There’s a certain satisfaction in knowing that somehow, some place, someday even Bill Gates has hammered his desk in frustration brought on by a healthy dose of Windows. :0)
http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/archives/141821.asp
Well I finally have a running PC after a few days of pain and some sticky issues. I was going to take some build progess pictures but time and circumstances were against me and so there aren’t any.
To summarise, my PC failed to do anything useful shortly after plugging a USB device into the back, I then went through an ‘I can’t afford it but I need to upgrade’ moment and bought a full rebuild kit for £280. I was forced to change the mobo as I figured that had blown and it was Socket 939 with DDR ram and an AGP GFX card.
So all the new kit arrives, gets fitted and wired up, all cables inserted in the correct orifices and turn on. At this point I was expecting a nice shiny BIOS post screen, but instead I got the exact same symptoms I had previously.
So unplug all cables except monitor - nothing, unplug al HDD’s - nothing. Damn at this point I figured that the new Jeantech Storm 700W PSU I have is the culprit.
PSU swapped, and plugged in all wired up and…… Nothing :0( at this point I’m crying. Last thing I considered was unplugging the RAM as I expected a beep of some sort to come from the speaker on the mainboard (yup I do have one, I plugged it in myself). So RAM removed turn on and…… BEEEEEEEP!
Crap, bad memory? Plug chip into Slot 1 - and machine starts, Plug another into Slot 2 - machine starts, Slot 3 - OK, Slot 4 - no boot. Remove first 3 chips place the last ‘offending chip into slot 1 - machine boots.
So bad mainboard. At this point I’ve nothing left to do but figure on swapping the mainboard. So I continued with repairing windows so it would boot and as part of my auto rebuild mode I updated the BIOS - bit of a silly thing to do if I’m swapping the mainboard but hey at this point I’m tired, have wiped the wrong drive during partition maintenence (luckily only an extra storage drive) and I’m tired.
So windows spent the night updating it’s patches again and during a reboot I decided to verify the issue with Slot 4 and note the exact symptoms so I can rant at some poor schmuck at the store. So plug chip 4 into slot 4 and….. machine boots 80;
It figures that a Bios update fixed something and it figures i just spent 3 days trying to get a machine running when there was a really simple fix waiting there to be discovered by the intrepid explorer.
So I’m Back up and running again, busy re-activating Photoshop because My hardware changed - wasn’t expecting that. And I have also managed to run 3DMark06 and got a score of 7189. the actual results are here if you are interested in the detail.Technorati Tags: Cheap PC Upgrade
This weekend sees the next round of character updates for TF2. this Time the Pyro gets a small makeover and a tone of neat achievements to get your teeth into. The Pyro’s flame thrower has been slightly modded so it now has an alt fire option that will repel nearby ordnance and opponents when used. the idea behind this is that you set the unlucky victim alight then blast them with a shot of compressed air using the alt fire option thus enabling the nible legged gimp suited freak of a pyro that you are, to escape forthwith ;0)
As with the medic class there are 36 new achievements which will unlock new weapons when you reach the 12, 24 and 36 milestones.
2 New community maps are also included in this update and there’s another freeplay weekend so if you don’t already have TF2 in your game collection, you can download and play for free all weekend. Oh, as if that weren’t enough, theres a new TF2 blog too over at teamfortress.com
The Full details and some nice shiny pics are here, and I’ve included the new meet the sniper video below.
Have fun and maybe I’ll see you on a server, if you get fragged by StaticVenom <TWM> that’s me ;0)
Team Fortress 2 “Meet the Sniper” Trailer (HD)Technorati Tags: TF2, Team Fortress 2, Pyro
Looks like the Firefox download day may have produced a record after all. We’ll know in a week or so once the download logs have been purged and cleaned but the current stats are that over 8 million downloads occurred in the 24 hours allotted, and the count is currently at over 11 million so people are still downloading.
Looks like someone already found a security issue and there are a couple of bugs I’ve noticed and have been informed about. But, as is the mozilla way, we shall have an update for those in a week or so if not sooner :0)
The BBC website has a short article on the day’s success and SpreadFirefox has the current count and distribution map.Technorati Tags: Firefox 3, Download Day, World Record
The Firefox 3 record download attempt seems to be going well there are over 5 million downloads already and there’s still plenty of time left. The download day finishes at 18:00 BST today so if you havent downloaded yet then get yourself over to SpreadFirefox download it and then you can select the Flaunt it link on the right panel to get yourself a nice custom certificate to brag about it ;0)
If you use Firefox in any shape or form you’ll be interested in Firefox 3. Due to be released today FF3 improves mightily on FF2 especially in speed.
To mark the occasion there’s a world record attempt for the most downloads in a single day.
So as well as getting yourself a superb new browser update you can help make history too. The link on the image below will get you to the site for more information and a sign up page.
