Current changes

A few weeks ago I started upgrading and changing several things on my media centre PC. Most importantly, I’ve exchanged the mainboard and the RAM. Another component that’s changed was the graphics card. I switched from a common GeForce GTX 560ti to a GeForce GTX 560ti 448.

The “old” graphics card was a SuperClocked version by EVGA, which had a lot of power but the EVGA Classified Edition of the GeForce 560ti 448 was too intriguing to be resisted to. The EVGA CE uses six power phases and is more a 570 than a 560. The big issue with the 570 is the lack power phases – four instead of five. One of my previous 570 cards died due to this fact during an overclocking session and a slight voltage increase.

I also exchanged the chassis, which looks much more elegant than the old chassis I’ve used and is a little quieter. The only noisy thing that is currently inside is the graphics card, but the cooling components will be exchanged in the very nearby future.

The CPU that was once working in my work PC wandered into the media centre giving me much more core horse power. The CPU is now overclocked but does not cause too much heat, thanks to a stock voltage.

After setting up the system and installing all the things I actually need (tons of games and XBMC) I’m very satisfied with the final result. Everything feels much smoother and the overall gamin performance has increased a lot. The only thing that bothers me currently is the noise level of the system during gaming sessions. But like I said, this is going to be solved.

The reason why I actually did those changes to the system was mainly the new Batman video game. And my plan worked perfectly well. The game’s now finished and I did not notice any weird performance issues, except the rumble with the Joker and his henchmen and the Catwoman fight in the strong room. Those were more PhysX related and my dedicated 9800GT had a little struggle with these fights.

Whatever the case, I’ve finally got a “debugged” system where everything finally works, which was not the case on the old system. For instance, ‘L.A. Noire’ did not even start. XBMC is working smoothly and I had no issues with exporting and importing the media library data.

Of RipJaws and Eden

Previously, I’ve told you guys about my GeForce upgrade on my media centre. The performance boost was, well, kind of okay, but at last I felt it was time for an overall upgrade on the system. I’ ve got this AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition in my PC that I usually use for some work on photos and on the other hand it’s simply a machine I use to manage my mails, websites and these kind of things.

It finally turns out that the processor plugged into this machine gets a little bored so I’ll do an exchange and my AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition moves from my media centre to this working machine. Both system still run on the AMD 7xx chipset and the media centre will now get the upgrade to the AMD 990FX chipset in form of an Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD7 board.

I’ll put 16GB DDR3 12800 G.Skill RipJaw modules on this system, so that I finally do not have to suffer on a memory bottleneck. I personally think that this is a good foundation for my EVGA GeForce GTX 560ti 448 Cores Classified. I was able to get a performance increase on games like “Batman Arkham City” but the overall system performance became pretty bad during the last year and a half so it’s time to make an upgrade and most importantly get a fresh and new installment of Windows 7.

 ...

I’ve exchanged graphics and sound card drivers a lot in the past and I also had to struggle with several hardware and software issues that also caused new bugs, if you know what I’m saying.

Anyhow, I don’t expect a performance boost of 200 per cent but I’m certain that the overall system performance and feel of smoothness will increase and a lot of crashes and bugs will get fixed with this new setup.

In preparation for this did I also give the new XBMC version (called “Eden”) a try, which is currently out as a beta release. I was a little disappointed. I did a fresh installment and imported my old library to get everything as clean as I could. The movie library did not work as expected. I was missing movie posters. I wasn’t able to get movie information. The new skin itself is not a thing I’m going to be friend with because all the items are drawn much smaller and it looks like as if there’s something missing on the GUI.

I also tried several video add-ons and most of them did not work properly as well. To summarize, this is still a beta version and it does not represent the final product, but I will wait for a long time until I’ll finally do the update from “Dharma” to “Eden”. I’m fine and comfortable with my current media centre software. So why changing a good and running system?

I hope I can get everything done within the next 5-7 days and I’ll keep you informed.

A prig with the rig

In a rush and packed with a lot of experience from the previous installation I went on by the day before and re-installed my new gaming rig. It’s now a setup I actually like and what fits my quality standards. I hate PCs that include a driver farm or orphans from previous and malfunctioning drivers, like I had on the setup before. What I did before was to install everything automated from the DVD that came with the motherboard and a lot of drivers and software has been beta. Updating and upgrading was a real pain in the ass. After this whole procedure I had more failures than before.

