Back Online!

Tremble, peasants! For we here at NosCo once again have fully working internet access!

...Okay, now which button cues the dramatic lightning bolt...?

But yeah. Since Tuesday the 22nd, I've been operating on ever-worsening internet. When it started, it was annoying -- it would go out every half hour or so, stay down five minutes, and then be back up. Yesterday morning, I was lucky if I could get through the three pages required to check my email before the modem pooched. My last comment on the Nexus took five or six reconnections to actually get through.

Turned out to be two issues: whoever worked in the junction box last had made, as the technician put it: "a mess". The co-ax to my apartment was so kinked up he described it as a "zig zag"; and noted that the cable was so bent that the filament or whatever co-ax has to transmit the signal was broken, dropping my signal strength so low that neither modem nor cable box could keep a connection when the wind blew -- which here in the Columbia River Hellhol- I mean Basin, is always.

On top of that, something (or things) in my modem was in its death throes. Hence the worsening performance as time went on. Some swapped junction cables and a new modem later, and here I am again.

I'd love to flip Charter Cable shit over the incident, and go on a tirade about their customer support as so many others have... but I can't in good conscience. Real life issues kept me from getting in touch with tech support until Wednesday of this week (and they showed up to fix it on Thursday, so not bad time); and yes it took two visits to fix, but that was mostly my fault for not testing the "fixed" connection with a sustained download before the guy left. Other than issues with piss-poor reception on my cell phone to call tech support (which they have no control over) I found the entire process straight-forward and simple; and the tech they sent out seemed to know his business.

I have to confess, I did a Google search earlier in the week trying to check for other problems in my area -- local contractors are bad about digging ditches without calling and cutting the regional fiber-op backbone (happens at least once a year, sometimes more) -- and the entire first page of results was nothing but people bitching that Charter didn't fix whatever they had wrong. I was expecting to be left hanging; when he said that the problem was signal strength in the junction box, I figured someone in the complex had tied one too many lines in on Tuesday, and that last straw finally broke the camel's back and we couldn't get cable internet anymore.

I was wrong. They fixed me up, and after catching up on some torrents and downloading that driver update I'd been needing since Thursday (no, no: the last Thursday, not yesterday), she's still running perfectly. Not only that, but the new modem has some kind of enhancements over the old one and my connection now tops out at 2m/bit instead of 1m/bit. Sustained download speeds of 1.9 megabytes a second. Well, it ain't flyin' cars... but that's living-in-the-future enough for me.

And junction box shenanigans and burned out modems are officially considered "not your fault" so it didn't cost me one red cent.

So while anecdotal evidence may still support them sucking, my personal experience now conflicts with that; and I'm pretty happy with my internet service. Still wish I could get the Military Channel and Nicktoons TV instead of eight versions of Telemundo... but that's a rant for another day. I'm just happy I didn't end up having to switch to the local phone company's craptastic excuse for A/DSL; which I had back in '06 -- cannot say I miss those big 30k/sec downstream speeds, either. What? No, I didn't miss a zero: thirty kilobytes a second.

Anyway. Should be posts incoming. As I noted in passing in the NCCS comments the other day, I ended up with a new video card; since my long-serving 8800GTS was on its way to Video-Card-Valhalla. It's the dust. Cakes up the fan bearings, fan stops, GPU fries. Ended up catching a helluva sale on a GTX650ti 2gb; though my old-ass PC doesn't much like the PCIe 3.0 format apparently. Am hoping the new drivers I finally managed to get yesterday will help with that.

I have since assembled a mess 'o screenshots; enough for six or so posts... but couldn't do much with them when I couldn't reliably access Picasa to graft them into posts. Of course now I have to separate them, sort out the ones that aren't suitable for public sharing (I. Admit. NOTHING.), and then arrange thoughts that go with them into semi-coherency for posts... so it may still be awhile.

Oh Wow

So, about an hour after my last comment this morning, my old 17" LCD gave up the ghost. Rather than just giving me crap on startup, it started randomly going in and out. Shortly thereafter, if stopped working altogether. Power light wouldn't even come on.

Finally got into the city, and hit Best Buy. Caught a Samsung 23" LEDHDWTFBBQ on sale for $189 (down from $269) and decided it was the least bad option. They had a couple in 27", but I was fairly sure my desk wouldn't handle it.

Got home, got it plugged in, and had a picture!

...a crappy, lopsided, grainy picture. Note to self: HD/widescreen doesn't play well with 1280x1024.

Reset to the nearest widescreen resolution I saw -- 1300-something; and hit okay... and promptly lost all picture.

