad choice.  I can’t speak for most other models except for Belken which also seem to work just fine.  Just don’t spend too much, get one with removable cables, and the smallest amount of emulation possible.  Read the reviews as there are always people complaining about the problems with emulation on the ones which do it poorly.

Well, rectangular anyway.  After months of whining I finally ordered a new motherboard, CPU, and RAM for the Cube.  Just as a reminded, this machine is used for file serving, general office work, bittorrent, and video editing/encoding.  Basically my stable, bogged down machine.  I keep the other free from cruft so it’s faster for gaming and is more fun to overclock.

The Cube will be getting the Asus P5Q3.  This is the second I’ve purchased.  The first was actually the P5Q3 Deluxe which Abi is using in her desktop.  Apart from the lack of WiFi, which works nicely I must add, I’m not sure what’s different between the boards.  Asus has the problem of making lots of little model revisions on each board and it’s a bunch of work to try to figure out which boards are better than others.  For $150 though it’s a hard board to beat.

Why no LGA 1366 board?  They’re kind of expensive still honestly.  Also I wanted to upgrade my gaming rig with a new processor.  It’s currently running the Q9450 which is an excellent processor.  It just doesn’t overclock very well.  Also, games just don’t benefit from the four cores.  Most games don’t even benefit from a dual core.

So I ordered an E8400.  These chips are almost guaranteed to hit 4GHz.  And at that clock rate, any non SMP games are going to run better.  This is an aging chip but it still seems to be the ’sweet spot’ right now.  $165 still seems like a lot of money for an old dual core.  I guess it’s the demand on the thing.

A DDR3 motherboard needs some DDR3 RAM.  My gaming rig needs RAM more though.  My current Corsair RAM is only good for 1600MHz.  That’s really not too bad.  But the RAM is often running at 1200-1300MHz because it can’t keep up with the FSBs I’m running.  I found that 1600MHz DDR gets a bit limiting fast.  Now, truth be told, RAM speed isn’t a critical factor for most things unless you’re swapping a lot of textures from RAM to video memory.  GTA4 seems to do that a lot as do some other games that allow you to set high view distances.  It’s generally better to have more video RAM but… well, I really wanted to try some 2000MHz DDR3 just to see if I’d get any more performance out of better dividors.  Sometimes it’s the case that weird dividors can increase latencies.  I don’t know if that’s the case here but let’s find out.

I went with some truely horribly colored RAM.  Patriot Viper PVS34G2000LLKNB.  4G worth this time instead of the 2G I currently have (which Vista64 hates).  I went with the Patriot because it was cheap and I’m sick of Corsair RAM dying.  Yes, I’m really scared of the high voltage this thing is rated at.  That tends to kill RAM fast.  And yes, I’m scared of the Patriot brand.  I haven’t had luck with it in the past.  But for $180 I get a flash drive and a copy of 3DMark Vantage too.  I was sold.

I think the RAM is a crap shoot.  Assuming it runs at it’s rated speed when I get it, I’ll be surprised if the RAM has any longevity.  I hope by that time we have some faster, and more affordable, DDR3 around.  If 2000MHz RAM makes any difference in performance that is.  It’s possible that the cheapest and slowest DDR3 is just as viable.  Just get a brand with a decent warranty.

Patriot’s website claims to have a limited lifetime warranty on the Viper RAM as long as you don’t modify it in any way.  I’ve heard that it’s hard to actually obtain an RMA though.

This RAM is also only rated for 2000MHz on the Nvidia i790.  How it will react on my P5E3 X48 is unknown I guess.  Crapshoot.  My experience in the past with this Nvidia only thing with other products is that they work just as well on Intel chipsets.

Since the Cube isn’t watercooled and I don’t actually have a cooler for it, I had to pick up this.  I really do like Zalman products.  A little costly, a little pretty, and definitely not the best performers.  But usually quiet and well made.  And for a machine that will be on 24×7, quiet and well made is important.

So I have a project for the weekend!