Whatsoever, this first installment was for testing purposes only and it wasn’t intended to be for eternity. I’m now having the system with all the drivers I actually needed. The version numbers I wanted. And the hardware tools are functional. The only bug I actually had, was to be found in the Windows Game Explorer. I have to add, that I use the Vista Game Explorer Editor to get all my games correctly listed in the Windows Game Explorer. First games that I install, besides Steam, is the Blizzard bundle, like StarCraft, WarCraft, Diablo etc.

After installing these games I opened the WGE to scan for new games. The only game that got updated was StarCraft, WarCraft and Diablo II was abandoned with an ugly icon. I then tried to use the VGEE, it found StarCraft and was set up correctly. I restarted VGEE and when I tried to edit some more games I was welcomed by an error message and all the previously added games were deleted from list.

I’ll make it short, the only way to fix this very issue was to uninstall them. Check out the WGE for errors. Additionally did I go to the registry entry of the WGE and assured that there is nothing left from previous game installations. I also deleted the link files that were left in my user profile. I then re-installed the games that were causing these errors. I opened the WGE to let him scan for new games. After that I went to the registry entries of WGE and deleted the entries that were added for the new games. I also found one empty entry that was removed, too. Link files in the WGE section created in my user profile were deleted again. Et voilá, I was able to open VGEE and getting update information on games without errors our devastating my WGE list.

I’m pretty sure that there are more games out there causing errors like these and most likely they will be caused due to this empty entry key in the registry. It sure will be a good decision to backup WGE’s registry keys AND soft links before actually editing the WGE with VGEE. I first found this issue after having installed around 60 games and this made me more than just angry.

For the rare time being

The last couple of days has been very busy for me, not that I had too many “private projects” but some too intense of time. First things first, my gaming system got crashed during the Windows 7 Service Pack 1 update process and I wasn’t able to revive it any way. I had to reinstall everthing, had to setup a lot of applications and so on. Good thing about this, the system can now be rebooted again without getting a raid failure, which was one big issue with the previous setup. I’m nearly finished with the system, like 90 per cent, and I only have to restore most of my games profiles. Actually, this whole thing wasted a lot of time on my last weekend and is also responsible for missing, once again, the game of the week feature here in this blog.

Besides all this were I still in modifying and hacking my Motorola Backflip cellphone. I now managed to install Android 2.2 aka Froyo including multitouch, which isn’t a stock feature of the phone, and I also installed an unlocked kernel that I’m able to overclock and also underclock it. The phone now runs with a stock Android, without any Motorola software features, and it’s, compared to the default Android 1.5, as fast as hell. I’m testing the battery at the moment to see, if my also also increased the lifetime of this particular part of the phone. It’s such a hilarious feel to finally have features on my cellphone that aren’t supposed to be there actually. And most importantly, for my subjective estimation, the phone has now a status, where I would say, that one can use it instead of just getting angry about it.

Android

Far from all this nerdish stuff did I come back to a more healthier living style without all this unhealthy, calory rich and fat food. I also visit the gym from time to time and as expected, it’s giving me a boost in many ways. Say whatever you want, after a fine session in the gym, you feel refreshed and the essence of life creeps back to your bones and you feel recharged. I mentioned it in one of my previous posts, I don’t want to exaggerate anything at the moment and I want to keep it on a level where I still have fun with all this too. Getting into a boot camp like training plan as I had it once before is not my intention, even though I can say, that this was fun too. Anyhow, I’m losing weight, I start feeling better now and hopefully my cardio will increase once again. There’s no particular muscle training on the schedule right now, I just want to sustain my back and belly muscles at the moment to get a strong centre for future training plans.

Unfortunately, I haven’t found any time for photography or any creative stuff in that kind of way. I also haven’t managed to get a little bit more into the whole Photoshop/Lightroom thing that was actually on my schedule for this year’s beginning. Saying that there was no time is not totally correct, I actually wasn’t in the mood to do anything like this. Maybe later, when my bike is fixed and I’ll be able to get out a little bit more often and most importantly further away.