Samsung's documentation is OH SO FUCKING HELPFUL, TOO! It has 87 languages (seriously. It had paragraphs in Turkish and Swedish), and when I found the English section... it basically consisted of "plug in, follow on-screen instructions"; and the rest was some shit about hooking it up to a portable device. I suppose some folks care about that? Me, I didn't want a media station -- I just want to see what's going on with my PC, thanks. Some games, some web browsing, maybe some anime blown up into glorious 23" HD...

Anyway. I played an old and mean trick, and forced the computer to reboot into safe mode; where I forced the resolution back into 1280x1024 -- which looked like shit, but I knew gave a workable picture.

I was leery about it, but apparently my video card supports the "native resolution" of the monitor -- 1920 x 1080. I was afraid it would be unreadably small text... but oh baby...

This is soooo nice. I know I can't get this kind of resolution from my games... but this is going to make for some nice video watchin'.

I have to say, I feel positively ghetto at the moment. This is the biggest monitor or TV I've ever actually used (prior to this was a 19" television that had a tube). Only ended up having to move it two or three inches closer to me -- my desk is a corner type; so the wider the monitor, the further from the back it has to sit. The 17"er nestled right into very back of the frame, but this one is just too big. Still, I have enough room left for my XM radio and its dock; and room for my revolver and spare ammo to sit in its old, comfortable spot too.

Dear Gods, what modern conveniences will I acquire next? A cordless telemophone? One of them new-fangled boxes with cold inside that keeps yer food from going bad so fast? Truly, the mind doth boggle...

Up The Wall

...Or, Making me second guess myself.

I've gotta confess, FNV is driving me insane, lately. Well, more-so than I normally am, anyway.

There for awhile, I had it working more or less well; and could play mostly crash free. That game is apparently gone. Played most of yesterday, and it's back to its old standby of crashing completely at random. Can be two minutes in, can be two hours; and every third or fourth loading screen results in either crash or lockup. I've gotten quite habitual at tapping the quick save key.

Far as I can tell, it's all memory-related. The game crashes when loading, as in loading screens; but almost every play-time crash is when it's either loading in new terrain/buildings, or activating spawns to "pop in" the 3d models of actors/creatures. With the occasional crash during the start of combat -- but I've ranted more than once over the memory drain of companions when combat starts. I don't know what they're doing, but the game uses a massive amount of memory for about ten seconds and then goes back to normal. If the memory leak that Bethsoft could never be bothered to fix already has the cache in a sad state when that massive draw hits... well, imagine the noise Wile E. makes as he heads for the desert floor.

It's actually gotten to the point that it's made me doubt my PC here. Granted, the eMachine here would turn the stomach of most "serious gamers"; but for the relative pittance I paid for it back in 2007, it's given one hell of a term of service even if it pooches tomorrow. All the crashing, the BSoDs, performance problems; it's all made me think at various times that I had a virus, my RAM was going bad, and the GPU had fried/was in the process of frying (long-time readers may recall that I had a GPU pooch in 2009, taking me out of FO3 for a couple weeks; so I'm a bit paranoid about it happening again).

And of course, the problems are near identical in Skyrim. Random crashes (mostly on loading new cells or assets); and BSoDs if I'm not careful about keeping Firefox reined in before trying to play (Flash has a happyfuntime memory leak, too). So naturally, it's my PC, right?

Well...

Occasionally, I feel the need to put things into perspective; or just to play something different. From time to time, I'll abandon my usual haunts in favor or enacting death and destruction on much larger scales -- strategy games. Anyone who's played it can tell you Sins of a Solar Empire is no slouch in the system hardware drain arena, and a while back when frustrated beyond my tolerance by Skyrim, I played an entire medium-large campaign in one sitting. To the tune of seven hours and change; straight. Not only did it not crash, but when done it unloaded from Windows memory without incident (though it took about five minutes to fully clear... yowch) and I was able to continue computing normally.

Huh, so that's what happens when you have an engine written by people who actually play games, instead of people just looking for a paycheck. Between Bethsoft and EA fucking me over every chance they get, I sometimes forget companies like Stardock exist. Shame they don't do sandbox FPS/RPG hybrids. Probably wouldn't have any asinine DRM, either...

Anyway, what got me thinking about all this was yesterday morning I was browsing around a Fallout forum and happened to be linked to Slof's site; where I saw her notation that Fallout 3 and NV were too crash-happy for her and had been abandoned.

