Dear Santa, thank you for the dolls and pencils and the fish. It's Easter now, so I hope I didn't wake you but... honest, it is an emergency. There's a crack in my wall. Aunt Sharon says it's just an ordinary crack, but I know its not cause at night there's voices so... please please can you send someone to fix it? Or a policeman, or...
Back in a moment.
Thank you Santa.
Sunday, September 21
Well, That's A Surprise
Now that I have a working PC again, I wanted to get some games reinstalled on it. The Sims 2 already went on - thanks to a utility that recovered my license keys from the registry on my old PC.
I wanted to reload SimCity 4 as well, because you need it to create custom regions in The Sims 2. I had my whole games directory from my old PC backed up, but clearly there was no way SimCity was going to work without the correct keys in the registry. And while I had all the disks, I couldn't find the license key for the original game. (I did find the box, manual, and key for the Rush Hour expansion pack.)
Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained, so I restored the directory and tried it. And it worked. Perfectly. First time. Under Vista 64, an operating system undreamt of when the game was released. So points to Maxis and to Microsoft on that one. (Part of the reason it worked is that SimCity 4 was designed to run on Windows 95/98/Me, which didn't have a registry at all. But part of it has to be good coding.)
SimCity 4 was the thing that lead my to build my previous PC, because the machine I had at the time couldn't cope with its absurd memory requirements. I had a whole 512MB, and as my city grew, the game would grind to a halt. Surely it couldn't be using all that memory? Surely it was. So I added another 256MB - all the motherboard could take with the modules available then - and it ran better, briefly, before I collided with the Windows Me 512MB memory limit and the machine corrupted its own operating system and fell down and died. (I later rebuilt it with 1.25GB and XP, used it as a development box at work, and eventually gave it away. As far as I know, it still works.)
Anyways, the last time I played SimCity 4 in any depth was on a 1.2GHz Athlon with 512MB of memory and a 128MB GeForce 4600. I now have a 2.6GHz Athlon 64 X2 with 8GB of memory and a 1GB GeForce 9600.
It's pretty darn zippy. I'd love to see a SimCity 5, but this will do for now. (Maybe I'll try SimCity Societies some time, but reports are that it's pretty much an abortion.)
I've also got Railroad Tycoon 2 and 3 on here. Expect productivity to plummet.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
04:21 AM
| Comments (15)
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 419 words, total size 2 kb.
1
Hey Pixy, my v.1 "Banner" template seems to have disappeared. Any way you could load me a default one? (Or tell me where I could find it?)
Posted by: Old Grouch at Sunday, September 21 2008 10:53 AM (oHrKR)
2
Oh, just a heads up: Sim City 4 has issues with hyperthreaded or multi-core processors (and I'm sure it has issues with multiple processors). The symptom is a crash to desktop at some point (usually takes about around one to three hours, just when you're getting into the game and forget to regularly save and... oh, let's not get into rants, yet...). The fix is to set the affinity of the program to only the first core, which you should be able to do in task manager.
What I've done what find the program WinLauncherXP and use that to start up Sim City 4 forced to only one core, and no more CTDs on my 2.5 GHz AMD Phenom Quad-core. I've only had hyperthreaded and multi-core systems (Intel Pentium 4 2.8 GHz hyperthreaded and AMD Athlon 64 X2 2.2 GHz) since I played Sim City 4, and I would end up uninstalling the game in disgust after shelving it for months at a time (and much research with no success finding anything to fix this). It was only a few days ago when trying out the game that my search for a cure at least pointed out the possibility of multi-core being a problem for the game. Testing that showed I could now play the game for many, many (did I mention many) hours without a single CTD! Unfortunately, that did mean I also wasted alot of time playing Sim City 4 instead of doing something a bit more productive...
Oh, I don't know if you can use the WinLauncherXP for Windows Vista 64, but if you have CTD issues, hopefully this can start you off in the right direction in fixing it.