I suppose everyone has those days where everything seems to go right then like a pack of cards it all falls apart. I just managed to get a whole weekend like that. All started well on Saturday with a nice day out to see a friend at his medieval weekend, complete with battle re-enactment and bird of prey display. The weather was superb and I enjoyed a full session with my new camera. Then Sunday seemed to take a major nosedive.
I was working away happily on my main office P.C. and decided to try adding some files to an external usb drive that is plugged into my NAS drive, for some reason I was unable to add a new folder to the drive so I ejected it nicely from the NAS and plugged it int the back of the main P.C. POP! now all USB devices are lifeless - Keyboard, mouse… all dead, monitor shut off due to no signal being received and I’m left baffled.
All the fans spin up the drives all fire up theres power going to the Mainboard but no response at all, not even a bios. Obviously something nasty happened somewhere either just at the same time I plugged in the USB drive or as a consequence of plugging it in.
Either way I’m left P.C.-less at the moment. Fortunately my laptop is helping to pick up some of the pieces.
So now I need to repair the damage, my main course of action would normally be to replace the mainboard and move on. Unfortunately the mainboard is a socket 939 board so i’m screwed!
It also had AGP for the Graphics and despite only just upgrading to a nice shiny X1950 Pro, it’s AGP and that’s a problem. The memory is DDR as well so that’s a count of 3 that leaves me stuck.
My only recourse, at a time when I need to spend money on my car is to buy as cheap as possible without completely ruling myself out of any future upgrades, or worse, getting cheap crap components that will fail in a year like this mainboard has.
Despite wanting to splash the cash, I’ve done the right thing and been stingy enough with the cash. Hopefully I will be up and running again tomorrow night.
Being a fan of ATI and AMD (despite their current shortcomings in the quad core department), and knowing I can’t stretch to quad core I opted to stick with dual core and had to move up to AM2.
I was lucky enough to find a mainboard coming in at £52 that is AM2 and AM2+ compatible and when AMD offload their Phenom stock I will be able to slap another couple of cores in later on for a few quid less than they are currently selling for. This baby has the new AMD 780G chipset on it which includes the ATI 3200 embeded gfx which gets awesome 3DMark06 scores AND the new Hybrid Graphics technology which means you get a psuedo SLI type effect when you plug in a PCIe x16 card.
I’ve opted to slap in an ATI 3850 Pro from Sapphire which will give me decent graphics performance on a budget with the ability to crossfire. Matching this to the chipset means I don’t have to worry about conflicts and I can take advantage of the Hybrid Graphics functionality to boost things a bit. The 3850 comes close to the 8800’s in most reviews I’ve seen so not bat for a shade less than £100.
4GB of DDRII from OCZ
Then a couple of cables and a new DVD burner running off SATA as the mainboard has a single IDE connector and I’ve got 2 drives I need to connect.
This configuration is not going to break and speed limits or win any awards for high powered gaming rig, but, I should get impressive performance on a shoestring. My budget celing was £300 and I came in at £280.
This is an upgrade I could have done without right now but I think i’ve been savvy enough with my cash to buy decent performance and some form of upgrade capabilityon a very tight budget.
When I get it all running I’ll post a 3DMark06 score and some pics of the build in progress. Fingers crossed that all goes well.
According to the latest news hot off the Steam press (see what i did there? ) ;0) The Pyro class is coming in for an upgrade and is the next target for the new class achievements. Looks like they have some neat stuff coming including a Meet the Sniper Video.
The Steam news release is below for convenience:
We’ve almost completely wrapped up the next big release for Team Fortress 2, which will focus on the Pyro
class, along with the Meet the Sniper movie. We’ve spent time looking
at how the recent Medic release went, and have rolled feedback from that release
into the new item designs for the Pyro and into the design of the achievements
required to unlock those items. One item, shown here in concept form, will be
the Axtinguisher. Although it does about half of normal damage to standard
run-of-the-mill non-burning enemies, once you light someone on fire the
Axtinguisher will guarantee a critical hit.Along with all of the new
content, we’re also going to be making some significant changes to the Pyro
class for everyone, regardless of whether they have unlocked any new items.
Making sure your site runs on different browsers has always been a bugbear for web developers. There are those out there who simply go for a best fit, or simply support a single browser only. I’m one of those people who simultaneously hate and yet love the challenge of making any web development I do compatible with as many browsers as possible.
The same guy that has brought us the IE DebugBar is currently putting together a browser that has the engines from IE 5.5 right up through the range to IE8 Beta 1. This is a great tool as it’s currently not possible to run multiple versions of IE on the same machine without having Virtual Machines or lots of different installations you can play with. There are a few Hacks out there, but I wouldn’t want to go down that route.
IETester is going to save a lot of people a lot of time.