My media centre – A field report

It’s been nearly 9 month since living with a media centre PC in my living room and it has become a regular part of my daily life. The balance between the simple watching of TV broadcasts and the common use of a PC, like surfing the internet, playing games has changed. Nowadays I do watch more and more content that is streamed and published via the internet and old school TV makes only a minor part in my daily life. The point actually is, that I don’t have the time nor the will to watch specific contents on TV at a special time and nor do I have the will to spend like half an hour to setup the HDD recorder that I don’t miss a show on TV. This is old-fashioned in my opinion, especially by regarding the fact that if I use the media centre I can watch whatever I want and what I subscriped to at any time I want. If I watch TV I’m bound to a fixed schedule and like I previously said, I’m not going to waste my rare free time to TV programs.

Another, and in my opinion, very important point that the media centre has become so popular for me is, that the content it offers is mainly customized to my needs and interests. As you may know, I’m a gamer and I love to watch broadcasts with videogame content, so I watch like GameTrailers.com, GiantBomb or GameSpot contents any time I want. If I’m more in the mood to get a little relaxation and enjoy earth’s beauty I lay back and watch the marvellous shows of Earth-Touch.com. I’ve also got tons of subscriptions on Youtube, mainly gaming content but also channels with subjects like sports, news , photography or simply comedy. As you can see, I’ve got this large variety of things to watch at any time I want, I’m near the point to think about cancelling my cable provider subscribtion because it makes barely sense.

Besides simple watching of different contents the media centre also offers another ability to serve me well, it’s a gaming platform. I had to make a compromise between ultra silent media centre PC and gaming PC. This PC serves in both ways and is not as quiet as a media centre usually used to be, but this doesn’t really matter, because while watching movies or anything else like this, you can barely here the PC and it’s not as disturbingly load as a regular gaming PC. This case, where the hardware was built in, is a silent case and I also avoided the use of unnessecary fans the gain a low noise level and I’m pretty happy with the final result. I can’t deny that there’s still some room for tweaking the system to gain a little less noise, but it’s fine the way it is.

Anyhow, the media centre is a well balanced and efficient gaming PC as well and I use this PC very often for some relaxed gaming sessions. I used to play a lot of games that are played console style (with a gamepad) on the media centre PC and left the FPS and RPG to my main game system. It’s way more fun to play a soccer or a basketball game on the couch watching the stuff on a giant TV instead of seeing this on a small 24inch PC monitor. It also fulfills some social aspects because I personally play much more games with friends visiting me as I’ve done before by just having the “normal, regular” gaming PC. Another important point for me is, I don’t have to waste money on an expensive console, even though I would like to have a PS3.

As a final conclusion can I say, that the media centre was a good investment. Ordinary TV becomes less and less important for me and like I said, I’m near the point cancelling my cable provider subscription. I gain more information in a much smaller space of time and most importantly information that I actually need instead of getting tons and tons of crap information, e.g. celebrity stuff. Some of my “gaming habits” have changed too because I’m more willing to play “casual games” like sports games and games regularly played with a gamepad. Yap, I like the media centre, everyone should have one.

A BITS too complicated

Though I didn’t want write so much about computers, software and all hardware related stuff, I have to write something related to these topics anyway. What happened is the following, I’m still in a progress of, let us say, upgrading with no mercy. As you might know, I replaced a lot of my graphics cards, silenced a few of my PCs (the media centre is still left). I also had some weird problems with my gaming system that just didn’t want to start, finally it was just an empty battery and a new one rescued me from paying another 600 Euro to fix this PC. This PC welcomed me with a new problem, Windows Update and Windows Live do not work any more under the gaming OS (yes, it’s dual-boot with an “editing OS”, too). The problem is pretty complicated and I haven’t found a real solution for that, it’s that BITS is no longer to found in the service menu. It’s just lost – disappeared. After some checking I came to the conclusion that some of the needed files for this service are corrupt and the hash differs, too. It’s barely possible to replace the files without going deeper into the crypts and vault of the Windows system itself and I made a decision. DELETE.

I wanted to get rid of the “editing OS” anyway and the whole dual-boot sucked, because it simply takes too much space and the maintenance is too intense in time. Before I go by and start a complicated software surgery, I simply format the whole RAID and install a complete, new, fresh system for gaming only. The editing one moved to “internet PC” because this one will soon (actually today) be upgraded with a new six-core CPU which is going to kick ass. I’m not sure if I should install a small 32bit OS, too. The thing is, that I’ve found a lot of games (well, three to be exact) with a stupid copy protection that I wanted to play again, that do no longer work under Windows 7 64bit, just because of this stupid protection. I already did a backup of my complete Steam game collection so that it will not take too long to “rebuild the game library”. Right now there are around 180 listed in the Windows Game Explorer and a few additional ones in Steam, too. That’s a kind of a lot of work.

