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Greetings from the future

11:07 PM / Technology / 9 Comments

I'm typing this post from inside Windows 8, which I upgraded to this evening. Windows 8 has been the subject of a great deal of chatter in Computerland, not much of it very positive, stemming mainly from Microsoft's frankly batty decision to ditch the Start menu that has been with us since Windows 95 and replace it with a full-sized Start SCREEN that seems to have been designed primarily for users of fondleslabs. I can't say I was too enthused by anything I saw or read about Windows 8 - essentially, it looked like a slightly tweaked Windows 7, but with a clunky new interface bolted on top of it.

Still, Microsoft are currently offering the upgrade edition of Windows 8 Pro for a ridiculously cheap £24.99 (the offer expires at the end of January, at which point I'm assuming prices will rise to their usual extortionate levels), and given that upgrading from Windows 7 has been described as fairly painless, I decided, with a couple of hours to kill, to buy a copy, install it and see what it was like.

[Continue reading...]

I'm back

10:57 AM / Technology / 1 Comment

Sorry for my recent disappearance - computer woes. I'd practically just installed my new video card when one of my hard disks started to fail.

I have four drives in my system:

1. an 80 GB SSD which I use as a boot device;
2. another 80 GB SSD which I use as an install drive for games and the contents of my "My Documents" folder;
3. a 1 TB hard drive (a Hitachi DeskStar) which I use for storing pictures, music, a few miscellaneous applications, copies of this web site going back to August 2001, and a stack of movie files (mainly trailers and stuff downloaded from YouTube); and
4. a 2 TB hard drive (Western Digital Caviar Black) containing my documents, drivers, installers and about 600 GB of recorded TV shows and movies.

Guess which one decided to fail?

It would have to be the largest one, wouldn't it? I first became aware of the problem when I came back to find that the entire system had locked up while attempting to unpack the installation files for THE WITCHER 2 (which I'd just finished redownloading from Good Old Games). Initially I was ready to blame the new video card (any new technology will tend to have teething problems and, with AMD yet to release WHQL certified drivers for the card, I'm currently using beta drivers), but when the same thing happened again while attempting to write to the hard drive, the culprit was obvious. After a reboot, a short DST in SeaTools failed, and I got that sinking feeling I always get when I realise a hard drive is on the way out.

It could have been worse. I did lose some data, but it was only the document I was writing to the drive at that given time. (Unfortunately it was the latest redrafting of the PhD chapter I'm currently working on, and my last backup was nearly a week old.) The rest I was able to siphon off on to various hard drives, including my laptop. (Copying 350 GB of data over 100 Mbit Ethernet is not fun.) The hard drive, which was only two years old, has been sent back to Western Digital to be RMA'd (thank fuck for five-year warranties). However, unwilling to sit around twiddling my thumbs for up to 28 days before seeing a replacement, I decided to burn a hole in my wallet and pick up a new drive (I'll either sell the replacement WD send me or keep it around for occasions such as this). Unfortunately, hard disk prices are still through the roof due to shortages brought about by the flooding in Thailand last year, so I wasn't exactly spoiled for choice, and the few drives that WERE available were pretty expensive. Still, I eventually managed to get an OEM Hitachi DeskStar 7K3000 for just over £150 including delivery. So yeah, not exactly overjoyed to be forking out yet MORE money I can't really afford on computer parts, but at least I'm up and running again. Hopefully this one'll last a bit longer than two years.

New computer toy

1:30 PM / Technology / 3 Comments

For several years, I've made a habit of performing a major upgrade on my computer once every 2-3 years, gutting it and replacing the majority of the internal components - motherboard, CPU, RAM and video card. The last time I did this was in 2010, when I switched from my ageing Core 2 Duo setup to a then state of the art Core i7 (LGA1366). Two years on... and I have no earthly reason to do so again at present. Improvements to computer performance have plateaued to such an extent that if I were to replace my current setup with one of the new LGA2011 Core i7s, it's extremely unlikely that I would actually notice any change to the speed. The bottom line is that the majority of games don't even tap the full potential of the CPUs Intel was releasing two years ago, let alone the ones coming out today. So, there will be no major computer upgrade for me this year, for which my bank balance is incredibly grateful.

One area in which sizeable improvements HAVE been made, however, is with regard to graphics. Especially since buying my new monitor, with its native 2560x1440 resolution, it's become increasingly clear that my old Radeon HD 5850 lacks the muscle to play the latest games with all the bells and whistles enabled. Even the deceptively low-tech STARCRAFT II, the game I still play the most, tends to choke at the highest settings thanks to the large number of units on the screen.

When it comes to graphics cards, I'm normally about six months behind the curve, waiting for prices to come down and the various third party manufacturers to come up with their own variations as regards performance and cooling solutions as compared to the stock models from ATI (...sorry, AMD) and Nvidia. This time round, though, an extremely attractive proposition came along more or less at the time of the release of the second-tier card in ATI's new 7XXX series, in the form of the Sapphire HD 7950 Overclock edition. This card, while not as powerful as its beefier (and more expensive) 7970 cousin, handily beats the previous single-GPU card performance champion, the Nvidia GeForce GTX 580, in most tests, and has an excellent cooler which appears to be both the quietest AND the most effective of the various third party coolers made available at launch. Having received and installed it last night, I've discovered that it's actually quieter and cooler under load (by about 20 degrees Celsius) than my old 5850 from two generations ago - quite a feat given that, in the computer world, more performance normally = more heat.

