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):

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?

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 2×2GB 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…

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. (more…)

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.

I’ve bumped the system up to 400mHz FSB so I’m able to clock in at 3.2 at this point. I’m going to do some attempts at 420 after running at 400 for a few days and until I get my new RAM. I wanted to upgrade to 4GB of RAM and was looking at adding 2 more sticks of the Ballistix but rather than dropping $80 with a rebate for $25-30 I picked up 2×2GB of G-Skill for $80 shipped (no rebates) that seemed to be doing well with overclocking. So I am able to keep it to 2 sticks and only pay about $25-30 more and sell off the 2×1GB 1066’s or sell them with the E6600/P5W system. We’ll see how it does with the Maximus Formula but I as I said I’d rather run 2 sticks than 4 and it runs at a lower voltage than the Crucial.

The only thing I am concerned with at the moment is the north bridge temperatures which stays over 50c even at 333FSB but doesn’t go above 60c even at full load (4 Prime95’s running on each affinity).  With it set at 400fsb and idle it’s 55c and still only goes up to around 60c on load.  My other concern is that the DRAM voltage (even set to 2.22v in BIOS) is showing 2.27v in Asus Probe II and the DRAM Ref is at 1.14v.  I’m hoping the new RAM will correct this but I need to do some posting on the NB temps.

At the present my 3DMark scores are up from 13,803 with the E6600/P5W to 17,552 (~22% increase) with the Q9450/Maximus Formula so I’m happy with the upgrade at this point. I can tell a difference in some apps like Photoshop on load times.

I ran 3DMark @1920×1200 and got the UPS beeping again, so it looks like I’m going to move the monitor to a normal surge for now and just pick up a second UPS for the monitor, residential gateway, switch and speakers since most of it’s just on a normal surge now.

The other thing that was kind of wild is watching 3DMark06 and seeing the speeds and remembering my original test that netted me a whopping 1,579 on my AMD 3500+ (non-64) with the x800 Pro! Still not bought Advantage that just released and not sure if I will in the forseeable future. I’ll probably look at upgrading next year when the new Intel sockets are released and I do a full system overhaul…then again this upgrade felt that way on my wallet with the board/memory/proc weighing in at about $670 and video cards around $500 earlier this year.

Edit: UPS probable fix. I think I found what has been causing the beeping and I assume it’s the load on the battery. I had the normal surge protector on one of the battery plugs. What I assume is causing the issue is the Residential Gateway since (I’m guessing) the beeping started occurring after I got AT&T UVerse and probably about the time I got the 3870s (which is what baffled me before)…so it must have put an additional load (over the previously installed cable modem) on the UPS that it’s overloading the battery. I haven’t had an issue but then again power has been fine so far this year but summer is coming when I enjoy occasional outages. So my original idea of moving everything to a new one will still be the final plan.

I gave 410FSB a try as well and it didn’t go well.  3DMark06 bails out on the 2nd CPU test.  I tried dropping the RAM to 985 since I had tried at 1093 (and reading that the Crucial is 800 with speed ratings of 1066, so it makes me wonder what it can do above 1066).   It still crashed at 985 though so I’ll be content with the 400 until I can try the G-Skill to see if that assists even though it’s on the CPU test.