They have issues too though

X-Mas is over and I’m nearly finished with the changed to my PCs where I once again meet a point where I get confronted with a disturbing problem on my gaming system. It does not start everytime I want it to start. When I go by and move the waterpump a little bit the system goes and starts. Another time it’s just a touch somewhere in the case or near the motherboard. I’m not sure till now what the exact problem is but it’s not the power supply unit, it works perfectly. There’s some kind of interference and I don’t know where it is. Hopefully it’s nothing serious so that I don’t have to do a major replacement to the system which will cost me around 650EUR right now.

Besides all this, I’m on the noise hunt and I try to eliminate every disturbing noise that comes from any PC I own. I just silenced one PC with a noise absorber kit by Be Quiet! and it will be quieter if the fans would work correctly or let us say, if they were not so bloody dirty. Well, I freed them off the dust but I guess it was a bit too late and now I have to replace them. It’s very hard these days to get 80mm fans with red LEDs that are declared silent cause everyone switched to 120mm or bigger. The backplane in my gaming system will be replaced by a much quieter one too because I wasn’t able to completely disable the fan without getting an alarm noise and I didn’t wanted to rip the speaker off because of the “you’ll never know”-factor. Maybe it’s the backplane that causes the starting issue (well, NO!!!).

The HDD cases in my media center (which is capable for gaming too right now) are getting completely removed to and will be simply replaced by some uncoupling units. Two hits with one strike, I get rid of the 40mm fans and the hard drives are getting a little bit more “softened” in the case. By the way, the media center is the best working system at the moment without any issues. Like I said, the gaming PC has starting problems and the inter PC seems unstable to me, which leads me to final point.

I am going to say goodbye to Fedora and Linux on this system because I switch back to Windows. It still remains a system for internet but also for audio production and some picture editing. It comes in pretty handy because two monitors are plugged to this system and these two things are handled pretty good if you have a second monitor. It’s a kind of sad that I’ll soon will have no Linux machine but unfortunately is Linux not able to fulfill my needs. Combined with the stability problems it’s the best choice to get back to Windows.

There’s light at the end of the tunnel. I have so much hardware lying around that a fourth system is coming up which will be a pure dedicated gameserver and guess what, it’s going to be a Linux system. Till now do I not have any specific plans on that but it will come and hopefully will it come together with a LAN in spring 2011.

For those of you who expect to read some more things about my photography hobby can I tell, that there’s pretty soon something new to say about it because I ordered some fine new stuff for my camera. But more about these things will be here to read later in another post. I’m sorry for posting so much about my PCs and hardware and stuff these days but it’s a cold and extremely snowy winter here in Germany and this is like the perfect time for me to get a few jobs done in these cases.

Closet cleaned

Last weekend stood under the flag of rearrangement and getting rid of some useless things from the past. Out of a clear blue sky I decided to sort out some of my old IT books to get some space to place the old books of my grandfather inside my bookcase. Seriously, I don’t need a book about Novell DOS 6.2 or MS DOS anymore and if I’ll feel that urgent need to find some information about this ancient operating systems I would find much more knowledge bases on the net than in a single book. And due to fact that I stopped coding in 2005 I thought that there’s no more need for books like C++ and shit like that. I finally made it in nearly five hours of pure bookcase management to find a worthy place for every book. My beloved game strategy guides are now on eye height and everything else is well sorted and easy to find.

Secondly did I finally made it to exchange the mainboards of my internet PC with the one built in in my media center PC. I did this because the board of my internet PC offers two 16x PCIx slots and I wanted to use one graphic card as a dedicated PhysX accelerator like I do in my gaming system (GF260+GF9800GT). The exchange went better than expected, the systems are still working, except for some pulse server bugs on Fedora. The bug in Fedora is not a major one because Fedora 14 is going to be released this week and I don’t want to do an upgrade, I feel like re-installing the system by keeping the home folder, like I did several times in the past. The whole setup procedure runs pretty fast, because all that is left to do after the core setup routine is to install the missing packages, every application is already configured in my home folder.