Yeah, I’m still talking about Vista tuning.  I’m just so bothered to have 25-30% of my RAM in use when I have nothing running. Service and Task tuning is very important with Vista.  It tends to run with a ’safe’ set of services out of the box but most of these things aren’t required by anyone.  I’m certainly not on a domain.  I’m not sharing credentials.  I don’t need tablet input services.  There are so many different versions of Vista which allow you to have differing amounts of useless applications.  But Microsoft isn’t doing anything to ask what you as a user actually intend to DO with this install.  Are you in an office?  Are you just playing games?  Are you just looking for internet and email?  Why not do some sort of on demand kind of installations?  Microsoft won’t change for the better until it has to.  *cough* Windows 7…

The most confusing and constant part of my Vista install is that right after boot up and log in it’s using 750-800m of RAM.  But this drops after a few minutes to 560-580m.  It’s at 631m right now after a fresh boot with only FireFox running.  It can’t be good for Windows to be loading so much of my hard drives that it doesn’t need that much longer after boot.  There doesn’t seem to be any way to stop it though.

I dabbled with using the Windows Classing theme, disabling the Themes service and the Desktop Management service.  After a couple days I’ve realized that it has no real performance impact on this machine and only saves about 30-50m of RAM.  Disabling Aero can save another 50-70m so as pretty as it is, I have that disabled for now.  Kind of splits the difference you know?

I really dislike the scroll bar in the start menu.  It slows me down I think.  I need to look for a way to kill that.  I prefer the XP just expand forever over half the screen method.

Someone really needs to write a good document on disabling Vista tasks.  There are plenty of Service references.  But less information about tasks.  Some online guides actually suggest you don’t modify them at all.  But that’s not quite right.  You can in fact disable 80% of them.  Certainly the defrag and anything pertaining to the indexer if you don’t use it.  Anything that runs while the system is ‘idle’ is probably a bad idea.  Anything that runs at start up or login can really delay those things.  I really hate that certain tasks like the error rollup tasks run every x minutes regardless of if you’re doing something more important at that time or not.

I currently own an original Nintendo DS along with a DS Lite.  The problem with the DS you see is that it’s horribly uncomfortable for me to play.  I don’t know if its carpal tunnel or the design of the thing.  It and the GBA before it are awful devices to play RPGs on.

The GBA was kind enough to have the GameBoy Player for the GameCube however.  I don’t know if there will ever be such a thing for DS games.  It’s a question of input and dual screens.  It’s not something that’s so easily emulated on a single TV.  But I could certainly be done.

The DS has the third largest collection of JRPGs of any system.  It’s very close to the PS2 and PSX collections.  So if you’re a JRPG collector, you really want to buy many of these DS titles.  There are some especially good old school ones.  Many remakes and ports.  And it seems a shame really that these awesome games are stuck on a device I can hardly see and that gives me cramps after 30 minutes of playtime.

The PSP isn’t as problematic.  It’s comfortable, the screen is large, and it’s ultimately meant for people of an age greater than 12.  The PSP itself follows the PSX/PS2 lineage of having some great JRPGs but sadly doesn’t have the same level of market.  Sony’s close minded tactics with locking the device down has really limited the takeoff of the device.  I’m sure the head haunchos are blaming market segmentation or something else to that effect.  But no, it was simple old man bureaucracy and greed that made it a closed system and stunted it’s ‘cool factor’ potential.

The DS itself has about two dozen different devices that allow the thing to be hacked in all sorts of clever ways.  Heck, a friend gave me a broken M3 Simply.  If I ever bothered to try and make it work, I could easily go download any ROM I wanted and stick it on this flash cartridge and play it on the DS.  So instead of spending the $150/mo on DS games I probably won’t ever play because I can’t stand the DS, I could just save all the ROMs and emulate them on my PC.

But, I have a problem.  I have an addiction to collecting certain kinds of video games even if I can’t play them.  I’m cutting back little by little.  But I really needed that copy of Dragon Quest V and The Y’s I & II I swear!

I’m so happy to have gotten president’s day off from work.  It gives me a nice long weekend to decompress and spend some maitenance time on some projects.  One of the things that went missing from my life when I got married is downtime.  Prisoners have this sort of thing in droves.  It’s the kind of time that lets you obsess over the details.  It’s the kind of time that forces you in to doing something you want to do and would take pride in doing except you’d probably never get around to doing it otherwise.

Okay, maybe it’s not just marriage and kids.  It’s also video games and television and the internet.  It’s an enormous amount of media that I could spend my whole life digesting.  And I think this sort of thing can be very educational.  I’ve learned more in the past few years from Wikipedia than I had in my entire highschool career.  But this desire to absorb has overtaken my desire to produce.  And that’s very unlike me.

Video games and reading and movies are also an escape.  Escaping is important to me as it gives me a drug free way to turn reality off for a moment.  It’s an ideal way to melt away stress.  But with a successful career comes the added means to buying a lot more books and video games and movies.  There’s just not enough time in the day to deal with it all.

