Year: 2011

Nice

Hi Pete!

I am sorry to hear about the accident. Sometimes when I am out driving and see all those people driving to fast or talking in cellphones etc I am actually surprised accidents not happens more oftened. Some people seams to think they are immortal…

Hugs Sandra

Those rockets of yours certainly added something to the evening…!

Not many people won’t have heard about the big crash on the motorway near where I live. What reminded me that this is a much smaller world these days was the sad news that a friend of a friend lost his life in the incident.

I didn’t know him personally but from the love that’s been shown via Facebook, he is already being sorely missed.

I doubt we’ll ever know the exact cause of the accident and it would be wrong to speculate without knowing facts, although people are blaming fireworks. Assigning blame would also be wrong here, although I believe accepting some collective responsibility is appropriate. Driving standards have collapsed lately (I know I road-rage more than is healthy) as people are getting a sense of invulnerability from modern cars that are built far tougher than when I learned to drive.

People have joked that the best safety device to go in a car would be a spike protruding from the steering wheel, I’d compare that to a Rover Metro loaner car I had. I drove that really slowly … not because it couldn’t muster much pace but because I knew from its swiss cheese construction that it would disintegrate if a juggernaut breathed on it.

What’s really sad is that even with reminders of how dangerous the roads can be, people are still :
Driving way too fast,
Tailgating,
Saying “70mph is too low a limit for motorways” (badly wrong)
Not driving with any consideration to people around them,
Driving without due care and attention (that goes for those who use mobiles in the car too)
And many more sins shared by drivers these days.

Another sign of this being a small world is that I drove down the bit of motorway where the accident happened just a fortnight before.

Other (happier!) stuff :

Pumpkin* finally has all the bits that will go into making it a fully equipped PC 🙂 It was missing a conventional hard disc due to the floods in Thailand making hard disc prices go through the roof. A 1TB drive was £45 before the floods, the same drive is now £110, with that going up £5 today. When ultra rapid inflation hits, it’s always worth a little bit of shopping around to see if you can take advantage of retailers who aren’t keeping up with changing prices.

*(yes – I called it Pumpkin. Seemed fitting for something born on Halloween)

Cue a trip to BestBuy who are sadly closing down in UK. It would have been good to see them stay in retail here to keep PCWorld & Currys honest. (No chance of that with Comet). Anyway, I picked up a 1.5TB drive there for £72 today. More than pre-flood prices and it’s an older model but still fits the bill :

It will have plenty of space,
It’s not as quick as a current model but still quicker than the 250GB in the machine at the moment.

I can also assign 500GB of it to a Linux drive for playing with later :-). It’s been a while since I looked at Linux and I’m hoping it will allow me to run some old Windows games that refuse to work in Windows 7. I just need to have a look at installation options, plus I’ll need to move some stuff from the old drive to the new one. But – it means I can do now some of the stuff I was holding off on, like getting cheapie Office programs on the desktop.

Oh – rockets are fun. We had a Crazie fireworks evening on Satuday, with BionicDwarf, Cyberkitten and I all with our Mad Scientists hats firmly stapled to our heads. We also had the Craziequeen in attendance who had locked away her Health & Safety hat for the evening too. (Could have been handy due to bits of firework raining down on us). We literally had a blast, although I suspect we shall be avoiding rockets in the future. Why ?

Most were fine. However :
1 rose very slowly in “Houston we have a problem” style, barely getting to the treeline before going bang. The tree was still smouldering an hour later.
Another had been sniffing the alkyhol. It went up 10 feet, decided it was afraid of heights and promptly exited stage left before exploding in someone’s garden. Oops.

Right – time to continue the Mass Effect campaign I started last week 🙂 But :

Always remember the fallen. Their sacrifice means nothing if we do not learn from it. Drive slower, get there safe.

Had a Costa with a difference yesterday.

