Archive for May, 2008
Microsoft SyncToy 2.0 Beta
Posted by Wanderlust in Software Friday, 30 May 2008 02:26 No Comments
Microsoft has, what appears to be, a very nice and quick tool to sync data from one PC to another. This is handy for me to sync my web work, imaging, data docs, game screenshots, etc. from my main PC to my server and then to sync back to my laptop. I just started playing with the tool but if you’re interested in something that syncs up your PCs with little work (unlike Symantec’s backup tool that encrypts files and requires 360 installed on all systems…YUCK), this is the tool for you without the overhead of something like TortoiseSVN (which is a great tool) and a bit easier to use.
Check it out at Microsoft.
A screenshot of it in action (a bit cut up but click for a full image):
Frontlines … Even More
Posted by Wanderlust in First Person Shooters, PC Gaming Wednesday, 28 May 2008 04:41 No Comments
All I have to say is what the hell…
I have really enjoyed the single player but the multi-player is really a piece of shit. I’m sure there will be others that say you need to do this or that but why? I go into MP, set it to not show empty servers and refresh. I see a server I want to enter and it does nothing. OK, so I choose another server, it does the same thing…sit at the browser window. I refresh and it sits at the refreshing screen (finding games…) with no end in site.
I’m really not sure what the deal is with this game. I can’t be the only one having these ridiculous issues, can I?
Crucial Ballistix = Crucial Mistake
Posted by Wanderlust in Hardware Wednesday, 14 May 2008 01:53 No Comments
Before I had everything I picked up 2GB of Crucial Ballistix (at the beginning of March) and when I finally finished building out the Q9450/Asus Maximus Formula I threw them in. As previously mentioned the voltage on these seemed to run high even on stock speed of 800mHz which was some concern and especially after reading all the comments on the NewEgg review page for this memory. I chose it because of the good luck in the past I’ve had with Crucial but I wish I would have taken a look at the reviews first. Right now it stands at about 29% of the reviews on NewEgg give the memory a rating of 1. I don’t typically look very hard at reviews on NewEgg because the issues are typically a DOA module and people immediately rate the item a 1 when there’s always going to be a few bad apples in a batch. This is a different situation and most of the 1 ratings are modules that were fine and died 2 week (as the case for me) and up to 3 months. I dropped NewEgg a note that I personally think they should consider suspending the sale until Crucial gets some quality control in place and stops sending out garbage. Whether it falls on deaf ears or not, who knows but I RMA’d mine today since they do have a 90 day replacement at NewEgg for memory.
In the mean time I received my G.Skill 2x2GB modules which are posting at 1.97v and a ref voltage of 0.99, well below that of the Crucial.
My woes began on Friday. I really haven’t been active because of some house work that I’ve been completing and family stuff for the birthday and Mothers Day. I went to check my mail and the system was sitting at a message that it was unable to boot from the operating system. I rebooted to find that my RAID was failing so I did a hard reboot and the RAID was detected, booted into Windows and life seemed to be happy. I honestly don’t think I checked it again until Sunday and the system was locked and wasn’t responding to the monitor. Powering off/on did nothing on several attempts so I used the CMOS reset button, rebooted and dropped into BIOS and set the RAID and minor changes keeping it at stock “auto” for everything. I powered down/up and immediately saw a blue screen flash (need to disable the auto restart). The system came up from the blue screen and appeared OK but there was no audio, so I disabled/re-enabled the driver (which typically works) and it rebooted while making the change. On reboot it immediately gave me errors that my profile was corrupted and couldn’t load as well as several root files being corrupted. I attempted one more reboot and the same thing. I powered down and left it off until tonight thinking I would need to try the new RAM and rebuild (something I really didn’t want to do). I dropped the G.Skill in, rebooted and the system came up flawlessly with audio and all. I checked voltage and as I said it’s running well and I even bumped the system up to 380FSB and rebooted. I’m currently running 2 Folding@Home GPU2′s on my two 3870s and it’s been up for about 4 hours without a hiccup. We’ll see how it does overnight and into tomorrow night but even some of my temps and other voltage that I thought were a bit high seem to be a better range.
Unfortunately the North Bridge still is registering 50c at idle but seems to only jump to 61c while running the two F@H sessions. Still need to look into that or take a look at changing the voltage on the NB to see if I can get the temps down but my understanding is that concern is when it starts hitting around 70c in full load and I had read (need to find it) where it should be OK as high 90c but I’d rather not see it even reach 70c so I’ll just have to monitor it and see if changing the voltage helps or post some more messages.
Until then…
Grand Theft Auto IV for the Xbox 360
Posted by Wanderlust in XBox 360 Tuesday, 13 May 2008 11:50 No Comments
I’ve not spent a lot of time on the PC the past week for a few reasons and one of them being GTA IV. The other I’ll discuss later after I get my RAM installed.
Anyway I’m fairly impressed with GTA IV so far. The graphics are nice, the story line has been interesting and I’m addicted to car jacking! 
I’ve played the early versions in the past and it was fun but the story line wasn’t engaging like GTA IV… I believe 1 and 2 are the previous versions I tried.
While I just started on Friday I’ve found the amount of work to be very detailed and immersive.
Frontlines: Fuel of War Problems
Posted by Wanderlust in First Person Shooters Tuesday, 6 May 2008 04:42 No Comments
As much as I want to like this game I’m having a hard time. The single player is fun but the browser and connecting to online games is a nightmare. I get connected, play for quite a while, I exit the game and attempt to join another and the launch button doesn’t work (not to mention wtf is up with not being able to double click on a server??). Anyway I click on launch and nothing happens, so I drop back to the menu and click “online” again and it does a refresh and never returns from refresh land. All I can do after waiting for 5 minutes is alt-tab and kill the process. At this point I restart the game and get a message that I’m already logged in. Not sure how long this lasts since I went into single player at this point and played for an hour or so but it’s at least 10 minutes.
The browser is a PoS and while they took a great game engine with the UT3 engine it functions just as poorly as the BFxxxx games….it’s almost as though they thought, what is the worst part of the Battlefield experience and added it to FFoW. The filters work about as well as BF2 in the earlier days and the lack of options is sad for the browser. Once in a game it works well but at least with Crossfire you get flickering lights all over the place from the onset. There were some issues with UT3 originally but that seems to have been worked out but not in FFoW and it starts immediately in a game, both single player and multiplayer.
Playing a game is fun but it seems the same few maps are usually available (even worse than the BF series) but getting into them is far from fun. I’m going to try to focus on this game a bit more and see how it continues but right now I’m disappointed in the multiplayer.