So yeah, great card - second fastest single-GPU card currently on the market - and a welcome upgrade as I look forward to my two most anticipated games of 2012, DIABLO III and GUILD WARS 2. (RAYMAN ORIGINS is finally coming to the PC in March too, though I don't anticipate it requiring a beast of a video card.) Obviously this card is absolute overkill if you only use for computer for word processing, browsing the web and watching the odd movie, but if like me you have a high resolution display, play games and consider anything less than 60 fps to be a compromise, you could do a lot worse than pick up one of these.

CPU usage in Final Draft 8...

8:15 PM / Technology / 3 Comments

...on a quad-core Intel Core i7 with hyperthreading enabled. That's just from bog standard typing - nothing fancy. It's no wonder my laptop's battery drains in a couple of hours if I'm using the program on it. Honestly I'm tempted just to type my scripts in Microsoft Word and then transfer them over to Final Draft at the very end, though I really shouldn't have to.

Sorry for the lack of updates (again). In addition to my PhD work, I'm also putting together a submission for this. Wish me luck!

Computer fail

12:36 PM / Technology / 5 Comments

So I now have a shiny new laptop. Why? Reaching the end of my tether with my old ASUS UL30A, that's why. For the past three months or so, I've been getting random hard freezes when using anything multimedia-related - listening to MP3s, watching videos on YouTube, etc. When Lee and I recorded our Movie Matters giallo special with our friend Sandy Richardson back in June, the constant crashing caused us to have to postpone for a day while I desperately tried to troubleshoot the problem, and even after that, when we recorded a day later, my laptop crapped out mid-stream and the podcast only survived thanks to Lee's backup recording. Since then, the problem has continued. It's survived a BIOS update, a new hard drive, a complete reinstall of Windows... and I'd finally had enough. I'd been contemplating buying a more powerful laptop for a while (the UL30A has a fairly feeble CPU, which leads to great battery longevity but sluggish performance in the likes of the notoriously badly coded Final Draft 8 screenwriting software), and now seemed like as good a time as any to bite the bullet.

So I bought a Mac.

Just kidding. (Although I did recently pick up an aluminium Apple keyboard, so Mr. Jobs finally managed to squeeze some money out of me.) I actually bought an HP Pavilion DM4-2000EA. For £600, this gets me 4 GB of RAM, a 2.1 GHz Core i3 processor, a 500 GB 7,200 RPM hard drive, and a decent-ish "up to 7 hours" of battery life (though in reality you're not actually going to get that much out of it, unless you plan to use those seven hours to stare at the desktop wallpaper).

And you know, I'm pretty pleased with it. It's quite a bit noisier than my old ASUS, and the battery life isn't as impressive, but these are concessions I'm happy to make in the name of improved performance - you wouldn't believe how much smoother everything feels going from a mobile Celeron processor to a Core i3. Plus, the whole not crashing thing is a big perk. There are some niggles - the USB ports are so tight I almost wrecked my memory stick trying to pull it out, and I was having issues with keystrokes intermittently failing to register... though, oddly enough, removing the battery for ten minutes, acting on advice I came across on a tech forum relating to a different model, fixed this, and the problem has yet to recur (touch wood).

Of course, I'm now £600 out of pocket - not a good situation to be in with my university fees due to be paid before too long. I suppose now I need to get in touch with ASUS and see if they'd be willing to perform a repair on an out of warranty laptop. What d'you reckon my chances are?

Finally a free BD playback solution for Windows

6:52 PM / Blu-ray / Technology / 11 Comments

I would urge everyone with a BD-ROM drive in their PC to check out DAPlayer, as far as I'm aware the first of its kind: a completely free playback solution for BDs. Oh, and it plays HD DVDs too.

It's a fairly rudimentary program and not without its problems. It doesn't support menus of any kind - either HDMV or BD-Java. Instead, it simply analyses the disc and then gives you what it determines to be the main title (as far as I can gather simply the longest item on the disc), though it does read playlists rather than individual .m2ts files, meaning that titles that use seamless branching work just fine. It also gives you access to a playlist menu so you can access bonus features, alternate cuts etc. Additionally, I found that the audio was noticeably out of sync on my system. This can easily be corrected using the "Delay +" and "Delay -" controls in the audio menu (a setting of -3 worked for me), but quitting the program causes it to forget which setting you specified. Furthermore, at least one disc I tried (THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE) suffered from severely jittery motion, while another (KINGDOM OF HEAVEN) wouldn't play at all.

Still, DAPlayer seems very promising. It's not clear from the web site whether development is ongoing and improvements can be expected, but if they can iron out the glitches I'd be more than happy to switch to it full-time, forsaking the reliable but somewhat clunky TotalMedia Theatre 3.

This article...

4:10 PM / Technology / No Comments

...is required reading if you're having trouble with colour profiles in Windows 7 or Vista:

Stop Losing Display Calibration with Windows 7

I have a new monitor

12:16 PM / Technology / 3 Comments

My birthday isn't till next month, but ever mindful of the potential for cock-ups to occur when technology is involved, if I'm planning on getting anything computer-related I generally make a point of buying early in order to (a) pre-empt any potential returns/replacements and (b) ensure that everything's up and running the way I want it by my actual birthday. Last year, this prudent thinking came in hand when my new motherboard inexplicably died, so I decided to take the same approach this year.

I've wanted to get a new desktop monitor for a while. The Dell UltraSharp 2709W I bought back in February 2009 has served me reasonably well, but I've never been 100% happy with it. Its input lag is pretty noticeable, its gamma curve is way off in the lower values (which tends to bring out compression artefacts on BDs and DVDs that wouldn't be visible on a properly calibrated system), and I've already had to get it replaced once when, after less than a year of use, it developed a fault whereby a vertical magenta line, a single pixel wide but running the entire height of the display, would appear upon start-up and not disappear until the monitor had been running for 20-30 minutes. Over the last few months, the replacement has developed a similar problem, this time cyan rather than magenta and running the gamut from a single line to four. Clearly it's a fault with this particular model. I'm going to haggle with Dell to get it replaced (though the fact that it's now out of warranty will probably make this very difficult), but if so will end up selling the replacement as, quite frankly, I've had enough.

