You have to check this out.
Nothing can ruin your day like having your file server crash at the end of a long day. This happened to me yesterday, and I have been dealing with the repercussions for a good 24 hrs, and it looks like I have another day of the same in store for me tomorrow.
Luckily, the pain has been dulled somewhat by a marvelous little flash game that I found through Wired. The game mechanics of Bloxorz are dead simple, but it is a lot of fun.
The goal of the game is to fit the block into the hole, without falling off the edges of the level. Enjoy!
If you are ever having difficulty creating a BartPE disc and your source disc is a Dell OEM Win XP CD, these instructions might save you a lot of trouble.
Let me show you what I have been looking at every time I try to play Far Cry or Half-Life 2: The Lost Coast for more than 5-10 minutes:
I get to look at that garbage, for which the only option is a hard reboot of the computer. I have been trying to track down the source of the problem. First of all, I discovered that I was probably pushing my RAM a little too hard (I had the CAS timing set to 2.5 but it should have been 3 ns). Then I discovered that I was inadvertently overclocking the AGP bus from 66 MHz to 68 MHz. I am told that my graphics card (an NVidia GeForce 6800GT) really requires that the bus be locked to 66 MHz. Alas, while I was initially hopeful when on my first attempt after correcting these problems I played 15-20 minutes of Far Cry without a problem, eventually I got stuck with the same fuzz of pixels.
So, let’s analyze the potential culprits:
- The system is overheating - I have put a lot of work into fixing this, so I find it unlikely.
- My power supply is not supplying a stable current - another distinct possibility given the type of problem. I would find this more likely if I didn’t have a high-quality power supply (an Antec TrueBlue 480W).
- My DRAM is hosed - a likely possibility. I would like to run Memtest86 for a few hours to test this, but at the moment my CD/DVD drive is also refusing to read burned media, so I need to replace the DVD drive before I can check this.
- My CPU is hosed - I haven’t experienced any computer trouble outside of video games. Processor-intensive tasks such as encoding video to H.264 work fine, so I doubt this.
- My video card is hosed - the most likely candidate in my mind. This card has always run very hot, and it doesn’t get extensive use in my computer except when I play games, which is when I am having trouble.
Sadly, if the problem is the video card, I don’t have very good upgrade options. My system requires an AGP video card, which is no longer supported by the video card manufacturers (PCI Express has widely replaced the AGP standard). I think it is silly to put $100 into buying an old video card which would work with my current setup when that money could go towards overhauling my entire system. With that in mind, I have specced out a new CPU, motherboard, and video card. I think I can put together a system which can run the latest games at respectable framerates (at very high/max settings) for only $600.
Man, I can’t stand talking to first-level support anymore. I just got off the phone with someone at AT&T Yahoo! tech support because I was experiencing 400-500ms ping times. I had very good circumstantial evidence that they needed to restart a router. What does the first-level techie want me to do? Restart my computer. The problem has nothing to do with my computer!! Then she reads me something about my provisioned connection speed. I told her that she didn’t understand the difference between throughput and latency if she was focusing on my connection speed.
While on the phone I fixed my own problem by forcing my DSL modem to get a new IP address. Which just confirmed what I’ve always known: calling tech support is a waste of my time.