I’d come back from having a wander through the middle of Bristol and instead of pay more for my parking in the city centre, I went to the Costa near Tesco. All normal, nothing to report. Until the nutters come in …

3 people to dominate 3 tables, unfortunately choosing the ones next to where I’d settled. (Lesson – it can be better to guarantee who you sit by instead of leaving it up to chance). The kind of people you really don’t want sitting beside you. I can handle being included in a conversation by interesting people but people who have trouble stringing two coherent words together – please no. Especially when those people demand you join in with them. I’d have moved to a different table but I’m not quite that rude.

So that’s the Costa nutters. I also seemed to be a magnet for the charity people around Bristol (must have been the poppy on display) and to finish that thread, Paintball Guy decides to try his luck at Tesco too. Can’t be the appearance, I’m currently doing the impression of a derelict (not shaved for a while cos I’m on leave).

Oh well. People make life interesting but it’s good to be able to choose your acquaintainces instead of having them thrust on you.

How’s other stuff ?

The new PC build is working great, although the fan noise is currently a little intrusive. Also intrusive are the two blue lit fans inside the box. I get the feeling they’d provide a spooky backlight for horror films seeing as they’re behind the sofa. Temperatures of the machine are just fine at 46 degrees C max for the processor and 60 degrees C max for the graphics card. That leaves loads of headroom for the summer.

Apart from the disaster which is Battlefield 3 (and a BOINC issue which I think was due to beta software), it’s rock solid stable. It’s currently idling away doing lots of distributed computing research under the BOINC umbrella that includes the SETI hunt for aliens, climate prediction and medical research. Doing distributed computing is a great way of seeing if a computer is stable when it’s worked hard, as BOINC will make it give maximum potential over a prolonged period of time. It’s tougher than game stuff.

Games are shiny. Well. For most of them, shiny = smoother as they can’t really take advantage of the better hardware, the extra grunt just gives more frames per second (low numbers there make for jerkiness and bad playability). Warcraft looks about the same, apart from shadows and water. It looks more like a proper world is in there amidst the cartoony stuff. Water effects are incredible, instead of there being a white water wake behind a swimmer, it’s proper ripples. Wonder what would happen if you dropped a Goblin Fishing Pole in the water. And they need to put that item back in the game where it belongs.

Not tried the newer Deus Ex yet, although I have downloaded it. I have a line on a potential fix for Battlefield 3 (wind down the wick on the graphics card a little) but haven’t tried that yet. Maybe later.

For now, I’ve almost cleared the TV box of recorded stuff ahead of clearing it. It still has bugs with series linking which is why it needs a kick in the “back to factory settings” button.

Oh yeah – fireworks tomorrow. It’s birthday season, so a few of us are meeting up to blow a lot of stuff up. Should be a blast 🙂

Battlefield 3 = Do Not Buy

Don’t touch it with a bargepole. It’s crash-to-desktop hell not just for me but for hundreds of other angry people logging into the BF3 forums. Not just nVidia people, it’s all of them – AMD cpu’s, Intel cpu’s, AMD graphics or nVidia graphics, they’re all having problems.

Tried a few things so far, none have worked. I think the machine is ok as it ran the 3dMark11 benchmarks successfully. I’m currently downloading League of Legends again (WoW comes later) to get some quality gameplay time in.

Another comment – the Z68 based motherboard I have is supposed to support SSD caching, where the fast disc speeds up the slow disc. I’ve not been able to enable that so far though, dunno why. I’ll check again when I have a new hard disc to permanently keep in the system, the one that’s in there now is split up over multiple partitions which could be what’s blocking it.

Oh – annual leave day 2 and I’m back to wondering what they’re up to in the office. I’ve already emerged more than I usually do … Novatech and back yesterday. Not planning to go out much more although I believe supplies will be required soon. I’m almost on my last cookies.

Now that it’s (almost) complete, I’ve been wondering if it was a really good idea to bring a new machine to life on Halloween.

It is a night when all sorts of weird things are supposed to come out to play. Oh hell, maybe this is the best night of the year. All the gremlins will be out on the town instead of waiting to creep inside a machine as you build it.

By this point you’re wondering : What’s he been up to? While my laptop is almost 2 years old now (and starting to feel its age, aka it needs a dustbusting) my main desktop PC was built in April 2006. Even with a graphics upgrade along the way, that’s Oooold for a games box. What have I got ?