Enter the Hazro HZ27WB:

Hazro is a UK-based company that primarily caters towards creative and multimedia professionals, as well as medical and military organisations. The HZ27WB, a 27" 16:9 S-IPS display with a native resolution of 2560x1400, is the sort of stripped-down no-bullshit device I've been looking for. There's no scaler, in fact no support for anything apart from the native resolution (which, in case you're slack-jawed with horror, is not a problem - it just means using the video card rather than the display to scale lower resolutions to the correct size). There are no controls on the monitor besides a power button and a mechanism to raise and lower the backlight (which means using a custom Windows colour profile to achieve a properly calibrated image rather than changing any settings on the display itself). The only input is a single dual-link DVI connector.

What all this means in practice is very low input lag, because the monitor isn't doing anything to the image beyond simply displaying what the video card sends it. Over the years, I've observed that, broadly speaking, the more inputs a display has - DVI, VGA, DisplayPort, HDMI, component and the like - the worse the input lag will be. TFT Central, probably the best monitor review site out there, measured an average input lag of just over 11 milliseconds - a fabulous result and one that you'd need to be superhuman to actually detect. As a result, everything just feels much more responsive. I can now play STARCRAFT II, a game that relies on lightning-fast responses, without that annoying feeling that my brain is responding faster than the game to my commands. I'm really surprised to see lag this low outside of a TN panel.

I'm not done yet. I've created a colour profile with a demo of ColorEyes Display Pro, and will probably run the calibration again once the monitor has had a few dozen hours of use to age it. And of course there's the fact that Windows colour profiles are a colossal headache. I've managed to get most of my software to play nice with the profile ColorEyes created, including Photoshop and even - to my surprise - TotalMedia Theatre 3, which I use when watching BDs on my PC. But I've come across a couple of inconsistencies - the Windows Photo Viewer, for example, shows desaturated hues compared to everything else. As such, I won't be writing any BD reviews based on what I see on this screen until I'm satisfied that what I'm seeing isn't distorted in any significant way. (Though I should point out that, whenever I review a BD, I also look at it on a Panasonic Plasma and JVC rear projector, both calibrated by an ISF-certified technician.)

But I'm very pleased with the monitor so far. I haven't found any stuck or dead pixels yet (though to be honest I'm not going out of my way to look for them - that's just a recipe for frustration, and Hazro don't have Dell's "premium pixel" guarantee, whereby they'll replace the display if even a single defective pixel is found), the backlight seems reasonably uniform for an S-IPS display (there's a bit of blooming in the bottom right hand corner, but on the plus side none of the "pinching" that affected my 2709W). After using my previous monitor for so long, which had an unusually large pixel pitch (a 27" computer monitor with a resolution of "only" 1920x1200 is pretty rare), it's taking me a while to get used to how small everything now looks, since despite the higher resolution, this display is actually the same physical size as my last.

And then of course there's the fact that native resolution 1080p content now looks tiny:

Suddenly the resolution of a Blu-ray Disc doesn't seem quite as massive as it once did. :D

The price of honesty

9:26 PM / Technology / 9 Comments

This evening, my copy of Adobe Photoshop (CS5 Extended student edition, which I bought last year for a fraction of the price of the non-student version) abruptly decided to stop working. No, scratch that, it decided that the software had been installed on two different computers and that it wouldn't work on my main rig until I deactivated it on the rogue machine... which is utter bollocks, of course, as it's only ever been installed on a single machine.

Nevertheless, I decided to persevere, eventually contacting Adobe's online chat support once I'd exhausted all the possibilities (restarting Windows, reinstalling the software, standing on my head and counting backwards from 10,000). What follows is a conversation that took place over the better part of an excruciating hour, with the representative's name changed. Please mentally add a pause of up to five minutes before each of "Deepak's" reponses.

You are now chatting with Deepak.

Deepak: Hello. Welcome to Adobe Customer Service.

Deepak: May I please have your email address registered with Adobe while I review your request?

Deepak: Hi Michael

Me: Sure: [email address removed]

Deepak: As I understand that you have issue with the Activation of Photoshop CS5 Extended on your computer, Is that correct?

Me: Yes

Me: It has been working fine until today, when it suddenly told me that I had reached my activation limit.

Deepak: Thank you for the information.

Deepak: May I know the serial number of the product please?

Me: [serial number removed]

Deepak: Thank you for the information.

Deepak: I checked with my resource and found Activated on 2 computers please Deactivate the software.

Me: I only have it installed on one computer, so that isn't possible.

Deepak: Sorry for the wait. Please do stay online.

Me: OK

Deepak: I'll be right with you.

Deepak: Thank you for the information.

Deepak: Since you are unable to deactivate,as an exception, I'll go ahead and make changes to your license key so that you are able to activate your software.Please stay online while I do changes.

Deepak: Steps to Activate the product

Deepak: If you have not activated the product during the install, please launch the product and under the 'Help' menu you will find the Activation option from where you can activate it.

Me: There is no activation option in the help menu, just a greyed out Deactivate button.

Deepak: Place the cursor for 2-3 minutes to Activate the software on your computer.

Me: Where do I place the cursor?

Deepak: If you have not activated the product during the install, please launch the product and under the 'Help' menu you will find the Activation option from where you can activate it.

