Entries from January 2007 ↓

Problems, problems, problems. Or not — who knows.

The installation and setup of Windows on the Colossus Server/Gaming PC went okay, but it’s been a bumpy ride. It’s mostly my fault, though — I tried to start things at a _high_ level of overclocking, instead of completely neutral, like I should’ve. -_-’

I’ve now got it running at just a base 100 FSB, but I’m planning on stepping it back up now that it’s relatively stable.

The video card has been funky, to say the least. It’d keep freezing up during 3d rendering, and then one time it stopped rendering 3d altogether. It might’ve been the Modded “Omega Drivers”:http://omegadrivers.net I was running, but then I switched to the official ATI ones I kept getting the same problem. However, I changed a couple of other things that might’ve been causing freeze-ups, and the freeze-ups apparently went away. Who knows, you know?

That being said, what’s with all these freaking “CLI.exe” services that run when you’ve got the official ATI drivers installed on your system? Beats me. All I know is this — turning them off doesn’t do anything (except that sometimes your Catalyst control panel doesn’t come up). On top of that, turning them off actually _increases_ my frame rate and scores in “3D Mark”:http://futuremark.com… anyone guess why that might be?

If you’ve got a sec, check out my little accordian-type interface for the shit to the right — took me a freakin’ day to code that crap, so you better have fun with it!

Once you load the Moblog object, it gets kind of screwy, but I’m working on it.

In other news, I’m installing WoW on my gaming PC as I speak! I finally got it up and running, thanks to the honest-to-goodness 256 MB Low-Density SDRAM chip that I got from “StarMicro.net”:http://starmicro.net — in case your wondering what the hell that is (and you probably are), it’s a special type of RAM that’s not even made any more that’s required if you want to use larger chips (such as 256 MB ones) in a select few older motherboards (like the one I’m currently building with). They’re hard as hell to track down, and when you do, they’re usually found with sky-high prices, so I really, really lucked out when I found this one for only $22.

Although, I’ve been having a bit of trouble getting the system running stable at anything above a 100 Mhz FSB (the “FSB” is the “highway” that all your little computer bips and bops on the motherboard communicate to each other with). My brother, “Thomas the Mighty”:http://gardens.tmanime.com, had success running this motherboard as high as 124 Mhz, so I’m still at a loss as to what I’m doing wrong… but, there’s lots of variables that are different in my case: different RAM, different CPU, different GPU, you name it.

Well, even with its Tualatin CPU running at 1300 Mhz, it’s still a bit faster than my laptop, so off I go to play!

Just a little something I found whilst perusing some parts sites…

Asus A8S-X Socket 939 Barebone Kit / AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 OEM / CPU Fan / ATX Mid-Tower Case / 500 Watt Power Supply

All that for $399! I haven’t taken the prices apart and seen just how good a deal it is, but at first glance it seems amazing. That chip alone is worth almost $400. All you’d need is your own memory and hard drive (and video card), and you’d be set — but then you’ve probably already got those things lying around in other computers, like me, right?!

This definitely isn’t for someone who’s making their first computer — it doesn’t have half the shit you need to start out with, so unless you like to tinker with computers like me, don’t bother buying it.

So, what’s been going on in my life, eh?

Well, I’ve been working on this site a little, and programming at work a lot.

I’ve gotten all my tax information, and am currently trying to find every single deduction I can so that I don’t owe Uncle Sam a damn cent.

I’m still trying to put myself together a gaming PC so that I can wipe my hard drive on my laptop and start running “Ubuntu”:http://www.ubuntu.com on it (since I only have windows on it anymore because of gaming).

I’m shooting for a system running a Tualatin Celeron running at about 1600mhz (overclocked quite a bit) and _at least_ 512 MB of RAM. That’s bare minimum RAM to run “WoW”:http://worldofwarcraft.com, thought I’m hoping because it’s a desktop system it’ll be passable — PC133 and PC100 RAM is getting kinda pricey these days, because it’s almost descended into that dreaded computer world of _obsoleteness_…

This, combined with my trusty old ATI 9200 SE (X!) that I’ve custom tuned to run some 60% overclocked above normal, should be enough. “WoW”:http://worldofwarcraft.com is made so that it doesn’t require the latest graphics hardware to run (a genius marketing move on the side of the company), and it’ll be a damn
sight faster than the GeForce 2 Go chip that’s in my laptop (which just so happens to be the _very_ lowest chip that’s compatible with the game!).

I should have it running by next weekend, at least. Wish me luck!

I know it’s cheesy sounding, but I didn’t have anything to else to talk about, so I wanted to show you some great deals I’ve found on the intarwebs during my browsing sessions the past week or so:

nVidia 6600 GT AGP for below $100 at 3B Tech

While I’m personally an ATI guy myself, I have to pay obeisance to the raw power that was the nVidia 6600 GT in its time. This card was — and for the AGP slot, still is — one of the fastest cards that was ever produced. It was like a fire-breathing dragon, eating up any benchmark or performance test you could throw at it.