So now I try not to fall in to my habit of watching or reading or playing the same things over and over again.  I could read that Neil Gaiman book or play that Valve game 100 times over and be perfectly satisfied.  But then I’m not experiencing new things and it seems like a waste of time.  Unfortunately, it turns out that my ability for comprehension on the first time through anything is a bit poor.  You watch Spirited Away for the 12th time and I guarantee you will see something new.

There is, of course, a health factor when it comes to media digestion.  Doing something is actually a lot better for your body, physically speaking.  I’m looking over the course guide at Le Cordon Bleu and I’d love to have the $50K to learn how to be a chef.  And I know that I’d loose 100 pounds running all over cooking things in a hot sweaty kitchen.  The repetitive nature of cooking makes me realize that I don’t want to go through with it.  But there’s no denying that it might actually be a very healthy thing to attempt.

If I don’t eat anything that I cook of course ;)

I can’t wait for spring cleaning.  I feel that strong desire to throw open the windows and start rearranging everything in my house.  We moved in last year around August and though we took a bit of extra time to plan things out, it still takes about a year to really understand the flow of your house and to know how to change it to make things better.  My office is a particular challenge since although I spent a lot of time organizing it so everything fit… well, there’s just a lot of stuff in here and the simplest project explodes in to an unweildy mess in an instant.  The cube keeps eating AGP video cards (though the PCI one I bought seems to be happy enough) and this isn’t helping since it’s guts seem to be forever strewn about my floor.

It’s going to take me a day just to organize all the CDs and DVDs I have thrown all over my desk.  God forbid I should label any of them or put them back in my organizer.

On the plus side, I have Reason 4 and Photoshop CS3 installed today.  My Canopus ADVC110 is working just great and I have some videos to edit together of the kids.  I’m sure the relatives would get a kick out of seeing some online videos.  I might just decide to be lazy and use Steam to buy FEAR2 or FarCry2 though.

I almost had a complete XP install on the m17.  My first challenge was to get XP to install on the ICH9R-E RAID controller without a floppy drive.  Even my USB floppy drive wouldn’t work for it.  After several days of trying different things, slipstreaming which didn’t work, I found a solution that meant editing the floppy drivers to add additional USB floppy drive support.  This worked well.  Mobility Modder made Catalyst install.  Many of the Vista drivers worked on XP when I couldn’t find XP drivers to use.  Everything worked…

Except screen brightness.  It was locked at 100% and was giving me headaches.  I spent a week trying to find a way to reduce brightness.  I even tried reducing it from the display settings.  Nothing worked.  The m17 relies on Vista’s advanced power options to adjsut the brightness.  I tried looking for generic XP drivers for it but no luck.  I suspect something out there exists to do it but I just couldn’t find it.

So I’m back on Vista now.  Once again I spent a good amount of time stripping off all unnecessary services thanks to BlackViper. I’m sitting at 730M right now with all drivers, Steam, Firefox, and Avast antivirus running.  That’s not great and I don’t know why it’s using so much RAM.  I have themes and aero disabled.  I have all the fancy desktop manager stuff turned off.  Maybe it’s some sort of caching.  The RAM does seem to be hiding in the background.  I can’t find it in taskman anyway.

I don’t know.  I’m sick of thinking about it :)

It will be a week before my new hard drives arrive so I’m giving Vista Home 32 bit a brutal shakedown on this laptop.  It honestly seems to run faster and better than Vista x64 on my Q9450.  I still think I’m going to throw XP Pro on it but with some clever tweaking of Tasks and Services I got Vista’s footprint down to under 650M.  A slight help but still a bit heavy when you only have 2048M to play with and need to run some very memory heavy games.

I’m trying to find out just how viable Vista is.  There are a bunch of people these days who think you should just suck it up and use Vista.  However, my experience with Vista 64 on my gaming rig is that it really makes the system less responsive.  It uses too much memory and 3-4G is really optimal.  But drivers are just really unstable or non existent for Vista 64.

Just what on Earth makes Vista worth it then?  I couldn’t ever really see any noticeable difference in DirectX 10 games.  Yeah, I do like some of the UI things a bit but… at the end of the day XP is just faster.  But Vista 32 isn’t nearly so bad.  It’s just a lot more responsive and the benchmarks seem just fine.  It seems to want less memory.