Me: As I already said, there is no Activation option from the Help menu, just a greyed out Deactivate button.

Deepak: You will find Activation option before Deactivation option.

Me: No, what comes before the Deactivation option is "Complete/Update Adobe ID Profile".

Deepak: Thank you for the information.

Deepak: Since you are unable to deactivate,as an exception, I'll go ahead and make changes to your license key so that you are able to activate your software.Please stay online while I do changes.

Deepak: Steps to Activate the product

Deepak: If you have not activated the product during the install, please launch the product and under the 'Help' menu you will find the Activation option from where you can activate it.

Me: As I already said, there is no Activation option from the Help menu, just a greyed out Deactivate button.

Deepak: Thank you for the information.

Deepak: Sorry for the wait. Please do stay online.

Deepak: I'll be right with you.

Deepak: Please reinstall the software to Activate the software on your computer.

Me: OK, I'll do this now. Please stay on the line.

Deepak: Please reinstall and Activate the software on your computer. If any error please contact us back on Live chat.

Deepak: Is there anything else I can help you with?

Me: Can you wait while I reinstall it in case I continue to have issues?

Deepak: Thank you for waiting. One moment please.

Deepak: Sorry for the wait. Please do stay online.

Deepak: I'll be right with you.

By this stage, I had managed to locate the install CD and was in the process of reinstalling Photoshop. At around the 60% mark, the saga continued...

Deepak: Please reinstall the software to Activate the software on your computer.

Me: I'm doing it.

Deepak: If any error please contact us back on Live chat.

Me: I still don't know if it will work yet.

Deepak: Thank you for the information.

Deepak: Sorry for the wait. Please do stay online.

Deepak: I'll be right with you.

Me: OK, I've reinstalled the software, but it's still saying my activation limit has been exceeded and the option to deactivate it is still greyed out.

Deepak: If you have not activated the product during the install, please launch the product and under the 'Help' menu you will find the Activation option from where you can activate it.

And so on and so forth.

Eventually, some considerable time after I'd stopped copying and pasting a record of this conversation into Word, the problem was finally resolved and the feckless Deepak sent me on my way with a "good day". Looking back at the above log, I'm actually quite impressed with myself for managing to remain so calm and resisting a burning desire to call Deepak a fucking useless stupid twat. It's all sorted now, but if it happened once it can (and I'm sure will) happen again, and I'm not particularly looking forward to another bout of this farce.

In the software world, Photoshop is among the most pirated applications out there (after Windows itself, of course), and I'm proud to say I'm not one of those shameless leeches. (Seriously, if you're not willing to pay for your image editing software, why not give the freeware Gimp or Paint.net a go?) Experiences like mine, however, aren't exactly a ringing endorsement for becoming a paying customer. The sad fact is that I could probably have downloaded a crack that solved my problem in a fraction of the amount of time it took Deepak to pull his finger out. But, good boy that I am, I chose to go down the legit route - more fool me.

If you have an unbearably slow memory stick...

3:55 PM / Technology / 5 Comments

...try formatting it as FAT32 rather than NTFS.

Sounds like a step backwards, I know, but in my case I saw a very significant improvement in performance. A couple of months back, I bought a 16 GB Corsair Flash Voyager GT for use when working between my two machines (the high-end system downstairs and the laptop I mainly keep in my bedroom). For the sake of expediency, it makes sense for me to simply save to the memory stick all the time rather than copying my files from one machine to the other (although I do of course perform frequent backups).

I bought the Corsair because of the company's reputation for manufacturing fast, reliable hardware, coupled with the impressive read/write speeds they were boasting. In reality, however, I found that I got only a fraction of the advertised write speed, with even small files (such as a basic spreadsheet or single-page Word document) taking upwards of five seconds to save. That might not sound too bad, but if like me you have a habit of hitting "Control + S" at frequent intervals, it soon becomes extremely annoying. (This is particularly true of Final Draft 8, the screenwriting program I use and probably the single most unreliable piece of software I've ever come across. Continually saving your work is an absolute must.)

So today I decided to try a little experiment. I reformatted the stick from NTFS to the older FAT32 file system... and immediately saw a massive increase in performance. Documents now save in a fraction of a second, and even when copying my documents back over from the hard drive, I could see how much the write speed had improved. This may not be the whole story (both times, I formatted the device using Windows' default settings, and the differing default allocation unit sizes for FAT32 and NTFS might also be a potential factor), but for me it was a very painless way of squeezing considerably more performance out of a device I use on a daily basis. Definitely worth trying if you've got the memory stick blues.

Input lag sucks...

7:02 PM / Technology / 5 Comments

...as I've come to realise when comparing the results side by side between the high(ish) end S-PVA monitor I use downstairs and the cheapo TN jobbie I keep in my bedroom for less crucial business. The S-PVA monitor, a Dell 2709W, has a lot of inputs - VGA, DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort, composite etc. - which a lot of people seem to like and which the manufacturers are fond of adding to their products. Unfortunately, all these different inputs requires more work from the monitor, resulting in more input lag.

For general desktop usage, a bit of input lag generally isn't too noticeable unless you're particularly attuned to it. In a fast-paced game, however, like a first person shooter or something like STARCRAFT II, where winning or losing depends on split second decisions, it can be lethal. I was aware, when playing STARCRAFT II, that I would sometimes miss-click when trying to select a certain unit in the heat of battle. Originally, I put this down to my own lack of dexterity, but after hooking up my TN panel this evening and playing a couple of matches, it became abundantly clear that the problem was not with my hand-eye coordination but rather than S-PVA panel's input lag. Playing on the TN panel just felt much more responsive, and I found it much easier to pull off intricate manoeuvres.