Cpu – was Athlon X2-3800+ (dual core 2GHz + tricks) to Intel i5-2500K (quad core 3.3GHz +)
Graphcs – was ATi X4850, now nVidia 560Ti (overclocked)
Memory – was 2GB, now 8GB
Storage – was 74GB + 250GB, now 60GB solid state + the 250GB which I’m robbing
Motherboard – was Asus, now Asrock
And the rest is fairly generic : Thermaltake V3Black case, Corsair 600W power supply, Samsung blu-ray drive, Zalman cooler and Windows 7 Home Ed

I’ve been building my PCs for years and it’s always guaranteed lost skin from somewhere. This time, I don’t think I’ve lost any skin (decent case design) but it’s definitely broken one build theme : Software install usually takes ages, hardware build not so much. Here’s the timeline :

Build start – 17.49 as I have the PC box out of its packaging and I’m looking at the power supply.
Power supply is in at 17.59 after a fight with the case.

The Thermaltake case holds the power supply in quite tightly but has something you need to unscrew to get it in that tight. The instructions supplied with the case are utterly inadequate. As in : “Place the power supply in proper location and secure it with screws.” Nothing about unscrewing the widget. And that theme continues with the rest of the build, lots of “ok, how’s that supposed to work” when putting things in the case. A shame too, as the build quality of the case is pretty good. I’d like things a little different (the top is riveted on, cutting access) but it’ll be a very solid case that will not rattle.

Ok – next is the hard disc, which took 15 minutes to figure out where to put it. More rubbish instructions. It lives on the bottom of the case. It’ll be joined by another one later from my old box. Plan A was to get a conventional 1TB hard disc, which is plenty of space. However … there’s been floods around the factories that make hard discs and the prices have hit the roof. A 1TB drive would have cost me £45 a fortnight ago. Last week that was £65, now that drive is £95 and rising. So I went Plan B, which incidentally gets me a quicker machine :

Plan B : steal 250GB hard disc from old machine. Buy 60GB solid state drive (SSD). The difference with the SSD is that instead of taking 1/1000ths of seconds to find Stuff on the drive including moving an arm over to it, the SSD takes under 1/1000th of a second. (Thought it was quicker). As well as the latency being better, the SSD can read many parts of itself at once, which a conventional hard disc can’t do. They’re just a lot faster. Anyway, 40GB for Windows, 20GB for what’s called SSD caching where it will make a bigger conventional drive much quicker.

What’s next ? Blu-ray player didn’t take long, just 4 minutes. The case has a quick release mechanism here, one for 5.25″ drives and 2 for 3.5″ internal drives. I then rearranged the power cables a little to get them out of the way for the motherboard to come in.

To make it easier, it’s best to put all components into the mainboard before you put that into the case when you have lots of access to all the plugs. Better before, rather than after when you need Tiny Fingers for Tiny Plugs.

Here’s where the headaches start. To make chips quicker, they have to make them smaller. There’s no pins on the Intel i7 2nd Gen chip, just pads on the bottom. This is held in the socket by something that in no way can be called “Zero Insertion Force”. Around the socket goes the heatsink arrangement. There’s a plastic surround which bolts on to the mainboard. Mistake 1 was to put the surround on before putting in the cpu. Oops. Nothing broken. I left the rest of the heatsink for a little later.

Memory went in at 18.50, this is easy as it is push-fit. One issue is that my memory comes with heatsinks which protrude upwards a bit. The memory heatsinks almost clash with the cpu heatsink and let to me moving them to the other 2 sockets. (4 sockets, 2 used, 2 spare).

The cpu heatsink I’ve used is a Zalman CNPS10X Extreme. “Extreme” is no exaggeration, this thing is HUGE weighing in at 920grammes. With domestic fans, bigger is better to a huge degree, as a bigger fan can be run slower. A slow big fan is much quieter than a quick small fan. Installation of these is “interesting” though. There’s a bracket that needs to be “just so” before you can tighten it down. That took some adjusting …

Next step – putting the motherboard in the case. Interesting Times for sure. The Thermaltake case comes with its own spacers for holding the board away from all the conductive case stuff. That mostly works but it took a little swearing and poking to get the board aligned with the screw holes. Board finished going in at 19.52.