The specs of the system I'm now enjoying SC4 on: 2.5 GHz AMD Phenom X4, 3 GB of RAM, a 640MB Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS, running Windows XP Home. Yeah, the game is really snappy now. Even with it running at a 1680x1050 widescreen resolution and with a mod to vastly improve the path finding of the sims in the city...
Posted by: Nick Istre at Monday, September 22 2008 01:31 AM (8qn8u)
3
I know I put paragraph spacing in that post! Hmm, a thought, hold on...
... Yup, figured. Looks like the javascript-based editor doesn't get loaded in Chrome. Well, to do things the old-fashioned way (And make better use of the Preview button).
Posted by: Nick Istre at Monday, September 22 2008 01:40 AM (8qn8u)
4
Well, now the banner is back but I can't see it in my template list. Should I say "thanks" or "WTF?"
Posted by: Old Grouch at Monday, September 22 2008 07:21 AM (O8afF)
5
That's a WTF, I'm afraid. But let me try something...
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, September 22 2008 09:36 PM (PiXy!)
6
Thanks Nick.
I have a new version of the editor which should work in Chrome, but haven't had a chance to install it yet.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, September 22 2008 09:37 PM (PiXy!)
7
Nope, wasn't what I thought. I suspected a corrupt index in the database, but I ran a full scan and everything's clean. Which is great, but doesn't quite explain why you can't see your template.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, September 22 2008 10:31 PM (PiXy!)
8
Hey Pixy:
Did I get banned by Ace over the weekend? I left a couple of critical comments there one night, and the next morning I couldn't find any mu.nu sites.
If he wants me gone after 5 years of commenting at his site, then I'm gone, but I'd like to visit other mu.nu sites.
Posted by: geoff at Tuesday, September 23 2008 06:48 PM (9gEre)
9
No, if you get banned all that happens is that it rejects your comments. It sounds like you can't see the server for some reason.
The most likely possibility is that the server was just overloaded when you were trying to access it. With the elections and everything, it's running flat out. I'm moving some sites to a new server to try to make things run a bit better.
Give it another try and let me know if you're still having trouble.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, September 23 2008 09:38 PM (PiXy!)
10
It's not the server load. It's been like this for at least 2 full days. I can get to mu.nu sites via an anonymizer, but I can't get there otherwise (with either FireFox or IE). There's no access delay from work, nor using the anonymizer, but when I try to surf there normally, it can't find the domain.
Posted by: geoff at Tuesday, September 23 2008 11:05 PM (YkbuS)
11
Geoff,
What happens if you try TRACERT?
(Run->"cmd" (opens a DOS window),
at prompt type "TRACERT ace.mu.nu" (case doesn't matter)
Should end at address 74.86.117.130.
If you get a "can't find the site" message, your ISP's DNS server is screwy. If it locks up somewhere along the way, there's a network routing problem that will have to work itself out.)
Posted by: Old Grouch at Wednesday, September 24 2008 02:04 AM (rublp)
12
Thanks, Old Grouch - I'll try it when I get home.
Posted by: geoff at Wednesday, September 24 2008 03:09 AM (NU8R3)
13
Tried the Tracert thing: got a "Unable to resolve target system name" error. I assume that means that between Saturday and Sunday the DNS server went south?
Posted by: geoff at Wednesday, September 24 2008 05:39 PM (9gEre)
14
I've had problems before where customers of one particular ISP couldn't see mu.nu. I'd suggest you email them and ask them to check.
Also, try typing
ping 74.86.117.130
in the DOS window. That will tell you whether you can reach the server. If you can reach the server but can't get to the sites, then it's definitely a DNS problem.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, September 24 2008 08:38 PM (PiXy!)
15
I successfully pinged, so I guess I just wait for the bee* (the DNS bee, that is).
*Obscure Quark reference.
Posted by: geoff at Thursday, September 25 2008 02:13 PM (ynsah)
Hide Comments
| Add Comment
Thursday, September 11
Once More Into The Breach
Visited
Capitol Square at lunchtime today, and came back with an Asus 9600GT, 1GB version.