Unfortunately do I have to run my Linux internet system with a crappy GeForce 8600GT because this graphic card knows a nothing about PhysX so I had to place my GF9800GT in my media center for a while till it is getting replaced by a new PhysX dedicated card. I’ll also replace the cpu fan of my media center because the stock one sold by AMD is a kind of cheap and noisy and is going to be replaced by an Arctic Cooling Xtreme Freezer Rev.2. Hopefully the noise will disappear after that and the AMD Phenom II X4 965 will feel comfortable without making too much noise. Anyhow, the whole media center is going to be much quieter than it is now.

Reporting for duty

Nothing really special happened within the last few days except some nerdy things. The holy equipment for my paladin in WoW is nearly completely epic and I look forward to my first instances as a holy paladin though I have no idea how it actually works because I am a tank since level 25 or something. Probably will I use some non-hero instances to learn before I kick the real shit (yap, yap, yap… the overheal will shine over my healing failures). On the other hand I am busy in WoW with some crafting things that I left on the way while hardcore leveling my paladin. Damn, I hate it when a game turns to a work like thing. I used to start a priest and a warrior for some twinking. The priest plays a little bit lame in low level but the warrior totally rocks and I guess I will play it more often from time to time.

Besides all this were I working on my media center again and it’s in a kind of RC state now. Windows 7 was by far the better choice compared to Linux Mint, though Linux has had a fine performance but due to some screen tearing issues and the complexity that comes into play when using a dual-boot system as a media center, it had to leave the hall. The media center choice itself fell on XBMC. The Windows Media Center is a kind of a rude joke from Microsoft which is absolutely useless in all kinds of ways. The third choice was Moovida but I finally missed some customization features so I switched to XBMC which is more complex in the beginning but very easy to use in the end. I finally made to import all my TV shows correctly to the media library and my movies were found and tagged as well. It’s pretty easy to use and it looks great. I use the standard theme but I guess I’ll give some of the other themes a try in the future.

If you’ll ask yourself what’s up in project “Straight Edge 2.0” can I tell that I follow every rule except the sports rule. Unfortunately. I don’t know when I will do some sport again, probably next week or if everything works perfectly well this week, maybe this weekend. Gladfully am I stuck on a weight around 97kg and it does not increase (Yeah!). So, that’s it for now…

A pain in the ass

…and on the eighth day God created the game industry and he saw that it was good.

…and on the ninth day God gifted the game industry with paranoia and greed and he saw that it was good…

Seriously? As you may know I am a game junkie and I love video games. I have a collection of nearly 1,400 games for different platforms and unfortunately I do not have time to play them all through. So is comes natural that I order a few games here and then like I did two days ago. I found some very cheap offers on Amazon, some games for around six bucks. One of these games was “Peter Jackson’s King Kong”. Though this game does not look nice compared to nowadays standards I really wanted to play this BUT thanks to the paranoia of the gaming industry the game was protected with my so behated copy protection called StarForce. First of all, the game got installed, then you try to start it and receive a message that you have to restart your system to apply and complete the driver installation. What the fuck?

So, ya, I restarted and something that I already expected happened. My Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit ran an automated recovery and failed. After that I decided to choose the last known good configuration and the system booted. So far, so nice. After login I noticed that I wasn’t able to connect to the internet though my network settings were correct and haven’t changed them for a couple of month. I also needed to reboot to apply some new network setting. What the fuck? Why the hell does a copy protection affect my network adapters?

I tried a few different things to fix the problem but nothing really helped. Not even a crack. After finding no solution I decided to simply uninstall the game to get my old running system configuration back. I also uninstalled to StarForce drivers manually to completely ensure that there’s nothing left of this bullshit. Well the game was able to start but it crashed right after starting the campaign. Now, after uninstalling everything my system works perfectly fine again and I wasted six bucks on a game that could have been good and enjoyable but thanks to copy protection mechanisms I wasn’t able to play it nor to enjoy any other game. Ladies and gentlemen of the game industry, do we really need such a strangulation of righteous gamers? Do we, the gamers, truely need to get such a pain in the ass by buying a game? Isn’t it enough to bugfix the game? Do you, the game industry, really need to implenent such factory default bug in your games? I don’t think so.

…and I saw, that it was bad.