And now it could be yours, for below a hundred bucks. I can’t even begin to imagine what it must’ve cost brand new back in the day.

!http://www.starmicro.net/images/PIIIFCPGA2.JPG!
Pentium III-S Tualatin 1.26GHz for $25 at StarMicro

Well, this site has a weird name (and their layout is rather… spartan), but they have great reviews on “Pricewatch.com”:http://pricewatch.com, so I trust it.

What you’re looking at is one of the “Tualatin” core CPU’s that Intel made in the waning years of the Socket 370 platform. It was the last inception of the Pentium III, introduced in 2001-02, and it was by far the fastest — faster even than many inceptions of the Pentium IV (I’ve tested this personally myself).

Right now it’s a _damn_ good deal because, with a simple slot adapter, you can put one on many old Socket 370 boards (all of we computer aficionados have a couple of _those_ laying around). Doing this will give you a computer just about up to par with anything you could have today (save the fastest and most expensive new chips).

This site, “http://starmicro.net”:StarMicro.net, also has a good selection of PC133 SDRAM, including some hard to find low-density chips… those are getting harder and harder to find these days.

Well, with the help of “Nina”:http://blog-her.com and “this site”:http://textpattern.com/faq/134/how-do-I-make-an-archive-page, I now have an archive page! You can check it out with the link at the top.

(I’m still working on the layout for all of these pages — I swear everything won’t be _just_ green and black forever.)

Well, I’m helping out a friend of mine by setting up a new hard drive in his computer (a “Seagate Barracuda 250-GB”:http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/desktops/barracuda_hard_drives/barracuda_7200.10), and I just got it in today. I do jobs like this for friends and family, free of charge — it’s kind of a hobby. I also help fix cars and provide free legal advice.
Well, my friend’s motherboard is an oldie but a goodie — the venerable “ASUS A7V8X-X”:http://support.asus.com/download/download.aspx?SLanguage=en-us&model=A7V8X-X for the AMD Socket A chipset. The chip I helped him pick out (nearly five years ago now!) was an Athlon XP 2600 — it’s still fast as hell today, and plays just about any game you can think of.

That knowledge in hand, I know it’s a good motherboard. So, I hook up the new drive (and a new power supply — his old ones keep burning out), and the board recognizes it immediately. Even sees that it’s a 250GB drive; that’s pretty neat, because I’m pretty sure even _the technology_ involved for this didn’t exist five years ago.

However, when I put in his Windows XP install CD (and old one without SP2), the damn thing only recognizes it as being about 137GB or so.

Well, at first I’m like, “Oh Shit — the hardware’s not compatible.” (I usually think of the worst things first — a small character flaw.) I go to the Seagate site on this drive, thinking that this must be a pretty common problem (incorrect initial hard drive sizes usually are). Of course, it is, and I find a handy dandy little “help topic page”:http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=127_GB_-_137_GB_Limitation&vgnextoid=186b5b1142aec010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD about it.

It says that your motherboard needs to support “48 bit LBA addressing,” and of course I’m thinking, _OH NOES, we’re not even going to be able to use this new drive to its full potentional_.

But then I remember that the motherboard’s BIOS was able to see the 250GB limit, and the answer was clear — it wasn’t the board, it was just a limitation in this version of Windows XP (the first of many, as you know). I downloaded Seagate’s DiskWizard’s starter ISO, burned a CD of it, and formatted the drive.

The good point of using the special burning software from the company like this — it actually lets you format your partitions in FAT32, instead of just NTSF!

(By the way, as I’m writing this, it’s just completed a full installation of Windows XP in only 7 minutes — damn, this drive is _fast_ as well as big!)

Unfortunately, the added case fans I got for my friend can’t go in his case (he’s been having a bit of heat problem in his case) — there’s only one extra fan connector on the “ASUS A7V8X-X”:http://support.asus.com/download/download.aspx?SLanguage=en-us&model=A7V8X-X, and I’ve already got an additional exhaust fan at the back of the case taking it up. Luckily, the CPU fan upgrade I got _did_ fit, however the old screws aren’t big enough and it didn’t come with any new ones! Arghh!

Either way, it’s now got a super big drive, _and_ it’s running cooler. Plus, the new parts are able to be carried over to his new system whenever he upgrades. I say it’s been a success.

!http://threshold-zero.tmanime.com/images/2.jpg!

Now, who’s that handsome fellow?

Just now getting “TextPattern”:http://textpattern.com set up to be my main blog — I’ve had it here in this subdomain for months and months now, but now, due to help from my loving “Nina”:http://blog-her.com, I’ve finally enabled it!

At first glance, it’s easy as hell to use, and with its “Textile” based logic system, you can create easy if/then/else hooks in your HTML, without even touching a bit of JavaScript or PHP. After only a few hours, I’d say I have it pretty much down pat!

Good work, ye makers of “TextPattern”:http://textpattern.com.