In other news I have some more thoughts on the m17.  The speakers are too quiet.  This is a common complaint of mine with many laptops.  They just never seem to be loud enough.  Using some special software I have been able to determine that the GPUs and CPU run about 50c degrees while idling in Vista.  This is while using my Belkin lap cooler.  So the laptop is still breathing just fine.  It just runs hot.  With two GPUs this probably isn’t surprising.

The heat doesn’t bother me though since I use the lap cooler anyway.  Yes, I have tried to overclock the FSB.  But the CPU multipliers seem to drop when I do that.  I need to do a little more reading on overclocking without affecting speedstep or whatever other power management features are coming in to play.

It’s just not the right time to buy SSDs right now.  If you’re an early adopter or have money to burn than have at it.  There are a few reasons for this.  First off, the technology costs are going to come down dramatically.  These drives should end up being much cheaper to produce than standard mechanical hard drives.  They’ll probably follow a curve similar to Moore’s Law.

The software isn’t there just yet either.  Windows can have problem installing on SSDs.  Particularly the cheaper ones with MLC technology.  The SLC ones have better write performance and longevity but less capacity and huge price tags.  The write times are just terrible and can cause the OS to lock up now and again.  Better software and caching options will fix these issues.

I don’t need epic performance on my laptop.  The reliability would be nice but not $500 nice.  But in the spirit of getting GOOD performance I did order a couple of these Western Digital 7200RPM 16m cache drives.  This should give me disk performance comparible to normal workstations and for a much more affordable cost.

SSDs will become the thing to do as soon as they become mainstream and the costs drop significantly.  This new laptop may see them eventually.

It’s big and heavy and uncomfortable on my lap.  But that’s the sacrifice I made for the luxurious 17″ screen.  Anyway, here’s a list of what I think so far.

The machine came with a loose CrossFireX cable.  The first thing I did when the laptop arrived was to install Windows XP.  I just couldn’t get CrossFire working in XP so I assumed it was a driver issue.  Going back to Vista Home didn’t help.  I unscrewed the bottom panel and found the loose connector.  Snugging it back up seemed to make it work just fine.

It was probably rushed together but the good news is that Alienware shipped it to me very fast.  Fedex delayed shipment a bit but that’s not Alienware’s fault.  I think they were more than a week ahead of their estimated shipdate of 1/30.

Vista was crashy the moment I got it.  It could have been the loose CrossFireX cable.  Or it could have been the default software install which seemed sparse for the money spent.  I didn’t install most of that back on my Vista redo.

I’m not a fan of the keyboard layout.  I use Home and End a lot and these keys are only available on the numeric keypad.  I routinely hit keys on the numpad when hitting the backspace key because there isn’t any break between the numpad and they right of the normal keyboard.  The main keyboard and touchpad are offset to the left which actually isn’t so comfortable for me.  The unexpected depth of the laptop makes typing on this machine slightly more taxing as I have to reach.

I really love the fingerprint scanner.  It’s a modern feature I haven’t gotten to try before.  I wish I had it on all my PCs.

The 1920×1200 screen in a 17″ footprint is particularly tiny.  Color rendition isn’t spectacular on this screen.  The backlight is quite spotty.  I definitely wanted the extra screen real estate but unfortunately I feel like I’m squinting and straining to see it.

The touchpad has a texture which I’m not used to.  It feels a little strange on my fingers.  Is this a common thing on notebooks now?  I’m used to them being perfectly smooth.

WoW looks fantastic on the screen.  Shitty LCDs can give a lot of extra color saturation to games and WoW is colorful enough to benefit from it.  At 1920×1200 with no AA I’m getting about 20FPS in Northrend.  At 1600×1200 on my 8800 Ultra I get 45FPS with 2xAA enabled.  I think I could get a little better out of this on XP.  I’ve heard a rumor that ATI drivers don’t do CrossFire so well in WoW yet.

I’m getting 10881 in 3dMark06 in this configuration.  In XP with only one ATI card running I got 8896.  My record on the 8800 Ultra is 16433.  I would love to see what this laptop can do in XP with CrossFireX working.  These numbers are really respectable for what can be considered a ‘cheap’ gaming laptop.   I suspect there are overclocking options.

I can’t wait to get RAID0 on this laptop.  The 7200RPM 160G drive is still a bit slow and I think the laptop could feel much better with a better drive system.  I’m considering a second 160G drive or possibly a pair of SSD drives.  I need to do some research in to those though so I get the proper type.  Apparently the wrong SSD can cause OS halting now and then.  That’d drive me insane.