Input lag didn't stop me from getting into the Diamond league (the top ladder ranking for STARCRAFT II players, outside of the invite-only Pro league), but I'm now finding myself thinking back to old matches and re-evaluating precisely what led me to lose. I suspect most gamers use TN panels because they cost less than their PVA and IPS counterparts, which puts me at an immediate disadvantage - I personally can't stand the weak viewing angles and uneven backlighting associated with most TN models I've seen, so there's really no question of me using one on a long-term basis. Still, I'll probably be looking into getting a new display before too long (I'd also like one with better gamma tracking), so I'm going to be doing some serious research into PVA and IPS panels with more acceptable lag. I'll probably start by looking for one that doesn't have a bajillion different inputs.

By the way...

10:46 AM / Technology / No Comments

...for anyone else with an ATI Radeon 5000 series video card who has been suffering from latency issues due to the card's PowerPlay power saving technology, the latest drivers seem to have cleared up the problem completely. No more glitchy TV recordings or stuttering sound when watching YouTube videos when PowerPlay is enabled!

They also enable support for anti-aliasing in STARCRAFT II, which is nice.

New new headphones

7:36 PM / Technology / 9 Comments

I bought a new pair of 5.1 gaming headphones to replace my faulty Roccat Kave. The Medusa NX from Speedlink is priced similarly to the Roccat Kave (approximately £50) and offers the same basic functionality and connectivity, the bonus being that, so far, these have lasted for more than the twenty-four hours I got out of Roccat's offering.

On the whole, I would say that the audio quality with the Medusa NX isn't quite up there with the Roccat Kave (the left and right channels sound noticeably less clear than the centre channel), but at the same time the channel separation is improved. With the Roccat Kave, the surrounds weren't all that distinct from the left and right front channels; now, they actually do a passable imitation of coming from behind me. Of course it would be ridiculous to expect a pair of headphones to deliver the same level of positional sound as a dedicated 5.1 speaker setup, but the effect is really not bad at all for £50. They also have a nifty feature whereby they compensate for the lack of a dedicated subwoofer by converting the LFE data into a subtle (or not so subtle, depending on how high you set the slider) vibration effect. D-Box eat your heart out!

Oh, get to f...

9:53 PM / Technology / No Comments

Well, I got less than twenty-four hours' usage out of my new headphones before they started malfunctioning. I'm starting to think I'm cursed.

I spent most of yesterday playing DRAGON AGE: AWAKENING (it's a lot of fun, provided you don't mind more of the same) and trying out various movies with the Roccat Kave headphones. I was, on the whole, pretty impressed by the quality and the spatialisation, even if it wasn't a patch on a dedicated 5.1 setup. (My main reason for buying a pair of 5.1 speakers is that my brother does a lot of work in the same room as me and often needs me to turn down my volume so he can concentrate. Otherwise, I'd just use my speakers all the time.)

This morning, however, when I popped them on, I was treated to noticeable crackling and popping. At first I thought my sound card was the culprit, and I tried everything I could think of to eliminate the problem, including disabling it and re-enabling the on-board card. Eventually, I started pulling out the various jacks, one at a time, to see whether only a certain channel was affected. It was only when I pulled out all three jacks at once that I realised the problem persisted even when there was no connection between the headphones and the sound card. The Roccat Kaves use a USB connection for power, and it was only when I unplugged that (i.e. cutting off power completely) that the crackling subsided. A quick Google search revealed that I am not alone in experiencing this problem with these headphones. Because of that, I'll be returning them for a refund rather than a replacement.

Happy birthday to me.

Vroom!

10:12 PM / Technology / 4 Comments

Out of the blue, a replacement for my faulty motherboard arrived by courier this afternoon... and, an hour or so later, I was up and running with my new system in my new case. I wonder what was wrong with the previous motherboard. The supplier provided no explanation at all - just a new board in the same box I sent back to them.

It's a very nice case, with more fans than you can shake a stick at and greatly improved ventilation compared to my previous case. The net result is that all my components run significantly cooler than they did before, particularly the hard drives, where I've seen a drop of nearly 20 degrees Celsius, thanks to the whopping big 230 mm fan at the front of the case blowing cool air over them. Because of the increased ventilation and number of fans, more noise does end up escaping, but at the same time, the fact that everything is running much cooler means that the noisy video card fan (always the loudest part of the system) doesn't have to work anything like as hard when playing games, so the overall result is a quieter system... and one that will hopefully enjoy a longer life expectancy too.

So yeah, I'm extremely relieved everything went to plan this time. I was dreading plugging in the new board only to find out that the problem lay elsewhere. I should be getting a replacement for my dying laptop hard drive within the next couple of days too.

Like London buses

7:26 PM / Technology / 2 Comments

They say that when it rains, it pours. Or, in my case, when one computer component fails, another one won't be far behind it. Last weekend, it was my six-week-old motherboard. This weekend, it was the hard drive in my laptop, barely two months old itself. For some time, it had been making alarming clicking and squeaking noises, and recently had developed an irritating tendency to randomly not appear when the machine was booting, requiring a restart. This morning, I switched it on only to find that the performance was abysmal, with frequent, inexplicable freezes and a general sense of sluggishness. I decided to perform a diagnostic test on it using Seagate's SeaTools software. A couple of minutes later, it failed the short DST (diagnostic self test). At this point I promptly prised it out of the laptop and contacted Ebuyer about an RMA.

So, once again I'm without a laptop. The most annoying part of it is that this drive was itself bought to replace one that had failed, albeit in a more extreme manner. I doubt it could possibly be the case, but I really hope there's not some fault in the laptop itself that is periodically shafting hard disks.