It really sucks, because I love FNV and Skyrim in concept. It's just that in execution... Trying to get either game working worth a damn is rather like pulling teeth prior to the advent of anesthetic -- all you can really do is take a big drink of something high-proof, grip the chair arm tightly, and hope for the best. And much like pulling teeth, at the end of the day you usually wish you had spent it doing something else.

On an interesting note: despite being nominally the same engine as the other three (they can say what they want; Skyrim is still absofuckinglutely Gamebryo; just with a more annoying scripting format shoehorned in), Oblivion is pretty stable. I can play it three or four hours; with only the odd (once? twice a week, maybe) crash caused by some less than ideal scripting in some converted Japanese mods I won't go into the exact nature of here. It also at least partially destroys the "it's my PC" theory as well; since the way I have it set up Oblivion is more of an overall memory drain than FNV -- I've installed entirely too many HGEC bodies and armors; and the amount of drain that game can rack up is astounding, even at the relatively low graphics settings I run. Still, the memory leak wasn't as bad in that iteration of the engine, so it takes longer for the game to crash and burn.

Still, I'm not sure what I'm going to do about FNV. It would figure that right after I get my estate finished the damned thing stops working right. Probably has something to do with some mods I installed last month in an attempt to "make the game more interesting". Populated wasteland and casinos, angel park, a world of pain, the monster mod, and a few others...

They fucked my game so bad it's worthy of a Lifetime daytime movie about the evils of rape. I resisted ranting about them at the time because I try hard not to step on other modders' toes; especially when I don't know exactly what went wrong where... and "momod" broke my game so fucking bad I never got a chance to run down exactly what did it. It's MMM all over again. The others were varying levels of suck, fail, and pointless.

I cleared all the stuff out, of course... but not all at once. I had some foolish notions of being able to salvage some of the mods, and kept them active into the early stages of the game I'm currently playing. This, obviously, was a mistake. Judging by how much bigger each save file I make is than the previous one, it looks like there may be some bloat in there someplace. Probably doesn't help that I've modified my load order multiple times, and had to fix the master listing in two WME plugins to get them to behave -- savegames tend not to like having stuff like that changed.

So, it's looking like much as I don't want to -- especially being thirty-four hours in now -- I'm going to have to dump this set of saves; wipe them all, and start an entirely new game, since somehow my "clean save" ended up with Armor By Race in it (don't ask how -- I turned that stupid thing off at least a dozen times, and it would never shut down; I ended up having to delete the piece of shit to make it go away). After, of course, going through my data directory with a fine toothed comb and purging out every mesh and texture that isn't supposed to be there anymore.

I realize they weren't as moddable; but sometimes I miss the old days of gaming. You kids in the audience may not know this, but before the internet became ubiquitous, companies had to put out games that worked reasonably well at release. "Patching" involved disks (yes, with a K) and could be very expensive business. Of course, I don't have to memorize the IRQ, DMA, and Hex address of my game port and sound card for modern games... so there is that up side.

You know, I spent an hour or so yesterday morning working on my 1911's here at the desk while waiting on FNV to stop being stupid, and I have to confess: the older I get, the more I prefer that sort of stuff. I swear, games just get more and more unreliable and randomly coded every year... but steel will always be steel; and will always obey physics. Now if I could just figure out how to get that damned leather to stop squeaking... or failing that, I suppose I could break down and buy my own kydex forming table...

Random Reliability Persists

(This is going to be one of those technical issue posts. No mod previews or screenshots or anything like that, so feel free to skip if that's what you come here for.)

I've mentioned off and on since getting back up and running, the heavily variable 'playability' of Fallout 3 in general.

Before the FUBAR, my game was rock-solid stable, and had problems only when the game's memory leak came into play; that is to say, when the system ran completely out of memory, and the game kept demanding more. Results in a happy-fun-time-CTD.

Haven't been so lucky this time around. crashes have manifested here and there, AI problems, texture issues, and so on. 'Normal' stuff for FO3, but infuriating nonetheless when compared to the previous install's performance.

I thought I had it going pretty well. I could play three or four hours at a go - about the max that my 1gb system will tolerate with the Gamebryo engine in any form - the AI was acting right again, and slowdowns were few and far between.

Then, things went straight to hell. In two days, two of my three attempts at playing resulted in the PC hard-locked; requiring a total power kill via the switch on the PSU (stupid ATX power supplies not having a fucking off button like the old ATs. If I wanted the fucking computer to 'sleep', I'd tell windows to do it).

I wasn't sure what was going on. In addition to the locks, I had massive AI problems.

I went through, cleaned up stray files in the Data directory; started running conflict checks, and even began looking closer to every mod I had updated since the last install.

I happened to also be testing four companion plugins during this time. Two for NeilUK02, one for Toadlet, and one for Ladydesire.