I will try not to blow this one up.
For two weeks of effort and about $120 more than I originally planned to spend, I'm getting half the performance. But at least I've
evaded the sharks.
Update: Seems to work. (Tiptoes away very very carefully...)
Update: Still working. Card temperature is hovering around 35ºC (95ºF), compared to about 60ºC (140ºF) for the short-lived 9800GT. The cards are supposed to be roughly comparable in performance and power consumption - the 9800GT a bit higher on each. Makes me wonder if my card was faulty even before I destroyed it.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
02:10 PM
| Comments (1)
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 118 words, total size 1 kb.
(VERY BAD WORD)
Turns out that while modern graphics cards have temperature sensors, when something goes wrong - like, say, a stray cable caught in the fan - and they overheat, they, well, overheat.
And burn out.
Permanently.
I almost bought a passively cooled 9600, but no, I had to go for the fancy 9800, which is now a $200 paperweight. My PC won't even turn on with the card installed. Fortunately, it runs fine now that I've yanked the card out again.
Back to the trusty - and passively cooled - 6600.
Update: Just thought of something. My case - a Lian-Li V600 - mounts the motherboard upside-down, as it were. So in a normal case, the fan would be facing downward, much less likely to get fouled by a loose cable. Just my luck.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
12:36 AM
| Comments (4)
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 137 words, total size 1 kb.
1
Did you desecrate a shrine or something?
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Thursday, September 11 2008 03:13 AM (+rSRq)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, September 11 2008 03:18 AM (PiXy!)
3
That really sucks. Fans WILL fail, you can count on it. So you're supposed to replace the board every time the fan quits?
Posted by: Old Grouch at Thursday, September 11 2008 10:49 AM (eOV9F)
4
I think maybe the utility that I was using to underclock the card interfered with the thermal safety thingy. I don't know for sure. But I'm out $250 and about ten hours over the last two weeks.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, September 11 2008 11:59 AM (PiXy!)
Hide Comments
| Add Comment
Wednesday, September 10
Close Enough For Pixy Work
The 9800GT works. And yes, it's fast. I don't have anything that will actually stress it at the moment, but for stuff that doesn't require a card like this, it's great.
Unlike the 6600, it doesn't automatically come up in dual-screen mode, so I had to download and install the drivers to get that working. Except that the downloaded drivers didn't work at all - the installer insisted that I didn't have a compatible video card.
Back to the CD that came with the card. That work, fortunately. Only, while I was messing about trying to configure things correctly, I made a discovery - my two identical monitors have different brightness, contrast, and colour temperature levels when identical setttings are selected. Not different enough to worry about, but at some point I'm going to spend an hour microtweaking until they are
identical, goddammit!
Meanwhile, though, it works. It works!
Update: Uh-oh. Pale blue screen of beep-beep-beep! Looks like my baby UPS can't power both computers any more, so I've taken the Windows box off it. I think there was a power glitch when it overloaded and that caused the card to lock up, because it started beeping just afterwards.
Also, that card produces a fair whack of heat. I have a 14cm case exhaust fan, but even so it's getting kind of warm in there. Okay, I was playing a game on one screen and watching TV on the other, but I expect it to handle that without freaking out and falling over. We'll see.
Update: The card comes with an overclocking utility, which also allows you to underclock it - and pretty drastically, if you so desire, right down to one quarter the default speed. I've got it set to two-thirds right now, and I'm watching the temperature tick down. We'll see how that goes over time.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
10:41 PM
| No Comments
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 313 words, total size 2 kb.
Sorries
For the lack of posts.
For the slow responses to emails.
For the not-exactly-rapid progress of Minx recently.
I turned into a pumpkin.

Back very soon, with a little luck.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
05:06 PM
| Comments (2)
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 31 words, total size 1 kb.