June 2010: the month in which not just one but two computers went tits-up on me.

Dead computer

10:00 PM / Technology / 12 Comments

My lovely new computer, less than six weeks old, died yesterday.

First, to set the stage, I decided I wasn't happy with the temperature inside my old Antec Sonata III case. That case was designed with noise suppression in mind first and foremost, and was extremely limited in terms of cooling, having only a single case fan and no ventilation whatsoever. Heat would just sort of accumulate inside it and have nowhere to go... not good when you're running a Core i7 and a beefy video card. I decided to replace the case with a butt-ugly but feature-rich Coolermaster HAF 932, which is larger than the Sonata III and has an insane number of super-huge fans, blowing cool air over all the components inside it. It arrived yesterday, and I promptly carted everything upstairs, where I would have more light and room to manoeuvre.

The build didn't take particularly long, and I had everything put together and looking rather tidy thanks to the case's cable management system in just over an hour. At this point, I closed the side door, plugged it into the wall, hit the power switch and everything kicked into gear. "Great," I thought and, after setting my boot drive priorities in the BIOS, powered it off and hoiked it back downstairs.

It wouldn't turn on. Or rather, it would turn on and the fans would spin up, but then it would cut out after a second or so, before trying to spin up again, only to fail once again. Rinse and repeat in an endless cycle until I yanked the power cable out.

Over the course of the evening, I tore the whole thing apart and put it back together bit by bit, trying to isolate the problem. At first I thought perhaps it might be short circuiting, or that some component or other had become unseated. Nothing I tried managed to fix the problem, however, with it failing to boot even with the device sitting outside the case (to eliminate the possibility that it was shorting out on something) and only the bare minimum components - CPU and heatsink - plugged in. I've tried removing the CMOS battery, I've tried manually resetting the BIOS using the jumpers on the board, I've even removed and reseated my CPU and heatsink, but to no avail.

Basically, the problem can only be the CPU or the motherboard, and my gut instinct is telling me that the motherboard has somehow been bricked. How that could have happened in the process of carrying it down a couple of flights of stairs, I don't know, but there you have it. The only semi-plausible explanation I can come up with it that something went wrong when the BIOS updated itself after I changed the device boot priorities.

Whatever the reason, I'm basically stuck with a rather expensive doorstop. The CPU and motherboard were both ordered separately, so it's not as if I can return them both to the same place and have them figure out where the problem lies. I THINK it's the motherboard, but I can't be sure. My first course of action is going to be to take the matter up with the motherboard supplier, and see what happens from there. Luckily, I hadn't got around to selling my old system yet, so I'm currently able to use it. I'm not happy at all, though, as I'm sure you can imagine.

Fucking computers.

What I should be using right now.

Cool runnings

5:31 PM / Technology / 4 Comments

Q: What happens when you have a hefty video card that generates a great deal of heat directly under your hard drives?

A: The hard drives get very hot indeed.

Despite findings by Google which suggest that high hard drive temperature is not as likely to lead to failure as is commonly believed, I wasn't particularly happy about SpeedFan reporting disk temperatures of 60 degrees Celsius after a 20-minute match in STARCRAFT II. Unfortunately, my case doesn't have a built in hard disk fan of its own, and the place where common sense would dictate that you fit one - the space between the front exterior and interior - is taken up by a dust filter. To make matters worse, the drives themselves are packed very close together in order to leave ample room for me to thread the video card's PCI-E power connectors through the lower part of the case. This, as you can imagine, only makes the heat problem worse. The picture below gives a good indication of the sort of layout I'm dealing with:

(Yes, my cable management is lousy. I know. I'm not very good at advance planning.)

The solution was to attach a 120mm fan to the left hand side of the hard disk stack, blowing air towards the disks. My Noctua NH-D14 actually comes with two fans - a 140mm one between the two heatsinks and a 120mm one clasped on to the right hand side. You can run the cooler with one or both fans (or neither, if you're feeling particularly daring), and the various reviews I've read suggest that the difference between one and both fans amounts to little more than a couple of degrees Celsius. (Given the thing's size, many people with particularly tall RAM modules find that they have no choice but to remove the 120mm fan anyway.) As it happens I'm actually using the included adaptor to throttle the fan speed to 900 RPM in order to further reduce noise levels, and my CPU temperature has yet to go above 45 degrees (it's currently idling at 30, with SpeedFan reporting that the cores themselves are at around the 24-25 mark).

Therefore, I decided to simply shift the 120mm fan from the CPU cooler to the hard drives, and the result has been an average drop in hard drive temperature of about 15 degrees. They now idle at between 30 and 40 degrees (and the temperatures are continuing to slowly drop as I type this), and a half-hour STARCRAFT II match raised them to around 45. I'm more than happy with this state of affairs, particularly given that I didn't have to buy any new equipment.

My PCI sound card is now back in the system, by the way. I've decided to simply live with the issues I described previously regarding my video card's less than ideal power management system. I've come to the conclusion that I only actually need the card to run at full power when playing games, so my solution has been to create two hotkeyed power profiles: minimal power and full power. The majority of the time, I run on minimal power, with is perfectly adequate even for decoding high bit rate AVC, so I simply have to remember to tap ALT+SHIFT+2 (my hotkey for full power) before starting a game. Should I have to do this? No, and I dearly hope that future driver or hardware revisions from ATI will fix the latency issue that occurs whenever the card changes its power settings. In the grand scheme of things, though, it's an extremely minor inconvenience.