After multiple crashes, I finally just called Brooke and Bernie following me 'good enough' and threw in the endorsements. I don't want to deal with them anymore. That Exnem shit is fucked up. Not only does it look like shit, but it causes constant conflicts with my Type 3 armor replacers.

"Toad's People" worked fine as far as I could tell; but consisted of the two groups that I have no interest in my companions being - yard apes and geriatrics. Thankfully no Exnem this time, though. Verified it worked, dropped in my endorsement there, too.

Ladydesire's Chesapeake companion... I gave up on. I couldn't find her to test. I spent forty minutes the first time looking for her, and almost thirty the second. Nary hide nor hair. Never a glimpse. The readme said "in or around Megaton". Thanks, that narrows it down nicely. Second try was on the second version of the plugin, where the author (I thought) was going to move her to someplace actually find-able. I'm not going to rate it down... I'm just not going to endorse. Hoping I can stay quiet on the whole issue, and no one on the Nexus will notice.

As much testing done as I'm going to do, I pulled the plugins, and all of the Exnemized crap from my data directory. Went back three savegames to before I had turned any of the four on...

...and I played for almost four hours last night in one sitting. AI problems still manifested; but like they used to, my companion now got over the issues on her own if I just stood still and waited for her for a minute or two. I can hear the HDD working at something when it happens, so I'm thinking it's some issue in the engine, itself. Hopefully, like last time, it will resolve itself as the game breaks itself in.

Really, I don't want to cast aspersions; intimate that it was someone's companions - and I damned well don't want to discourage anyone from creating and/or sharing them... but that there evimadence is pretty strong.

Empirical research is a bitch to dispute, I know. Worst thing about it is I have no idea what could be doing that. The only thing I can come up with is that the Exnem bad-fake-tits-edition bodies that Bernie and Brooke use was clashing heavily with my Type 3 raider armor replacer. A bit gets out of alignment someplace eventually, and the game soils itself and runs away; as it does sometimes.

Obviously, one randomly working play session is not enough for me to conclusively declare that that was in fact the issue; it seems awfully coincidental - and I don't believe in coincidence.

Suppose I'll do what I always do: grit what's left of my teeth and suffer through plugins with problems to test them for people, and then turn them off when I can.

Just hoping Herculine's next plugin works as well as her Shojo one. While I don't really go for the kiddie thing, this new one sounds interesting.

Still reading this far? Wow. I'm impressed. That's a lot of rambling to put up with. Here, have a reward:

I lied about the no mod previews. Just to reward you, I'll let you know that there are two incoming to go with my cosmetic resource. One will be the plugin full of the test companions you saw screenshots of - suitably renamed, of course - and the other, a group of purpose made, smokin' hot Demonesses to gleefully aid your wasteland rampages. Fanged Demonesses. Ooh, yeah...

Gremlins

Gather round, Children. It's time for another session of Nos' stories of things that boggle the fucking mind.

Sgt Ovakil sends me a DVD, which I receive yesterday, as the USPS does not run on Sunday; the slackers.

Pop the DVD into my PC here, which promptly declares that the disc is blank, and asks if I would like to burn some data to it.

Now, I know he didn't send me a blank disc. I got my first CD burner almost a decade ago now, and I can smell drive conflict with burning software.

So, I get creative. I go to fire up ISOBuster, only to find out that I've since uninstalled ISOBuster. Dig up the installer from my archives... to see that I have recorded my key nowhere.

Fuck.

As a secondary option, I download and install IMGBURN. Fire it up, where it declares that there is an error on the disc, and it is not readable. I tell it where to shove its diagnosis, and just make me a damned image anyway.

Error pops up. "Insufficient free space on C:\"

...I have fifty-two free gigabytes. This is a four gig DVD+RW. How can there possibly not be enough free space?

Look closer, and IMGBURN has decided amongst itself that the resulting disc image will be eight point seven terabytes, and require some ninety-five hundred hours to create.

...Obviously, we have a problem somewhere...

In sheer exasperation, I try out my dad's laptop, as my old PIII no longer has a DVDROM in it (long story).

The laptop reads the disc without incident. The laptop, I might add, is a 2001 vintage Sony Vaio, that I've had to resurrect from death's door at least a dozen times. I didn't know it could even read a DVD+RW. The damned things didn't exist when it was made.

Fucking Emachine pieces of shit...

Anyway.

So now I have to get more creative. I dig up an ethernet cable, and prepare to LAN the two together; as I have no double-ended USB cables, nor any CD-R's to transfer the files to.