1
Looks to me like that pumpkin already got lucky.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Wednesday, September 10 2008 06:24 PM (+rSRq)
2
Yes, how dare you slack off on improving things you're providing us for free? You should be ashamed of yourself.*
*note: the preceding is sarcasm, and should not be taken seriously under any circumstances. Unless you want to feel ashamed of yourself for some reason, in which case, hey, who am I to judge?
Posted by: Wonderduck at Monday, September 15 2008 04:07 PM (xC579)
Hide Comments
| Add Comment
Tuesday, September 09
Half And Half
Got word back from the shop about my 4850: It works perfectly.
For them.
For me, of course, it's a pile of poo.
Over the weekend I dug out a GeForce 6600 and tried that, and that also works perfectly - and is actually slightly faster than the onboard video. So it's not that my motherboard is broken, it's just some weird incompatibility between my ATI chipset and the ATI video card.
So I asked for a refund and in it's place I'm getting an Nvidia 9800GT. That only delivers
half a teraflop and
half a gigabyte of RAM, but it's still twenty times the speed of the 6600 (give or take).
It's also a hundred dollars cheaper than the 4850, so I snaffled an eight-port gigabit switch at the same time.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
03:19 PM
| No Comments
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 135 words, total size 1 kb.
Thursday, September 04
Sporadicated
The official Spore website is down.
Not that I have the game in any case.
What with not having a video card and all.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
10:54 PM
| Comments (6)
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 26 words, total size 1 kb.
1
Pixy, something really strange happened to my "Strike Witches 10" post, and it's fouling up the site formatting for my whole site in FireFox 2, and for the comments in that post for IE7.
It's the Andrew Janes comment with the spoiler. I'm holding off on deleting it until you can get a chance to look at it.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Friday, September 05 2008 10:27 AM (+rSRq)
2
I read an article about Spore that said that EA released it in Australia before releasing it here. Which is certainly historically bass-ackward.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Sunday, September 07 2008 10:31 AM (+rSRq)
3
So, completely off topic--is the help@mu.nu email broke? Cuz I wrote you a bit ago and you have not replied! (Maybe you just hate me, or maybe you are auto-detecting early birthday wishes and pre-deleting them. Or maybe it was all just a dream...)
Posted by: Susie at Tuesday, September 09 2008 05:48 AM (+4H5S)
4
Sorry Susie. The email works, it's me what's broke.
I'm trying to catch up this week.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, September 09 2008 01:45 PM (PiXy!)
5
Ha - finally getting around to hitting some blogs. I've never been able to do much gaming... the first person shooters that might be pretty cool - make me dizzy. I've been trying to decide if I wanted to do Spore or not since it looks like fairly sane graphics for my weirdly wired brain.
Then I realized that I'd be spending 24 hours a day on my computer instead of the current 20... so right now it's a no go. Heh. I do want to hear your opinion of it though once you get the graphics card working.
Posted by: Teresa at Wednesday, September 10 2008 11:38 AM (mMa3+)
6
I got my 9800GT today. I'll try that out tonight, and if it works I'll pick up a copy of Spore tomorrow.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, September 10 2008 12:15 PM (PiXy!)
Hide Comments
| Add Comment
Wednesday, September 03
Governor Palin's Daughter Phoebe's Best Friend's Cousin's Hamster Reported Pregnant
New York Times, Washington Post ask "What did McCain know, and when did he know it?"
Update: Fox reports: "Hamster" actually guinea pig. Also, male.
Update: Zogby reports: McCain polling lower with Hamster-American households.
Update: Andrew Sullivan demands to see veterinary records. "How do we know that this hamster is really a guinea pig? How can we trust this, when we've made up so many... Uh, been lied to so many times?"
Update: Fox reports: Hang on, Governor Palin doesn't
have a daughter named Phoebe.
Update: New York Times, Washington Post ask "What did McCain know, and when did he know it?"
Update: Gallup reports: McCain polling lower with
Charmed-American households.