All systems go

2:09 PM / Technology / 3 Comments

Well, my new system is now up and running, and stable to the point that I'm happy to leave it as it is. It's currently overclocked to 3.77 GHz (from the default 2.8 GHz), and while I could go higher it would mean either reducing the memory speed or upping the voltage, and in the interests of keeping power consumption and heat down I don't feel particularly inclined to do the latter. (I believe this is because the memory controller is actually integrated into the CPU on Intel X58 systems.) Not that I've found myself wanting for extra megahertz: it was able to handle a constant 60 frames per second in UNREAL TOURNAMENT III with every graphics option maxed out, even at the default clock speed of 2.8 GHz.

My CPU-Z Validator page:

I was a little taken aback by just how quickly I managed to get the thing up and running. As you probably know from my previous posts, I essentially gutted the entire system retaining the sound card and disc drives but replacing everything else. Despite this, I was able to load my existing installation of Windows and, two minutes later, it had obtained all the drivers it needed and was content to work just fine without reinstalling ANYTHING. Admittedly, I went for the same component brands (Intel CPU, ASUS motherboard, ATI video card), but given that the entire chipset architecture has changed, I was shocked that I didn't have to reinstall Windows. That's never happened to me before. The only real hurdle was squeezing the video card in. The card itself only just fit, and the PCI-E power connectors are on the end of the card rather than on the top, as was the case with my previous card. Because the card was practically touching the case's hard drive column, I had to resort to some unorthodox cable management, threading the PCI-E power cables behind the column and squeezing the connectors through one of the air flow holes.

I did run into a rather unfortunate problem, however, that took me some time to solve. While watching a video on YouTube, I became aware that the sound would click and squeak with some degree of frequency, and on one occasion devolved into such a cacophony of squeals and static that I would probably have blown an eardrum if I hadn't ripped my headphones off immediately. I noticed that the problem became less apparent when I disabled hardware acceleration of Flash (which YouTube uses). A little later, I realised that the same thing would happen infrequently when playing movies in Windows Media Player. The final straw came when I recorded a TV programme via Windows Media Center and discovered that, in the recording itself, the video would glitch and block up every few seconds.

I dowloaded the DPC Latency Checker and discovered that, every time I got an audio or video glitch, it coincided with a major latency spike. I tried everything I could think of. I swapped my audio drivers, I moved both the sound and video cards to different slots. I even removed the sound card altogether and switched to the motherboard's on-board audio device, which had the effect of eliminating the audio glitching but not the latency spikes or the corresponding corruption to off-air recordings in Media Center.

I ultimately came across the solution completely by chance. The problem, it seems, stems from the PowerPlay technology that ATI has built into its current generation of graphics cards and drivers. An admirable idea in theory, PowerPlay automatically lowers the GPU and memory clock speeds when the card isn't being heavily used in an attempt to conserve power. Unfortunately, it turns out that, each time these values are adjusted, a massive latency spike occurs, resulting in the various glitches I described above. ATI doesn't provide an option to disable PowerPlay via its own software, but a handy guide posted on the AV Science Forum shows how to do it fairly easily with minimal text editing. This immediately cleared up all my problems, although personally I'm not over the moon about this solution given that it means running the graphics card at full belt 100% of the time. I suspect the solution is to create two power profiles in the control panel - low and high - and alternate between them depending on my needs. If I end up sticking with on-board audio (doubtful, as I'm particularly fond of the ALchemy software my PCI sound card uses to allow multi-channel audio in legacy games that use EAX or DirectSound3D), then I really only need to disable PowerPlay when it comes to recording TV.

Still, I can't stress enough how happy I am with the system on the whole. It's fast, stable and fairly quiet (it's slightly louder than my previous build, particularly when running graphics-intensive applications, but that was to be expected). See you in the internet pipes!

My system specs as they now stand:

• Case: Antec Sonata III
• Power supply: Antec EarthWatts 750W
• Motherboard: ASUS P6TD Deluxe
• Processor: Intel Core i7 930 2.8GHZ (Socket 1366) overclocked to 3.77 GHz
• Memory: 6 GB OCZ DDR3 1600MHz/PC3-12800 Triple Channel (three sticks of 2 GB)
• Video card: Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 5850 TOXIC Edition, 1 GB
• Optical drives: (1) Sony BDU-X10S BD-ROM/DVD-ROM drive (SATA); (2) LG GGCH20L BD-ROM/HD DVD-ROM/DVD-RAM drive (SATA)
• Hard drives: (1) Intel X25-M, 80 GB, solid state drive (SATA); (2) Hitachi Deskstar, 400 GB, 7,200 RPM (SATA), (3) Hitcachi Deskstar, 1 TB, 7,200 RPM (SATA)
• Display: 27" Dell Ultrasharp 2709W 1920x1200 widescreen LCD
• Sound card: Auzentech X-Fi Prelude 7.1
• Speakers: Logitech Z-5500 Digital (5.1, THX certified, PCM/Dolby Digital/DTS)
• Mouse: Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer 3.0 optical
• Keyboard: Dell Black USB Keyboard
• Printer/Scanner/Photocopier: Samsung SCX-4500W
• Network card: Dual Marvell Yukon 88E8056 Gigabit Ethernet controllers (on-board)
• Network router: Netgear WGR614v6 100 Mbps Ethernet/54 Mbps wireless router
• Digital TV: Freecom DVB USB

The aftermath of a system build

6:48 PM / Technology / 4 Comments

UNREAL TOURNAMENT III at constant 60 fps with all details maxed out is niiiice. More thoughts to follow.

It's taking shape...

2:00 PM / Technology / No Comments

I just need to pick up the motherboard and power supply, and I'll be all set.

(The CPU's outer packaging got a little battered in transit, but that's a small price to pay given that I got it sealed on eBay for £40 less than what the cheapest online retail store was asking for.)