I'm loathe to do that, as it means disconnecting my PC from the cable router, and trying to set up a home network - something that has not gone well for me in days past.

An idea strikes. His laptop is already configured to plug right in to my router to use the cable connection, so maybe newer routers function as a LAN hub, too. Sure enough, after turning on file sharing on both systems (normally switched off for security reasons), the computers can see each other, and readily transfer data.

So now, instead of copying the files at a hundred plug megabytes a second from DVDROM to hard drive, I'm transferring said files across a LAN at two and a half megabytes a second. I've seen USB 1.0 drives work faster than this shit.

The electromagnetics in this apartment must be horrendous... I always suspected, because of my hit-or-miss cell reception, but wow.

Now, I'm thrilled that I found some way to copy the files - and surprised as hell that my idea to set up a quickie-LAN actually worked - but what the fuck?

Why in the hell won't my PC read the disc? Why in the hell will the Vaio?

Between this, and a little RAM debacle I had awhile back... I'm just about willing to write Emachines in general off as a bad idea. Fucking Gateway never has turned out a PC worth a damn.

Not sure what else to do, though. Building my own is an option I'm not willing to deal with anymore, and no other makers are batting a thousand these days. Alienware - even if I was willing/able to spring that much, is now a wholly owned bitch of Dell. Not sure if old favorites like Falcon Northwest are still even in business... and I'll buy another EMachine before I touch a fucking HP.

You know what would be great? If computer makers would stop jerking each other off, trying to see who can get to the first googlecore processor, and spend their time building some reliable, compatible hardware.

Then again, reliable, compatible hardware doesn't force people to buy new every year and a half...

It's Alive!

Guess who's back, bitches?

...No, not Elvis, damn it. He really is dead, okay?

I meant me.

Thanks to the boundless generosity of our good buddy Sgt Ovakil - who is apparently trying real hard to get into heaven - I again have a working video card.

As I've told him, saying simply "thank you" seems grossly inadequate. Hopefully, by doing so in a semi-public manner, I can offset how lame my thanks are.

Spent a couple hours getting everything in, installed, diagnostic-ed, and put through some paces, and it looks good. New card cruises at 61C while playing FO3 @1024x768, large textures, medium most options. Turns in 20 - 25 FPS outdoors with two companions in tow. Better indoors. Not half shabby for a 2.4ghz single core that's got 66% of the recommended minimum spec of RAM, eh?

Unfortunately, I won't be immediately returning to modding. A whole host of small bugs manifested in FO3 during my test playing, and it's going to take me a day or two to get them all nailed down and killed with fire.

Especially since real life keeps intruding. Damned dishes won't do themselves, no matter how many times I tell them to. It's 2010. Aren't we supposed to have robots for this crap by now?

My dystopian ranting aside, a huge thanks to you, John. I have no idea why you like my work so much (really, it isn't that good...) but I'm glad you're enjoying it. I certainly owe you for this one.

Hardware

Not technically game-related, but posting this here for two reasons:

1) Computer related, and I know I have more a tech-y audience on this blog (moreso than my other)

2) I have an audience here, where I'm pretty sure only one or two people read my non-gaming blog; the rest wander in from Google searches.

Amazing. I spend ten years gunsmithing and ammunition experimenting... no one cares. But I take up modding a buggy FPS/RPG hybrid on a whim involving boredom and hot companions and I become some kind of hero...

Anyway.

Bored out of my damned skull this morning, I decided that since the card was effectively useless anyhow, I'd see about disassembling that fan and see if it was repairable.

The answer, of course, is a resounding no.

But what got my attention, was that the fan isn't in the design I'm used to. There are no bearings to flush and repack with grease. The little fan is apparently held in place by plastic clips, and spins on and is driven by a simple electromagnet.

That's just wild.

See, while I realize I'm not an old man by any means, my gaming days go back further than most of you kids. I remember playing Pong on the Atari, for example. The old Atari whose controller consisted of a spinning wheel with a single button on the side.

I remember working on an 8088 XT, with a whopping 640kb of RAM and a double-spaced 20mb hard drive. Talk about a boat anchor. The damned case alone must have weighed twenty pounds. Add in the monochrome CRT, and "clicker" keyboard (no sneaky midnight typing as a kid with that thing!) and I'm pretty sure the outfit weighed as much as I did, at the time.

Still remember my old DOS setup. I had written a bunch of batch files to run my favorite games from a menu. Even did little ASCII spaceships fighting it out around the edges.

Yeah, I was a geek.

But I digress.

