The Upgrade Chronicles, Part 2.

Got the stuff in today. Got the stuff into my system tonight. Posting this from my new system right now.

The Internet (mainly Google) is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it means that you are more informed as to what you could be looking at, in terms of things like upgrades and products. The downside is that ignorance is bliss. Though I read tons of good “this motherboard is great!” posts, I also read tons of “this motherboard sucks!” posts. It only takes one of those to make you nervous.

Many posts I had read stated that after upgrading to the A7S333, they were unable to get anything to run. Or boot. Or any OS’s to install, especially XP Pro. The common statement was the BSOD in the installation. Now, as I chronicled earlier, BSOD is a generic enough term that I didn’t know if it was a “real” BSOD or if it was a generic error message with a blue screen. As I left the computer shop, some guy walked in with the same problem I was dreading – new mobo, new RAM, new processor, no dice on XP. He was exchanging the RAM to see if that could be it. I started dreading this upgrade more and more, especially since it dawned on me I’ve never done anything this drastic alone.

Anywho, it took me 2 hours to get the new stuff in – partly because I was cautious, and partly because while Tiawan makes good motherboards, they don’t make a friendly upgrade experience. It took several tries to get the thing to turn on because as it turns out the part where the power switch hooks into the motherboard isn’t documented well either.

Then I booted it up and it went into BIOS mode. This was good. It detected the one hard drive I hooked up (I figured I’d hook one at a time up). Then I rebooted. It couldn’t detect the hard drive, despite doing so in the BIOS. It also couldn’t detect the floppy disk. I turned the floppy cable around and fixed that one but the hard drive was still a no go. So I hooked the other one up and that seems to have done it. It’s got something to do with the new hard drive cables/IDE paradigm but damned if I know exactly what or how, nor do I care at this hour.

Then XP started booting. And stopped. Or rather STOPped. It gave me a blue screen with an error message. At this point I’m not sure if its a “your shit is broke” or a “your shit is different” message. It says to reboot, so I do. It happens again. After some research and some random card/hair pulling, I get it down to this – the IDE controller has changed (obviously, the entire system has changed) and XP can’t handle it. I can either revert back to original motherboard, hack the registry, or reinstall XP. I pick the last option. Just to cheat, I reinstall XP over itself. An hour later, I’m back up and running.

So I fire up IE. Kinda faster. I fire up Excel. Kinda faster. I fire up Outlook. Kinda faster. At this point I start to wonder if this was worth it.

Then I fire up Neverwinter Nights. Whoa baby. For starters it comes up a lot faster. That’s good. It shows a cutscene. This is when it occurs to me that I couldn’t watch these before – too choppy. Now they’re like silk. That’s good. Then I get into the game. Damn. I never realized how choppy/slow it was before. Now it’s like a big stuck of buttah. Me likey the new processor. I could even bump up the resolution.

Then I fire up Civilization III, which I thought would be an even better test, seeing as how the game doesn’t rely on 3D hardware. Whoa. I never realized how many frames I was missing in this little sprite based game. And the load times are almost nil.

Then for fun I fire up Jedi Knight II, since the hectic battles were often a source of slowdown. I can run it in 1280×1024 mode. I’ve never been able to do that before.

So I’m happy. And relieved.

The one slightly sour note is the fan on my GeForce 3. A while back it was making noise, and I was going to have to replace it. Then it stopped, and I was happy. But when I took it out I noticed the fan was not turning easily, which made me think perhaps it hasn’t been spinning this whole time. When I put it back in I heard odd “chirping” noises – it was the fan trying (and failing) to spin. Not sure if it’s been making these noises all along (only heard them with the cover off the system) or if its just now stopped working since I fucked with it but in any event I need to replace it soon. Good thing it has a heatsink. Not sure why a CPU without a heatsink can make the chip fry and a video card chip will mostly just cause lockups and not fry, but oh well.

I may still do a full reinstall of XP, or I may not. Depends on how this installation reacts. Also I still don’t have all the little sound card connections going yet, nor do I have all the right stuff for the lights on the case and such, but good enough for now.

The Upgrade Chronicles, Part 1.

OK, so my system has been chugging along with a Pentium III 500 for some time now. This isn’t a bad thing really – it was starting to get slow back when I was still running Windows 98 and such but as soon as I bumped up the RAM and upgraded to XP, it started running really well again. Sure, games like Neverwinter Nights take a while to load, but once they do load they run pretty damn good all things considered, mainly because they rely on the video card for the graphic bits and I’m running a GeForce 3.

So what I need is a processor upgrade. Problem is, that also requires a motherboard upgrade as well. And, since its been so long since I upgraded my motherboard, there’s also new RAM out there. It’s funny – there are a wealth of computer topics that you have to get up to speed with in a short amount of time every time you want to upgrade. I wouldn’t know what a chipset was if it kicked me in the face, but I had to learn all about them to do this. Funny thing is, every time you so any sort of “massive” upgrade (and I think this kinda qualifies) there’s always at least one factor you never considered last time and is somehow vitally important this time around.