I can’t wait to get a decent cooler either!  I’m thinking about 4G of RAM which would only benefit me if I went to a 64 bit OS.  But 64 bit Vista is quite unstable and I have enough driver problems with the laptop.  With two 512m video cards and a 32 bit OS I would likely get 2.5G or less of available RAM.  It’s possible that faster RAM would be a benefit.  It’s 533MHz 7-7-7-20, Elpida brand PC3-8500F.  FSB is 1066MHz.  Chipset is PM45.  Anyway, it looks like there aren’t actually any faster options available.  And 4G of RAM is looking like a $160 upgrade.  So.  Guess RAM is out.

It took several nasty emails to LayeredTech to get them to reverse their ridiculous charges.  But they finally gave and credited my account.  I still really beleive that this policy of theirs only exists to grab an extra buck from their more casual customers.  The one off guys like me who don’t spend a lot of money there and maybe don’t pay as much attention as some other companies.  Or, maybe they’re just used to companies saying ‘aww fuck it’ and paying them that extra last month.

I wouldn’t be as sensetive to this if I didn’t work for that certain ISP in Buffalo, NY (LocalNet) that took PRIDE in getting a few extra payments out of their customers who just wanted to cancel.  Some people will just make 2-3 extra payments if they’re not paying attention or don’t want to wait 60 minutes on hold.  Companies know this and take advantage of it.  They ‘love’ autopay accounts.

Which is why I avoid them like the plague.

If you call these companies out and put the time in to it, they always seem to back down and do the right thing.  Threaten to go to the BBB and State Department of Commerce and they always seem to listen a little harder.  NY state used to really do a good job looking in to these things for the consumer and I had many a utility bill adjusted with their help.  Be an educated consumer, help us all out.  Never allowed yourself to be taken advantage of.

This is the lifeblood of those TV informercials and Made for TV products.  It’s the same principle that allows commercial banks to rape consumers with low balances by charging all sorts of NSF or Negative Balance fees.  The moment you allow someone else to control your money is the same moment that you’re at a disadvantage.

We really need laws in place to protect consumers with firm cancelation dates.  If a consumer says that they don’t want a service TODAY then the billing should stop TODAY if there isn’t some term contract in place.  It shouldn’t be up to the company to decide just when the customer is allowed to cancel their services.

Although I do beleive that any publicity is good publicity, I want to give some bad publicity to LayeredTech.  I just wanted to cancel my account today.  I have spent the past week or so migrating my websites over to Amazon’s EC2 service.  I knew today was the last day I had on my old server so I made sure everything was off, cleaned up all sensetive data, and went to cancel the server.

Without so much as a blink, LayeredTech gets back to me saying that since I didn’t cancel two days ago, two days before my monthly billing ‘due date’, that they are going to charge me for services next month.  They must have been through this many times before since right away they’re telling me how I will be going to collections even in their form mails.  They asked me if I would like to keep the server going until the end of February anyway since I’m paying no matter what.

I said to cancel it right away.  They seemed to comply.

And now they’re going to charge me for one month of service that I’ll never receive.  They point to their Terms of Service page as justification of some sort of contract for service.

Somehow it just doesn’t seem legal.  If I break a lease to an apartment and the landlords rent that apartment to someone else a week later, I’m only resposible for that week of rent missed.  If I cancel a phone bill or cable bill, I’m only charged for the days of service I’ve used.

I never exactly signed a contract with these people.  And for all I know, their terms of service has changed radically since I originally had rented my server there.  But this is the thanks I get for being a paying customer of theirs for a couple years.  I never missed a payment and I have at this time PAID for all the service I’ve ever received from them.

And now they’re skirting around firing ‘collections’ threats by following shady business practices.  It makes great economic sense to charge people for services they never provide.  I’ve watched enough Judge Judy to know that isn’t going to fly in court.

I’m not going to pay them $151.  They really just aren’t ever going to get it from me.  If it goes on my credit, it will come right off in 5-7 years anyway.  Clearly going to small claims court when they’re in Texas isn’t much of an option.  The fact that there’s no real way to prevent companies from screwing us like this without having to spend WAY more money than it’s worth to prove it in court proves that there is still something kind of wrong with our system.  But that’s really another story.

By the way, even if you don’t like Amazon EC2 hosting, I’ve priced out many other webhosts and there are plenty of competitive companies out there that beat the pants off of LayeredTech on a price versus performance basis.  That’s why I left LayeredTech to begin with.  They’re just too damn expensive.  Even the bigger hosting companies who used to be prohibitively expensive, Rackmount, Serverbeach, etc, offer competitive servers in this price range.