This fan amused me, but it also illustrates a problem with modern technology. That being that it isn't meant to be repaired. An old fan, I could have repacked the bearings, maybe replaced with a soldering iron whatever wire had burned out in the motor, and maybe got it working again. New stuff? Toss it, buy another... if they still make it; which they probably don't if your equipment is more than a year old.

Saw the same thing when my apartment's dishwasher went FUBAR this time last year. The pump motor had blown a seal. A $2 part.

Trouble was, they didn't sell that seal. You had to replace the entire pump, motor, and something else as they were all a sealed unit. A sealed unit, I might add, that cost so much that it was actually more cost effective to throw the old dishwasher away, and replace it with a new one.

Were it me, I'd have sprang the extra $50 to get one not made by Roper... but I'm not managing the apartment complex.

Cars are the same way. Time was, with a decent toolbox and a free Saturday, you could change damn near anything in a car. Now? Everything is special tools and sealed sub-assemblies and "dealer only" items... to the point that it just isn't worth trying to do it yourself.

If I wasn't already a morose person on a good day, these trends would certainly make me one.

Video Woes, Solved?

Got my housework done, finally (and man does that shit pile up when you laze about in a depressed fashion for a week and a half), and had some time to settle in and play a game, instead of just reading diagnostic reports.

Two things found:

1) My personal system/FO3 combination responds well to forcing the hard drive cache use to on. This apparently causes severe stuttering for some folks, but my game went buttery smooth with it on.

2) Seems the video card, if not the sole issue, has been the driving force behind my major issues. Played twenty odd minutes. Started getting stutters about 12 to 15 minutes in. It would miss a frame here, freeze up a few seconds when a spawn point was triggered, things like that. Problems got progressively worse as time went on. Alt-Tabbed back to Speccy, and the GPU had spiked from idle temp of 78C up to 94C.

Switched game off, let it cool back down to idle, started it back up. Played another ten, fifteen minutes. Problems began to manifest again. Same thing, but a bit worse. Closed the game, looked over the readout, and it was sitting at 95C, but the graph showed it had spiked to about 100C.

Seems like anything over 90C is bad ju-ju for the card, and apparently this particular specimen shows its heat-fatigue with major caching slowdowns. With what heat does to RAM chips, that's not really surprising. I'm still amazed nothing has burned out.

So, I've got my pedestal fan set up and aimed properly, and the card is happily idling along at 77C. Jumps to 80C when I watch a full-screen movie.

Suppose I get to buy a new card, then.

Seems you can get a pretty decent one for a C bill here lately, which is the top-out of what I'm usually willing to pay for a video card.

Yeah yeah. I should be springing for something like this, but like I told the Lady when she pointed it out to me while we were browsing the list: putting that thing into my PC would be like putting a Hemi into a Civic. Yeah, it's technically possible... but why? At the end of the day, it's still a damned Honda.

At the end of the day, this is still a thirty month old Emachine.

Seems though, like I can get a GF9600 or so for the hundred bucks. Just have to be careful, cause I'm pretty sure my PC doesn't support PCI-E 2.1 - my current card is a 2.0.

I really wish they'd pick a fucking standard and stick to it. ISA, then PCI, then AGP, then BETTAR AGP ZOMG 8X BESTEST EVAR... and now we're back to PCI? People need their damned schizophrenia meds. Or girlfriends.

'Sides. Even with an ailing card, with hard drive caching on, the game was running at 1024x768, decent draw distances, and still pulling a solid 25fps outdoors. Fallout 3 is the newest game I have much interest in running, probably won't buy New Vegas if it's still put out by Bethsoft anyway.

Don't see much point in putting a shit-ton of money I don't have into a PC just to say I have a more powerful one.

I prefer to own 454 Casulls for bragging rights. They're way more fun, and don't become obsolete every other year.

Anyhow, seems like the outside fan method will keep the computer running until I have a chance to get into town and see about a new card. It's just going to cut heavily back on my gaming.

Video Woes... Deeper

Well, I don't know that it's the cause of the problem, specifically... but I just found out that my GPU has been operating at 110C.

I'm amazed the son of a bitch hasn't burned out.

Uncapped the PC, and it seems the bargain basement fan on my bargain basement EVGA GF8400GS has quit working.

Gonna power down the system now, do some de-dusting, and see if that fan is just stuck or if the motor is fuxx0red.

S'all I need right now, having to blow a hunk of what little savings I've got build up on a new GPU...


Edit, 0845PST:

Yep. Fucking bearings are seized in the fan.

Good news is PSU, CPU, and secondary case fans are all working fine.

