This is something that a lot of you either forgot about, or have terrible memories of that ear bleeding noise coming from the modem. Yesterday I got my recently acquired Tohsiba Satellite Pro 430CDS working. It has a built in modem, so I thought what the heck lets see if it still works. After a quick Google search I found a free dialup service. Surprisingly it was actually pretty fast for dialup. Unfortunately I had not yet loaded W98 SE, so I was running on IE4. I was getting so many script errors it wasn’t even funny. Hopefully I can get a real web browser on it, since most have moved away from W98 support.
Dialing in
January 28th, 2010 by Goliath 182How DRM can kill a great game
December 25th, 2009 by Bjorn EndreI love Dragon Age Origins! It is one of the best games of 2009 in my opinion. So far I’ve racked up about 45 hours of gameplay and I still have a lot to do. But there is one major flaw with the game: the DRM.
I bought the Premium Extended something edition through Steam and got all the DLC with it (Wardens/Soldiers Keep, Stone Golem etc.). I had some minor issues getting the DLC to show up due to 2 different CD-keys coming with the game but that was quickly sorted. I played the game, did the DLC quests, got the armour and stuff. One of the quests, Wardens/Soldiers Peak, gives you access to a new castle where you not only can buy extra stuff but also store loot in a big box/vault.
Then something happened. At some point Soldiers Peak dissapeared from the map. I didn’t notice at first and kept playing on. Then I suddenly noticed that one of my party members was naked! The armour he was wearing was one that you got from one of the DLC quests. Then I coudn’t talk to my Golem anymore (which I got from the DLC Stone Golem quest).
What had happened? Well, at some point the game lost contact with the “online profile storage” at Bioware and boom – my DLC was no longer registered on me. And now those quests (and items) are buggered up. I get the option to restart the quests but at the same time the game “knows” I have completed them already so it doesn’t work redoing them. And what does Bioware say? “Go back to a save before this happened because so far we have no clue how to fix it”.
This is a perfect example on how NOT to do DRM. While the pirates can play the game complete with DLC I as a honest paying customer are screwed! Why do it need to verify my DLC every time I start the game? Why does it complain when I am not online that it cannot start the save as it needs to verify that I am allowed to use it? Why is it Bioware cannot make a simple tool that verifies your achievements/quests and sees that you completed the DLC quests and give me back my stuff?
I’m pissed. I still love the game but it has left me with a bitter taste in my mouth when it comes to buying stuff from EA/Bioware again. Because if this is how they want to treat paying customers they do not deserve any money from me.
Revisiting 1990
November 10th, 2009 by Goliath 182So if any of you have been reading the forums lately (if your not you should!), you would see that I am currently working on getting my old 386 to work. So far its only half done, but hopefully I can figure out the issue soon. You can read more about it HERE. Thanks 
Eyefinity
November 9th, 2009 by Bjorn EndreAMD was kind enough to lend me three Dell 2408WFP Ultrasharp 24 monitors to do some Eyefinity testing this weekend. Of course I ran into some issues as my reference HD5870 seems to have a bug som it can only handle 2 screens at once. The third monitor just don’t get a signal. Luckily I had my HIS HD5870 to save the day (but only after 4 hours of swapping cables, testing other monitors and generally swearing and bitching).
Testing 3 huge monitors isn’t easy. I had to clean away a lot of stuff just to fit them onto my work desktop.
Yesterday I spent hours on installing and testing games with Eyefinity. You can look forward to an article about it in a while. I can say it is really cool with games like Dirt or Grid which fully supports it. Especially in the Crossover competitions in Dirt it works well as you get a better view of your opponent even when he is not in your usuall viewpoint forward.
Eyefinity still feels like a bit of a gimmick as few can afford 3 monitors but it’s still a fun idea.
Bat as I said, we’ll post a full article about this soon. As my brief Eyefinity testing is done it is back to the PSU:s. Had an interesting experience where a high-end 550W PSU drew 455W from the wall and a cheap low-end 480W PSU drew 588W(!) from the wall with the same components and load. Talk about inefficient!!