Graphics was next. My budget is decent but still modest. I’ve put money into cpu this time with graphics being “average” instead of “amazing”. I’ve got a Gigabyte GeForce 560Ti card, factory overclocked to 900MHz (10% faster than normal). Curious to see how Shiny that will be. By this point, I was ignoring the case manual which made putting this card in much simpler.

Graphics in at 20.00, side of case on at 20.02, with Squeaky Bum Time (first power up) coming shortly after. Another difference this time is that I could hook it up to the telly, so an opportunity to test in the open before committing it to its hidey-hole. (I need to move the sofa to easily get at the hidey-hole).

From here on, it’s almost without incident (eerily). First power up went with no hitches at 20.12. I had a good check of the BIOS (the bit that runs the machine behind Windows) to make sure things were configured ok. This is also a good time in a build to go to “Hardware Monitoring” and keep an eye on the temperatures. It doesn’t give “in the green” but stable idle temps of 30 degrees C are Good. You don’t want that going up much, it means the heatsink isn’t doing its job.

I started off loading Windows 7 at 20.17 and the surprising thing is that it only took 23 minutes from starting to being able to see the internet on the machine. Bit less time to get a Windows screen up but it needed to be told how to see the net.

I decided to call a halt after a bit more temperature monitoring. Was getting hungry and could no longer focus-ignore that … I’ll reconvene tomorrow after moving the hard disc across to the new machine. Then I can see how Shiny the graphics will be.

How about the name ? I went for a Halloween theme name there : “Pumpkin”. Although my mind is now thinking along the lines of “Frankenstein” or “Horrifido”.

I still have my eye on that drum display from Tesco …

We bought fireworks. LOTS of fireworks…… [laughs]

Life’s often contrasts, things make you happy or make you sad in equal measure. I have a few of those at the moment :

Happy Face – my Battlefield 3 preorder came through today
Sad Face – looks like I need new stuff as the box says no Windows XP
(just means I chill out Sunday night and have a huge reason to not be lazy on Monday)

Happy Face – I should get those new bits on Monday for putting together later
Sad Face – I know that Better Stuff will be out by the end of the week
(Just means I go for less expensive bits and save 2 bits for later)

Happy Face – I have all sorts of great toys
Sad Face – no one around to share them with
(I love popcorn but I like hugs more)

Happy Face – I appear to be getting my leg back (the wound appears to be fading at last)
Sad Face – the days of me enjoying running around a cricket field seems like it’s in the past
(shoulder and back don’t have many games left in them)

Happy Face – Car’s great
Sad Face – it doesn’t understand me (it’s great but not perfect)
(the voice commands have about a 50% success rate at the moment, apart from that the brain of the automatic gearbox is perfectly in tune with what I want it to do)

Happy Face – England annihilated India in the Test series over here
Sad Face – England got annihilated by India at their place
(not much really to say there !)

Happy Face – I’m on leave next week
Sad Face – the house is messy and seeing it will remind me
(I have a lot of cleaning up to do)

Happy Face – work is quiet
Sad Face – it won’t be when the printer gets fixed
(work has its successes at the moment plus enough unexpected stuff to keep life interesting and “quiet” has nothing to do with the activity level, just the deciBels at my desk caused by a printer)

Happy Face – I show the car off to more people soon
Sad Face – lots of driving (that’s not really a Sad Face though)
(curious to see what mpg I get on the long run)

Happy Face – Tis Birthday season
Sad Face – Amazon’s wish list system seems rather broken
(been trying to order stuff for someone, that met with utter failure of the ordering system and their customer services)

Happy Face – Fireworks party next week
Sad Face – you kiddin’ ? Tis Explosions !

And on that last, I’ll leave it there and head off to my desktop PC for what could be its last gaming session. There can never really be a downside to recreational explosives. Ok, pet owners will definitely disagree there.