Sony is on the road to Sucktown.

Or: How to make the worst possible decision.
by AC - permalink

BetaNews reported a few days ago that Sony has decided to replace Internet Explorer with AOL Explorer as the default web browser on all new VAIO desktops and notebooks. Holy crap. That's like trading in a first-gen Kia Rio with 200,000 miles on it for a retired right-hand-drive mail truck. You have to give AOL credit, though. They talked HP into distributing the ironically Firefox-based Netscape 8, which will also be included on the VAIOs, along with IE6 and a bunch of other AOL software.

According to the article, "the browser directs users to a Sony-branded AOL.com homepage." I don't know about you, but to me that sounds like web-based bliss. If you're trying to get the end-users pumped up, you can't go wrong with a phrase like "Sony-branded AOL.com homepage." Not included on new VAIO PCs: a good web browser. There are so many out there, but apparently only Dell and Apple know about it. Dell UK is still reportedly scheduled to start shipping PCs with Firefox, and Apple of course has Safari. But what about Avant Browser? What about Opera? I have to wonder how much these deals are costing AOL, because these decisions cannot be based on anything but money.

I need an upgrade.

Can I borrow a couple hundred bucks?
by AC - permalink

My new T6425 can multitask the shit out of just about anything I throw at it. New apps open almost before the Start menu can hide itself. Windowed DVD playback is seamless no matter what I'm doing in the foreground. Older games like Medal of Honor and Ghost Recon run fast and smooth even maxed out. But goddamn do I need to upgrade.

First, the audio. The onboard 6.1 capable sound generates random, sparse pops no matter what it's doing. MP3 playback, game audio, movies, whatever. I can't make it stop, and it sucks. Second, newer games like Doom 3 that are designed for an independant GPU don't run well at all. Even Call of Duty is giving me problems, and I just don't get it. Given nearly identical graphics settings, Half-Life 2's Source engine runs way smoother and faster than Call of Duty's modified Quake III engine. I don't understand this because Medal of Honor and Quake III blaze right along on this system.

I knew going in that I'd need to add a new PCI-Express vidcard to this system, but I didn't think the onboard ATI Xpress 200 would need this much help this soon, especially with a Gig of system RAM and an AMD64 3500+ to work with. The only question now is how far to go. I'm thinking that I'll wait one more paycheck, then take a ton of cash to Best Buy and just buy the best I can afford. Picking and choosing the right card is just too fucking inconvenient these days. If you pinpoint what you want, you end up having to find a distributor that actually has one in stock, then have it shipped to you, if they ship at all.

Backtracking to Half-Life 2 for a moment, it turns out turning texture detail back to max creates almost no obvious framerate hit, which was just stunning to me. The Source engine would be my favorite ever if it didn't mandate constant downloads to play even single-player games offline. I've been trying to play Counter-Strike: Source, but after two hours of downloading I've gone from 91% updated to 92%, and of course I still can't even play the goddamn game. Thanks, Valve.

Opera is better than Firefox. Or not.

If your PC sucks, do we have the browser for you.
by AC - permalink

At work I'm forced to use this tired, overworked, under-serviced old Celeron box with Win98 and 64Mb RAM. It generates a DOSkey error in post, the PS2 ports randomly fail, and BSOD's are a regular feature. And it just won't run Firefox.

It seems like a memory leak to me. Running more than one tab for ten minutes or so, sometimes less, bogs down the system more and more until it's unable even to restart. It has IE5.5, but this is 2006, and I'm not using fucking IE5.5. But it turns out Opera runs like a champ. Sure, there's nothing to be done about all the massive banner ads slammed all over everywhere that AdBlock had erased from my memory, but it works.

It's nice, because I installed Opera 8.5 on my new PC two weeks ago and haven't opened it since. I like Opera. I just don't generally need it for anything.

I went out intending to spend twenty bucks on Call of Duty or Halo for PC, but I went ahead and spend fifty for Half-Life 2 GOTY edition. Fuck it, why not. It took around an hour and a half to install and download all the damn Steam updates and patches (dial-up), but the game runs a lot better than I expected with that onboard X200 IGP. I turned the res down to 800x600 and lowered the texture quality one notch to medium, and I'm getting a framerate consistantly between 45 and 60. That's with geometric detail, shadows, water, etc. all on high, but without anisotropic filtering or blooms. In other words, it's visually slightly better than the Xbox version of Half-Life 2, with tighter controls. Which is all I wanted in the first place.