18 PSU:s
November 4th, 2009 by Bjorn EndrePSU’s are one of the most important part of our computers. A bad PSU can not only damage your other components but also introduce instabilities in the system that can be hard to find the solution for as you normally do not think the PSU is the culprint. I’ve personally had a bunch of systems stop working just because the PSU was of poor quality.
In our lab right now I got 18(!) PSU’s in the range from 400W up to 650W that I am reviewing for a big round-up. Stay tuned to find out which PSU’s are good and which are not that good. That is if I can finish the testing without falling asleep. It’s really boring work. Running each PSU for an hour at no load, windows desktop low load and full load and logging the voltage for 3.3V, 5V and 12V.
Windows Home Server saves my day
October 15th, 2009 by Bjorn EndreBackups ….. how many of us do have good backups? I’m pretty sure most do not. This weekend I was happy that I had made sure my stuff was properly backed up as my main computer went bye bye.
I was busy benchmarking a reference HD5770 and HD5750 in my main system. My thought behind that was that this was a mainstream system with a E8400 (3 GHz) C2D which fit perfectly with what you would expect would be used with one of the cards. The last thing I planned to do was to do some benchmarks on a GTS250 as comparison. I put it in and turned the system on. Hmmm, no image, the computer didn’t POST ….. I put the HD5770 back …. same thing. Long story cut short – it seemed the motherboard had gone to the big scrapyard in the heaven (it was a Zotac 9300WIFI) so I put in a Gigabyte GeFoce 9400 motherboard instead. This time I got a image but it kept saying that there was no bootable disc. Seems like the Corsair P128 GB SSD which is my boot-disc had been damaged at some point.
Lucklily I have a Windows Home Server chugging along in the basement and it takes a backup of my computers each night. So I booted from the recovery DVD, put some network drivers for the nForce motherboard on a USB-stick so it could get network working and just chose to recover the complete system from last nights backup. It took a few hours but I was up and running again!
Naturally things can’t be that easy and while it worked fine once I got into Windows it turned out that most of the time when I restarted the computer it would say “Removed disc from drive” and just not boot. I switched motherboard again, this time to an ASUS mobo (much better orientation of the SATA-ports BTW) and did a new reinstall but in the end it turned out to be the SSD that was corrupt/broken. After I replaced it with a WD 300GB Raptor and did a recovery again(!) it has worked perfectly.
There are a lot of good backup programs (for example Acronics has some good backup functionality in their imaging-program) but what I like with WHS is that it takes care of everything behind my back. It was so easy just selecting the date I wanted to “go back to” and then have it re-image all my harddrives (you get to choose which drives you want to bring back) and after an hour or so (it was much faster with my WD-harddrive) .
So, do YOU have a good backup solution?
Report from Nobelprize land
October 7th, 2009 by Bjorn EndreIt has been a while since I have had time to write in the blog. Isn’t it strange how you have big plans but never seem to have time.
The last few weeks have been murder. Not only did I have the HD5870 articles to write, I also had a lot of other hardware that is waiting to get reviewed and released. You can look forward to reviews on some new AMD stuff, a bunch of ION motherboards, 120mm fans as well as some PSU’s.
Another thing taking up my time is of course my work at Nobelprize org where I am a webdeveloper (webdeveloper by day, hardware reviewer by night ..). It’s the week that all the announcements are done (so far the Medicine, Hhysics and Chemistry prices have been awarded) and as you might understand it is a hectic week for me. My main job is to help releasing new content on our site during the day and make sure everything runs fine. One added strain this time was that Google/Youtube approached us a week and a half ago and wanted us to stream the announcement live over youtube. It took us some time to set up but if you go to http://www.youtube.com/thenobelprize you can actually watch the announcements as they happen.
So what more is happening? The Kindle is finally getting released in Europe end of October. I’m tempted as I read a lot! I’m getting ready to dump my iPhone and get a HTC Hero with Android instead. Great GUI and less lock down. I got the PSPGo and love it. I’m all for Digital Distribution now and the PSPGo is such a nicer formfactor than the PSP -1000 and PSP-Slim that I used to own. I’m even preparing to dump my NDSi since it really isn’t getting used much.