Update: Daily Kos reports: Risque MySpace photos of Phoebe's best friend's cousin discovered.
Update: Protein Wisdom reports: "Uh, dude, that's an armadillo in a wig. And believe me, I know an armadillo in a wig when I see one."
Update: Huffington Post reports: Right-wing blogs caught in cover-up!
Update: Ace reports: Left-wing blogs hit bottom, keep digging. "Believe me, Jeff knows an armadillo in a wig when he sees one."
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
11:19 PM
| Comments (5)
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 191 words, total size 1 kb.
1
That really is what the last few days have felt like. Sad, isn't it?
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Thursday, September 04 2008 05:05 AM (+rSRq)
Posted by: TallDave at Saturday, September 06 2008 02:02 AM (/s1LA)
3
Yes, focus on anything but the fact that this Palin woman wants our daughter to carry rapist's babies to term. Why isn't that being discussed frontrow center?
Enjoy.
Posted by: Tim Fuller at Friday, September 26 2008 05:49 AM (Vv++5)
4
Maybe because she's never tried to turn her personal beliefs on that subject into law. Unless the legislative branch somehow ends up in the hands of the extreme Right this year (pronounced "not gonna happen"), the executive branch will have no opportunity to affect the legality of abortion during the next administration.
-j
Posted by: J Greely at Friday, September 26 2008 08:41 AM (9Nz6c)
5
Tim, the point is not that Governor Palin is right about everything, or that I agree with her about everything. The point is that the left came unhinged when she was named as Senator McCain's VP pick.
Well, more unhinged than usual, anyway.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, September 28 2008 01:26 PM (PiXy!)
Hide Comments
| Add Comment
Tuesday, September 02
Keeping Score
Bought three new toys.
Two work perfectly.
The other one destroyed my computer. (Just blue-screened again.)
So, about average.
Hmm.
If it's not the drivers, it's likely the memory, sayeth net wisdom.
So pop in Memtest86+, wait a few minutes, dum de dee, uh-oh.
I did have memory issues with this computer when I first built it, but after swapping modules around a bit and a few all-night runs of Memtest86+ it's been good for eight months. Maybe something got nudged out of alignment.
Popped the DIMMs, cleaned the contacts, aligned the spark gap, and put them back in in the opposite order. Memtest86+ is off again.
I also tried putting the video card back in. Nope! Display corruption all over the place - in text mode! - with Memtest86+ reporting no errors at that point.
I may have a faulty DIMM, but that card is just plain stuffed.
Update: Yep, faulty DIMM. I'll replace that too.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
01:07 AM
| Comments (1)
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 159 words, total size 1 kb.
1
These are the exact same problems that finally led me to sluff off Windoz and MS completely. When I was twenty years younger I enjoyed wasting all my time dicking with software and hardware issues. Now, not so much.
Enjoy.
Posted by: Tim Fuller at Friday, September 05 2008 02:06 AM (Vv++5)
Hide Comments
| Add Comment
Monday, September 01
Shark Attack*
My PC blue-screened again, with an IRQL-NOT-EQUAL or whatever it is.
Likely causes for this, according to the wisdom of the 'net, are bad memory or bad drivers. Since my PC bluescreened while I was reinstalling the video drivers, my first port of call was to uninstall those drivers.
Which I did.
My PC has an all-in-one ATI motherboard. I was installing an ATI video card. It's
the same drivers. I just uninstalled my motherboard drivers.
And, after reboot, everything seems to be working perfectly.
Either I've reached shallow water, or the sharks are just biding their time.
*Update: They're circling. I can tell. (The DVI port on my motherboard seems to turn off every now and then if the chipset is busy. I'm trying to format a 1.2TB external drive, which takes about 16 hours at the best of times. Bleah.)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
07:51 PM
| No Comments
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 145 words, total size 1 kb.
79kb generated in CPU 0.0413, elapsed 0.5467 seconds.
57 queries taking 0.5306 seconds, 401 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.