Oh, this really takes the cake

3:28 PM / Technology / 2 Comments

Yeah, really fucking descriptive, Mr. Computer. As it turns out, my laptop's hard drive is kaput. Over the last couple of days, I'd been noticing that its performance was steadily decreasing. This morning, assuming that the fault lay with my installation of Windows, I used the included recovery DVD to restore the drive to its original factory settings. About 50% of the way through the process, I got the informative message you see above. I rebooted the system, only for it to fail during the POST, with the following message:

Pri Master Hard Disk:S.M.A.R.T. Status BAD, Backup and Replace

Well, what do you know? It's a Seagate. Quel shocker, to quote GINGER SNAPS. The funniest part is that Seagate's own proprietary disc diagnostic tool, SeaTools, wasn't able to detect that one of its own hard drives was close to collapse. It gave the thing a clean bill of health less than half an hour before it hit the skids. I'm currently waiting for ASUS's tech support department to get back to me, though I'm not sure where I stand as regards the warranty given that I bought the machine second hand on eBay. I would assume that it's transferable, but you never know. If they won't replace it free of charge, perhaps it's time to bite the bullet and replace it with an SSD.

Being without a laptop is something I really don't need right now. I have to turn in a revised chapter of my thesis in less than a month, and I do a lot of writing in my room, which is quieter and less distracting for important work than using my main rig downstairs. Luckily I still haven't got round to selling my old VIAO, so I'm currently in the process of dusting it off and installing the necessary software. Of course, the main reason why I replaced the VIAO in the first place was because its battery was giving up the ghost, so it's absolutely useless in terms of portability.

Good thing I didn't keep anything essential on the laptop drive, eh?

Sacre bleu, it's big!

8:38 PM / Technology / 8 Comments

The good news is that it fits in my current case. With about a centimetre to spare. Which is a relief, because I'm still very happy with my Sonata III. It does a great job of cancelling out fan noise, it's an ideal size, and the tool-free drive trays are very convenient.

Rethinking my upgrade

10:42 PM / Technology / No Comments

I've made a few changes to my proposed list of components for my Summer 2010 computer upgrade. Over the last couple of days, I've been reading reviews of the Corsair H50 cooling solution and have come to the conclusion that it may not be all it's cracked up to be. I've read several complaints about the level of noise generated by the radiator, and while I know I won't be able to get a completely silent system (my need for a decent gaming graphics card puts paid to that), every little helps. As such, I've decided to forego the H50 and instead pick up a Noctua NH-D14, widely considered to be one of the (if not THE) quietest and most effective heatsinks out there. The only problem: size. The thing is massive.

If I was still getting a Corsair Obsidian 800D tower, that wouldn't be a problem. However, I'm now shying away from that too, in favour of sticking with my two-year-old Antec Sonata III. The Obsidian 800D is a huge piece of equipment, as large lengthwise as it is tall, and I'm rather limited in terms of space. My desk has a low horizontal beam to support the legs, making it difficult to stash a tower, and the cubby-hole in the corner where my Sonata III currently resides offers nowhere near enough room for anything even slightly larger (the Sonata III only just fits as it is). Therefore, if I were to get a new tower, I would end up having to get a new desk too, which in my mind simply isn't worth it. Provided my Sonata III can take the NH-D14, I can save at least £100 on the overall cost of the upgrade... which is why I've already ordered an NH-D14, so I can check in advance whether it will fit. If not, new tower here we come.

As for the remainder of the package, everything remains more or less as it stands. I think I'll probably go for 6 GB of RAM - 12 just seems like overkill, in terms of both cost and its use to me. I currently have 4 GB in my system and have never exceeded that, and I would have gone for 4 GB again were it not for the operating requirements of DDR3 RAM - modules have to be installed in triplets rather than in pairs, and I suspect 3 GB wouldn't be enough, so 6 it is. For the video card, I've decided to go for a Sapphire HD 5850 Toxic, which has had its core clock and memory speeds overclocked beyond those of the standard model, and also features a custom heatsink which is supposedly quieter and more effective at cooling the board.

Computer upgrade

10:07 PM / Technology / 5 Comments

The new system I mentioned in my previous post is still several months from fruition, giving me plenty of time to research and change my mind, but at the moment, I'm looking at going for the following components:

• CASE: Corsair Obsidian 800D
• HEATSINK: Corsair H50 (a very nice-sounding and surprisingly affordable liquid cooling solution)
• POWER SUPPLY: at least 750 watts (probably something from Corsair, modular if possible)
• MOTHERBOARD: ASUS P6T SE (no need for bells and whistles, just a good rock solid ASUS board with an Intel X58 Express chipset)
• CPU: Intel Core i7 (I'm looking at going for a 930 2.8GHz model and overclocking the hell out of it, which served me well with my 3 GHz Core 2 Duo)
• MEMORY: either 6 GB or 12 GB of DDR3 RAM (probably something from Crucial, Corsair or OCZ - DDR3 memory must be installed in sets of three in order to work in triple channel mode, hence the slightly unusual amounts)
• VIDEO CARD: ATI Radeon HD 5850 (the performance to price ratio for moving up to a 5870 isn't really worth it in my opinion)

Add to that my existing SSD, hard drives, optical drives and sound card, and I should have a very nice system that will be the envy of the neighbourhood... that is, if anyone in my neighbourhood cares about computers.

I tend to be fairly conservative when it comes to building systems, going with manufacturers whom I know from experience to be reliable and suited to my tastes and requirements - ASUS motherboards, Intel CPUs and chipsets, ATI video cards - but if anyone has any alternative suggestions, or wants to discuss anything about my proposed build, I'm more than happy to hear your thoughts.

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