I know the Source engine lets the CPU do a lot of the heavy lifting, which probably explains the decent performance despite my vidRAM bottleneck (my T6425 came with an AMD64 3500+). A patch was released just this week optimizing HL2 and the Source engine for AMD64 CPU's, which should help even more. And I'm leaning towards an ATI Radeon X800 GTO-based midrange vidcard. The goal is to max out all or most the gfx options in HL2, Doom 3, etc. at somewhere between 1024x768 and 1280x960. That's good enough for me.

I might be unconscious.

Sleep is for cowards.
by AC - permalink

Nearly four hours into the second of two consecutive shifts here. I didn't know I'd be working a double this morning. But dude didn't show up, so I guess I just keep working until someone comes in at three. Then I come back for at least eight more hours at 11. Getting seriously tired here, and I think all the coffee is starting to fuck with me.

So I did a bunch of tweaking and I still can't get Doom 3 to run for shit on my new eMachines T6425. But whatever. New vidcard soon. I did find the sweet spot for Quake III Arena though: with texture and geometric detail maxed out and at 32-bit color and texture depth, plus all the graphic bells & whistles on, it turns out 1152 delivers a stable 60fps. That's where it stays anyway with v-sync on, because the stock ATI tools won't let me lock in a refresh rate higher than 60Hz in full-screen OpenGL or D3D. Guess I should try one of the newer Catalyst sets or something.

Still having a problem with Half-Life/Blue Shift/Opposing Force. When the game engine is running in OpenGL, a thin strip of desktop is visible at the top and bottom of the screen. The game is actually rendered into this space, like weird half-assed letterboxing. Additionally, once I escape to the menu system and return to the game, the FOV is locked at about 10 (instead of 90) and slowly rotating down and to the left. I don't know what the fuck that's about. D3D mode is not as buggy, except that vertical sync doesn't work and the texture tearing is awful. I never had any problems with Half-Life with my old 32MB ATI card running Radeon 7200 drivers, but this onboard Xpress 200 just doesn't want to deal with it.

Doesn't matter though. I've got just two other issues with this box so far, aside from the 64MB of shared vidRAM that should be 128MB. One, it almost never detects my USB mouse on boot. I have to unplug it and plug it back in first. That's annoying. And two, the gigantic, green eMachines sticker on the front of the case listing all the specs is paper-backed and glued on with some ungodly industrial adhesive that won't come off. I'm having to scrape it off, then I'll have to thoroughly clean the faceplate. Suck, suck, suck.

Long overdue new PC.

What to do with all these media card slots...?
by AC - permalink

So I ordered a new eMachines T6524 desktop earlier than I'd planned. I watched Best Buy after Best Buy run out of stock and decided to hurry up and order one. I actually ended up buying it from CompUSA, because shipping was cheaper -- so cheap that I ordered it overnighted on Thursday morning, and 24 hours later it was here. Apparently I got in just under the wire, because eMachines stopped selling the 6524 as of this weekend.

So. The Athlon 64 3500+ is impressive. Most impressive. Then again, I'm moving up from a Duron 800. Still haven't actually done anything with the double-layer DVD burner. And I'm trying to figure out what the hell is up with the video adapter.

It's an ATI Radeon Xpress 200 series that's supposed to use up to 128MB of the system's 1GB of PC3200 DDR RAM. Instead, it uses a fixed 64MB of it. What? While it blows the doors off Ghost Recon and Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, Quake III Arena performance is only mediocre, and it appears I way overshot when I picked up Doom 3 yesterday morning. Even at 640x480 and with bump mapping and specular lighting off, it can barely run. That's not surprising with only 64MB of vidRAM, but I was expecting 128MB shared, as advertised. That's just all kinds of suck.

Still, the specs prove it's a bargain. And it does have a free 16X PCI-e slot, so in a few weeks I'll drop in a midrange, 256MB vidcard, which should let this box run anything from Half-Life 2 to Quake 4 to F.E.A.R. But it's all the older games I couldn't run on my old rig I really want right now, and they're dirt cheap. I picked up MoH: Allied Assault for ten bucks, and games like Halo, Far Cry, and Call of Duty are $20 apiece. There's no suck about that.