I'd also like to reiterate how much I hate living in the Columbia river basin. Even with my air filtered, there was so much dust in there that the CPU heat sink was damn near clogged solid.

Hasn't even been six months since I dusted in there, either.

Got an odd CPU heat sink and fan from a previous build that went FUBAR, suppose I get to dig it out and see if the fan is adaptable to the GPU.

Have I mentioned lately how much I hate computers?


Edit 2, 0903PST:

Well, looks like I tossed the fan and heat sink in the last move. Typical. Probably wouldn't have fit, anyway.

Seems if I keep the case open and a fan blowing on high into there, the GPU idles at 77C; which while not stellar... is within safe range.

Lovely. Guess I have to buy a new one, now.

Suppose I should fire up a game and see how high it'll spike.

If it was idling at 110C before... I'm surprised I didn't smell something scorching while FO3 was running.

Real pisser of it, is I was just playing CoD4 this morning, and as usual, there were no slowdowns. I've seen no artifacting, no blue screens of death... no POST errors. Nada. The damn thing's apparently been idling happily along at 1.5x normal temperature for Gods know how long.

If I hadn't been curious and installed Speccy while I was updating CCleaner, I'd probably never have noticed until the radiant heat either killed the GPU or burned the insulation off some nearby wiring.

Oh, well. At least I've already upgraded the power supply... so I won't have to be out that expense too, this time.

You know, I bought the Chaintech GF6200 in my old PIII box in two thousand and fucking four. That PIII 800, 450w PSU, and GF6200 have outlived three Athlon XPs, and now a GPU to add to the score card. Fucker of it is that if I plugged it in and fired 'er up, that little tank would run just like the day it was fucking new.

It just wouldn't run any of my games.

Goddamned programmed obsolescence...

Of course, I did find two syringes of Militec and ten bucks worth of patches for my Otis kit while digging through boxes looking for that fan, so I suppose the morning isn't a total bust.

Good News, Bad News

Good news:

I have made progress on the issues plaguing my ability to play FO3 for more than ten minutes at a go.

Had an incident with the GECK earlier, where the slowdown occurred. I was busy scripting at the time, and too hard-headed to stop and reload, so powered on. The hard drive was making a ton of those little working clicks (Emachines don't have an IDE light; I shit you not). Few minutes later, it goes back to normal.

Was playing the game, and sure enough, it slowed down again. Kept going - muttering profanity the entire time - and it did eventually clear up. Of course, it did it again five minutes later... but the whole thing is starting to feel like some kind of a caching issue.

Cache fills up, performance goes to shit, computer spends five minutes clearing cache; things go back to normal until cache is full again.

Unfortunately, this means that either my system RAM module or GPU are probably fucked up and in the early stages of dying. Going to have to look around and find some testing utilities.

What gets me, is that it doesn't do it on 178.24 series drivers, but does do it on any subsequent version. So I'm leaning towards the GPU.

Especially since I haven't been getting any BSoD's, which in my experience are always present when you have a pooching RAM module.

Weirder still... it only does it in Fallout 3. Was playing Sins of a Solar Empire the other morning for awhile (which is not kind to a system's video components, despite being an RTS) and had no issues at all.

Ditto for CoD4. Ran a botmatch a couple days ago without incident.

Going to have to dig out my Oblivion disc, and see if it's a Gamebryo thing, or just an FO3 thing.


Bad News:

V2 of the remodel is not as ready as I had hoped. Switches all work, but that strip script is giving me trouble. It works fine on a lone companion, but when two or more try to use it within a second or two of each other, only one will re-dress. The one that stays naked's inventory is intact, they just don't re-equip it properly. I'm not sure why this is. The engine is supposed to handle multiple trigger events on subsequent frames, so unless my game is still skipping them, I'm baffled as to what's going on. There's also some tile that needs realigning. S'what I get for doing coordinate math in my head at 0530. I also may have went a tish heavy on the special effects. Unlike my old Bedroom Redecorated mod, the NosCo Vault 1 Remodel will not be extraordinarily friendly to low-end PCs. Ironic since I use one.

It sure it pretty, though.

Companions definitely love the sauna. What is it with women and steam rooms? Oh, well. They lounge naked and don't care if I watch, so I'm not complaining.

Need to work on the bedroom proper's lighting, too. It's fine at the edges, but lacking over the bed in the center. Easy fix, though - just drop in another chandelier and a light to go with it, add said light to lightswitch script, and vee-oh-lah.

Probably going to have to break down and put in room bounds and occlusion planes to help offset the resource hit from all that water.

Disk Defragmenting

For years, I used the O&O Defragger, which was good, and had lots of options. Not the fastest around, but it worked well.