It’s about time I got a new laptop.  My 30th birthday seemed like a good enough excuse.  I wanted one that had some decent gaming capability so I can play Second Life and World of Warcraft on it as well as Grand Theft Auto and other easy to play on the couch PC games.  Something that could hold it’s own at a LAN would also be nice.  Gaming and laptops are still, surprisingly, a bad fit.  Six years ago, I reviewed my first gaming laptop, the Prostar 5694.  It was hot, heavy, had poor battery life and was pretty much non-upgradable.  Not much has changed today.  Buying a laptop you intend to game with really limits your choices quickly since far too few come with the better GPUs.

I got the Alienware m17 with dual ATI 3870 HD cards in CrossFire mode.  It’s an interesting choice since I do usually prefer nVidia.  I recently used an ATI 4850 card in Abi’s desktop and was strongly impressed with it.  This is not the fastest laptop GPU configuration by a long shot.  Alienware’s m17x, a slightly older but slightly better model and certainly more costly model, can be got with dual nVidia 9800m GT GPUs.  Each is significantly faster than the 3870.  But this add on costs $850 and adding even the non-SLI 9800m GT adds $300 to the cost.  Dual 3870s should be faster than a single 9800m GT and was a $250 upgrade for the m17.

I don’t use the term notebook because it implies something about how I’ll be using this machine.  Notebook or desktop-replacement are terms that let people know that you’re not actually intended to use these machines on your lap.  They’re supposed to be used on a desk.  My previous experience with 10 pound gaming behemoths is that they’re really not comfortable in the least anywhere else and I swore I’d never have anything over 6 pounds again.  I lied.

The Dell I have is small, light, and games moderately well with it’s Mobility 9000 GPU.  It plays Second Life, World of Warcraft, and GTA:SA at the lowest settings.  It’s light and doesn’t damage my wrists when picking it up off the floor.  But it’s 14″ 1024×768 screen is inadequate for doing any serious work on.  I have a lot of windows up when I’m programming and I really miss the luxury of large screens.  My decision to go with a large ‘desktop-replacement’ has much more to do with the big gorgeous screen than the gaming prowess.  The 1920×1200 Wide UXGA screen was another $250 upgrade on the m17 but one that was an absolute must for what I do.

I really wanted to go with the Intel T9400 2.53GHz processor with it’s 6m of L2 cache.  But it was another $250 upgrade which just wasn’t in the budget today.  So the T8400 2.26GHz with 3m of L2, the smallest I could get, will have to do.  This is still much faster than anything I currently do work on and more than enough for most games so I’m okay with it.  It’s also something I can possibly upgrade in the future.  I also went with the base 2×1024MB of DDR3.  For Vista 32b (which was forced on me) this really isn’t adequate but I’m going to try to go with Windows XP instead.  It just performs better.  RAM is also one of those things which can always be upgraded later.

Yeah, I did opt for the $25 upgrade for an illuminated keyboard.  Sure it’s pretty, but there’s been lots of times where I’ve used the laptop in the dark and couldn’t see what I was doing.  I guess I’m not much of a touch typist still.  The 160g 8m cache 7200RPM drive I chose was the cheapest as well.  Another easily upgradable option.  I fully intend to roll with a SSD drive as soon as I can afford it.  What I’m not clear on is if there are two HD spots in the machine and if I can enable RAID0 later myself.  The only other upgrade I got was the $25 Intel Ultimate N wifi card.  It would be nice to have N support with out a dongle hanging out of my machine and the rumor on the internet is that internal wireless cards have better range than external ones due to being able to have larger antennas behind the screen.  Don’t know if it’s true or not but $25 isn’t bad for N.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a decent Alienware coupon code and they charge $70 for fedex ground shipping.  That seems ludicrous.  I also had to pay sales tax.  So my $1900 purchase became more like $2065.  Yep, it’s the most expensive thing I’ve ever purchased.  You can call it my midlife crisis.  It also means I’m scared shitless over it.  And for good reason.  The $1800 Prostar I had back in 2002?  It died several times and seemed to spend more time in the shop than on my lap.  So I’ve been burned before on laptops.  Alienware actually sold rebadged Prostar notebooks back then so they’re not immune from getting crummy products.  They’re Dell parent company probably won’t help matters much.  But this is the reason I didn’t by some Clevo or Whitebook or Asus or some other  ‘no-name’ machine recommended by many online… I just don’t trust them to last more than a year or two.

For $2000, I want to get five years easy out of the thing :)