Up and running.

So far, so good.
by AC - permalink

All the parts I ordered from Newegg showed up at 5:30pm on Wednesday, almost exactly 48 hours after I placed the order. They shipped out that morning at 8:30, but I was the UPS guy's last delivery of the day. Which wouldn't have sucked quite so hard if I hadn't gotten up at 8:30 and seen that my shit had just left and was "in transit for delivery," giving me a good nine hours to wonder where the hell that stupid brown truck was, already. But at least everything was in one piece. I was disappointed in the packaging, though. My new AMD 64 4000+ CPU came from the OEM and not retail, which meant it was in a tiny plastic square sandwiched between a couple of quarter-inch pieces of foam. It worked, but it was slightly disconcerting. And nothing I ordered, including the cooler and PSU, came with any documentation of any kind, not even a registration card. If I wasn't moderately familiar with how to put a PC together I wouldn't have had even the slightest idea where to start.

Everything plugged in and seems to be working fine, except the Kingwin CPU cooler. Apparently it wasn't designed with my particular motherboard in mind, as there's no way to attach it. The clips sort-of fit across the old cooler's base, but only enough to keep it from sliding around. Which means that until I can jury rig it all together somehow, I'll have to keep my tower on its side indefinitely; if I stand it back up, the whole thing will pop off the CPU and crash down on top of my video card. So... yeah.

In any case, the CPU and power supply are working, and my rig hasn't crashed, so I guess one or the other was the problem -- probably the CPU. It's a good thing I'm not pushing the PSU anywhere close to its limits, because it unexpectedly has a big, fat fan built into the top of it. My case doesn't have a gaping hole back there, so I had to mount it with the fan pointing down, where its air-flow clips the back edge of my CPU's new cooler. As far as I can tell, though, it's only been running on its lowest setting, so it shouldn't be a problem.

Anyway, with my vid card seemingly cleared of being the cause of my overheating issues, and my new CPU holding a steady idle temperature of around 40C whether the case is open or not, I looked a bit more into what the acceptable temps are for a Radeon X800 XL. With the case shut up, mine hovers around 38C, which is apparently decent considering my case's layout and cooling setup. The GPU is on the far side of the single case fan, which I helped a little by digging up some tin-snips in the garage and using them to cut away the unnecessarily dense stamped-out grill that was covering it. It's still running hotter than I would like under load, but for the most part I'm finally comfortable with shutting up my case again, and it's nice not having that ridiculously loud desk fan blowing into it three feet from my head all the time.

I'll keep toying around with things, and update as needed. I also picked up the new Nine Inch Nails disc today, so I'll be posting about that after I've gotten a feel for it. And, I think I've finally got GTA Vice City working again, and I want to write about some crazy performance improvements I've gotten out of GTA San Andreas and Call of Duty 2.

Blogged with Flock

Beyond troubleshooting.

Is ten minutes of uptime too much to ask for?
by AC - permalink

So my PC has basically become unusable now. I've been relegated to using this old Duron-based rig again for pretty much everything while I use the odd ten-minute window to try to troubleshoot my main rig. And I think I've finally narrowed the problem down to either a bad CPU (most likely), a bad power supply (much less likely), or some random bad component on my mobo (god I hope not). As a last-ditch cheap effort I scraped off what was left of the old thermal paste from my CPU and heatsink -- which had turned the consistency of clay -- and replaced it with some cheap Arctic grease, but it didn't work.

So today I finally gave up and decided on some part-swapping. I ordered a new processor, CPU cooler, power supply, and some Arctic Silver 5 thermal paste from newegg.com. While it was tempting to do some real upgrading with a dual-core CPU, I decided it wouldn't be worth the hassle of switching back and forth from dual- to single-core for my older games and just went with a cheaper AMD 64 4000+ 2.4 chip, which is still a nontrivial upgrade from my apparently fubar'd 3500+ 2.2 CPU. The other essential upgrade is the cheap-but-still-better 500W PSU to replace my stock 300W unit that may or may not be itself the cause of the problems I've been having. I threw in the new cooler because it can't possibly be worse than the weak little fan and aluminum piece of shit I have now, and the Silver 5 is something I should have invested in a long time ago. The best part is with a lot of research and careful part selection, the whole lot came in at just a hundred and one bucks, plus tax and shipping. That's $101 for a brand new OEM AMD 4000+ and a 500W power supply and a copper cooler/fan assembly. The only question now is, can I put it all together and still get the goddamned rig to boot?