Since migrating to Windows Vista in late 2007, I've been stuck on the Windows Defragmenter.

It runs on a schedule, every Wednesday at 0100, and I'm prone to leaving the computer on 24/7, so that works out fine.

Windows defragmenter... has never been the best. Like most Microsoft products, it works... more or less. There's a bunch of stuff it doesn't do, and the interface is written for someone that thinks AOL is complicated. There is zero customization, and slightly more than zero information given. When working, it says only that it's defragmenting. No percentage done, estimated time remaining, what file its working on, nada.

You can't even select which drive(s) to defrag. It's all of C:\ or nothing.

I had let it run earlier today, but I knew from past experience that the results would be less than astounding.

So, I went digging for a new defragmenter; not wanting to drop $60 on a new O&O license.

Seems that Piriform, maker of CCleaner - a longtime favorite of mine for cleaning temporary files from the windows environ - has decided to jump into the defrag market with both feet.

True to what I've come to expect from them, the program just fucking rocks. Not only is it fast, but you can select individual files to defrag, and others not to; as well as the usual 'do the whole drive, Hal'.

Analyzed, selected files, and defragged my windows AND data drives in less than a half hour.

Also worthy of note, is that my C:\ drive was still almost 15% fragmented, even after the windows defragger did its thing.

So... the windows defragger is no longer allowed to run on its little schedule, and can now join the rest of windows' automatic "helpers" in hell, where I generally send them all within two hours of starting the PC up the first time.

Best of all, Defraggler? Is free. Totally. 100%. Not an ad, nor a pop-up box, nothing.

Even if you already have a defragmenting program, I fully recommend you check out defraggler. I don't think you'll be sorry. I know I'm not.

Continuing Video Woes: A Victory?

Possibly.

After a couple hours of tweaking ini files to hell and back, I think the problems are solved.

I was right - specularity, Vsync, and a couple other settings are hard-enabled in the .ini files, and cannot be turned off via the game menus.

If the options don't work, why fucking put them there, I wonder... but that's a bitch-fest for another day.

Deleted my backups of the ini files by mistake, so had to start again from scratch; and couldn't remember what all I had changed. I must have disabled the stuff before, and forgotten about it.

Got it running 1024x768, Actorfade set to 10, Object and Item fades set to 8 each, HDR enabled, reflections and refractions enabled.

Getting a solid 15fps outdoors. Not stellar, no, but you also have to bear in mind that I just deleted ten plus gigabytes of data from my hard drive, and have switched video driver sets four or five times.

My windows drive is in severe need of a defrag at this point. I'm surprised the game runs as well as it does. Going to tweak a couple more global settings in my Nvidia control panel from hell, and then let the 'Mute here sit idle for several hours while windows attempts to unfuck my C:\ drive.

One of these days I really need to spring for a new Vista/Win7 compatible version of O&O Defrag...

Progress

Little on the companions front, but I did manage to disprove the latest batch of insane "bug reports" tonight.

This one was a two-fer. Part one stated that the "little girl in vault 1 froze when you talk to her". This was easy to shoot holes in, as there are no fucking children in the RR Companions Vault series of mods. At all.

Part two was that there are apparently "invisible walls" in the jail inside V1. A quick run-through that part of the cell confirmed my original suspicion that no, there are not any invisible walls anywhere in the vault.

I swear, I don't know where these people come from, or why they always find me, but some days I wish I could get a hit of whatever they're on. It must be good shit.

New PC

Was in Best Buy earlier, and looked over some new PCs.

Amazing what a grand will buy you these days. Quad-core Intel with eight gigs of DDR3, a 1tb hard drive, and an ATI something or other superwhammyHD 1gb video card.

Seriously, I know three things about ATI cards:

1) It is not Nvidia.

2) Jack.

3) Shit.

The number of the card may as well have been made up of the atomic weights of the materials used to make the chipset for all the good it did me.

Would've been tempted... severely tempted, but I am not hearing good things about the quad cores getting along with certain programs. FO3 especially.

A similar system - dual core Intel with eight gigs of RAM - went for slightly over half the money. Considering I already own a good-ish video card, I'd have to say that one was way more tempting.

Also installing BF2 again. Had the urge to see how it played on my new GPU, since the last time I played it was on the 256mb 6200.

Fuck me I had forgotten how stupidly big EA patches are. the 1.50 patch is two fucking gigabytes. And I may have to get 1.41 on top of that to install first. Not sure, yet.

Oh, well; at least BF2 has integrated bot support.

Wonder if they ever got PRMM done? Have to check...