All this NVIDIA/PhysX/Fendi/DirectX11/OpenCL stuff is just making me sad. I do not like closed standards so I am looking forward to Bullet Physics and Havoc going OpenCL so we can start see developers using either OpenCL or DirectCompute instead of PhysX. NIDIA’s way of trying to cut off ATI users to use either a old Aegis Phys-card OR a NVIDIA card for physics is a bit desperate. I understand they do not support it but trying to stop it completely? If I have a NVIDIA card I bought, why not just let it be an unsupported hack instead of actively try to block it? Not to mention those poor bastards with their old Phys-cards from ASUS etc. … Luckily it looks like we soon have hacked drivers which brings back the support . Let’s jsut hope we soon do not need an unofficial hack. This actually reminds me of the time when we had a Glide-wrapper being written for Rendition cards. Sigh – I hate closed standards or standards that only work on one vendors card. And what is this talk about a “fake” card? How on earth did NVIDIA get themselves into this? All they had to do was to just say “sure, it was an attrap as our engineering cards aren’t really made to look good” and no-one would have cared. But to first deny deny and deny and then say “sure, it was fake”? That feels like they created unesseary bad press for something that shouldn’t be important. Makes you wonder how far away the cards really are … Oh well, I look forward their next card. Nothing is better than healthy competition.
Pre-release products yay!
September 11th, 2009 by Goliath 182Probably one of my favorite parts about being a reviewer is getting a unreleased product. I currently have three in my possession, and while I can’t tell you what they are, I can say that its fun having something that only a select few have. Don’t forget to check out the reviews when they finally post up later on in the month (and one much later on in the year)!
My first blog!
September 10th, 2009 by Goliath 182Well here I am with my first blog! I think I am going to have to cut it short already though… I have to get back to a NAS review, and a beta test *sigh*
Building my Win7 system
August 13th, 2009 by Bjorn EndreAs I have a Technet-subscription I have access to the Windows 7 RTM already. Yesterday I decided to rebuild our livingroom computer with some new hardware and Windows 7.
The computer has these components:
- Silverstone SUGO SG05 SFF-case. Review is coming in a week or so but this is a really nice case for those who want a case with small footprint while still being able to use high performance components.
- Zotac 9300 WIFI mini-ITX mobo. Not only does this mobo have the GeForce 9300 on-board graphics, it also has a 16x PCI-E slot
- HIS HD4770. The case supports cards up to 9″ so while the hD4870 won’t fit, the HD4850, HD4770 and many GeForce-cards fit
- 4 GB of DDR2-mem. This is being upgraded to 8 GB tomorrow. Unfortunately the mobo only has 2 memory slots so it will be interesting to see how it handles the two 4 GB Kingston-sticks I bought.
- Corsair P128 – 128 GB SSD for the system and some programs.
- Samsung 1TB EcoGreen (5400rpm) for all the stored data
- Zalman CNPS8000 CPu Cooler. I finally found a cooler that fits into the case and the motherboard and still offers good cooling at a low soundlevel.
- Intel E8400. Thinking of switching this out later to a Quad-core.
- ASUS external Blu-ray drive (yeah, didn’t ahve a slmiline slot-in player so I took this one)
- Noctua S12-800 120mm fan in the front of the case. Might swap this for a Noctua P12 and run it at slower speed.
So far the installation of the system has gone well. With the CPU-cooler and the Noctua fan the soundlevel is really low and you certainly do not hear the system during the day. When everyone sleeps and everything else is turned off you do hear it but it still is quite silent.
The installation of Win7 went very well and I’ve even managed to install drivers for all my stuff including even an network HP-printer.
I love the new Library feature which allows me to bring folders together (network folder,s folders on different drivers) and assign them to either “Pictures”, “Music”, “Documents” or “Videos”. I haven’t spent more time with the feature yet but it would be nice if you could create your own library …
So far everything is working fine!