Something I'd like to mention about using this old Duron box is that I've enjoyed browsing with the new Opera release on it. I had chance to play with Opera 9.2 on my main rig before it went kaput, and I remembered that Opera works well with old hardware, so I installed it on this old box. It's a really impressive piece of programming. In fact, I'd say that it's a tweak or two away from being every bit as good as Firefox 2.

I first tried 9.2 to have a look at the new "speed dial" feature. It's kind of redundant to the favorites list, but looks cool and it's fairly convenient. But the killer feature in my opinion is the Block Content option in the context menu. Basically, it works like Adblock in Firefox, Flock, or Avant. It's a quick way to wild-card-block ads from any given site, and plugs up a huge hole in the reasons-not-to-adopt Opera list. It's still fast, feature-complete, highly customizable, and well-supported. Unfortunately, Java-based applets, like the games at Pogo, still don't seem to work at all when launched through Opera, and when I tried to write this post, I was inexplicably unable to type anything in the big fat blog text box. But for everyday browsing, especially on an older PC, Opera has closed the gap considerably on Firefox, and has nearly caught Flock, at least in my experience.

Great movies, bad vibes.

Dystopian future, or fast-forwarded realism?
by AC - permalink

The whole "dysotopic future" theme is old hat, even cliche, in science fiction movies and video games by now. It's a cliche because for a long time it was a worst-case reactionary reality, as in Terminator or Mad Max. But lately the creators of these films and games are taking a more measured, thoughtful approach to what would once have been boilerplate sci/fi. What we're seeing now is properties like V for Vendetta, Half-Life 2, and the movie I rented yesterday, Children of Men.

These are speculative sci/fi works grounded in the present; what if the U.S.'s vindictive war against terrorism created a global climate of fear and, yes, more terrorism, asks Vendetta. What if an alien invasion led to a cooperative police state where even reproduction wasn't allowed and citizens were treated like insurgents, asks Half-Life 2. And what if a world-wide epidemic left everyone infertile, and coupled with multinational strife, anarchy broke out on a global scale? Children of Men asks this one, and the answer is not contained in just another science fiction flick, it's a genre-bending film that everyone should see.

I'm not going to write up a full review of Children, because (and I know it's cheap and I've done this before) I agree with everything said in the A.V. Club's review of it, and you should just read that. But I do want to elaborate on a couple of points that the Club didn't get to.

First, the immersion factor is incredible. The long, long takes this movie is notable for are restricted to the most tense and/or action-packed scenes, and makes already gripping sequences even more realistic and visceral. In addition, the scenery is just unbelievable. The sets are vast and insanely detailed. This is a dystopian reality with broken, decaying streets that stretch on as far as you can see.

Second, this particular dystopia is made all the more realistic by the increasingly popular limited-viewpoint. You are tied to Clive Owen's character physically in that you never see anything he can't, and more importantly you never know more that he does, making his character even more empathetic (and cathartic). The same trick was ground-breakingly used by Half-Life 1 back in 1998, and Half-Life 2 uses it even better. It works so well in Children because Owen gives a particularly strong performance, the best I've ever seen from him. Michael Caine may be getting all the attention (not unjustly, he's terrific), but Owen is believable and likeable in Children, playing a character with a sharp sense of humor but who's stained by depression and as floored by the incredible things going on around him as we are as viewers.

The A.V. Club gave Children of Men an A, and I have to agree. If it weren't for one of those endings that wrap things up but don't actually answer every question, and in fact make room for a sequel, I'd give it an A+. It's definitely a must-own on DVD.