Right, so I made the command decision to go with the Athlon XP line this time around. See, I used to have these “principles” about what I would get and where and from whom. For example, “buy your comic books from a Comic Book Store, the kind that sells D&D and cardboard cutouts of the X-Men, don’t get them from Wal-Mart.” and “buy your games at a dedicated store like Babbage’s, not from Best Buy”, and “Only buy the kinds of processors that everyone else has, not a different brand”. However, these “principles” began to give way when I started doing this thing called “working for a living” and stopped “living under my parents”. Now, I’m up for the lowest bidder, within reason. I don’t drive a junker car to save money, but I’m not going to pay 200% more just so that it’s brand new on the lot, either. I figure I’ll revert back to these principles when I become “rich” but we’ll see how that turns out later…

So in any event I decided to go with Athlon XP because AMD has held itself pretty well in the market, hell they took on Intel and didn’t die, and I was looking for the most bang for the buck this time around. I started hearing of a lot of people using them and so forth, espeically people like me – avid but cost conscious gamers. The final straw was my Microsoft/Intel whore friend who told me he went to Athlon – if he’s convinced that’s saying something.

However my original plan was to replace the motherboard and carry everything over, including RAM. Turns out about a year or so ago the paridigm changed from “SDRAM” to “DDR SDRAM”, which is (a little) more expensve and, more importantly, not what I had. I think when a RAM standard is well used then no one worries about what kind of RAM there is, everyone just uses the one – when the standard changes thats when people start worrying about semantics. To upgrade to this latest type of motherboard I would also have to buy RAM. If I went for the 512MB I have now things would get expensive. There is a board out there that can use the old style of RAM as well as the new style (not at the same time) but its an old board and apparently the concept either didn’t work well or proved unpopular. However, from what I’m told, the 256MB of DDR SDRAM works considerably faster/better than the 512 I have, and since I mostly bought the 512 to speed up the system, I figure I’ll get the 256 now and maybe upgrade later. It’s not like I’m playing EverQuest or anything.

And then there’s chipsets. Apparently the “big 2” are VIA and SiS. On the advice of a friend who’s had no problems with the motherboard maker ASUS, I’m getting an ASUS A7S333, which is based on the SiS 745 chipset. It’s a little bit slower than their VIA-based A7V333 and doesn’t have some things, like USB 2.0 or FireWire but from what I understand the difference doesn’t merit the $50 price difference. After the motherboard, RAM, CPU and the new power supply I’m getting, this $50 difference started to become important. Not to mention the fact that since this is such a big upgrade and is coming out of pocket in cash (as opposed to a credit card my parents are covering) that I decided to go local and not get the stuff online. It costs a little more but the idea of being able to take it back and not send it into space (plus a better warranty on the Athlon since its now a retail product instead of OEM) are worth it to me.

So they’re supposed to come in Tuesday or so. I’ll be stressing out until then.

BRILLIANT!

I swear I’ll get to those other topics soon enough but I just saw a commercial that I had to comment on.

I’m going to tell you right now that 90% of you have never seen a Blue Screen of Death, not really. When Microsoft released Windows NT in 1993 when it would crash it would show a blue screen with a listing of all of the contents of the variables in memory when it happened. It also placed these in a file. This was a “dump” of the memory and it helped developers find out what happened when the program crashed.

I get something similar when I have a program crash on the mainframe or when I place debugging statements in my code. Lemmie tell you – reading these things is fun.

I was reminded of this ability of NT (which carries over into Windows 2000 and XP) when I resized TightVNC the other day on my work machine (which runs 2000). It went to the Blue Screen of Death. The thing is, when NT/2K/XP goes to a BSOD, it really is death – there’s no recovery to be had, the system just stops.

Windows 95, 98 and ME are not actually the 32-bit cousins of the NT bloodline they claim to be – they’re really more like a 32-bit MS-DOS with a Windows program on top of it. Certian things in the 9x line can cause a bad crash to happen and the screen will turn blue with information on it. The difference, besides being a completely different type of screen, is that it’s still possible to continue in 9x sometimes, if only to shut the system down quickly. Even when an exception has occured and hitting “enter” on that blue screen just leads to another, it’s still better than the no option at all on the NT line.

Most people never even see the real BSOD in XP since by default XP will reboot – you have to enable this and then you’ll see the real BSOD when it happens. Once people started seeing the blue screen in 9x enough times and heard about the BSOD in NT, that term started becoming attached to the 9x variant on the screen. However, since most people never work with a NT operating system, most people have never seen a real BSOD.

I use the term BSOD when I see a 9x OS have it, so I’m not saying I’m some sort of prude and most people are idiots. However, since Apple has seen fit to incorporate BSOD into a commercial I thought I’d clear all this up.

Here’s how most offices work in the Teague building where I work. You enter a door from the hallway and then you’re in a room from which there are more doors, each of which leads to an office. I guess they did this for space reasons. Anywho, the next door down to the left from me is a room like this that leads to offices. In addition, it leads to another room which in turn leads to an office. In that room there’s a printer. Being the kind of workplace we are there are printers everywhere. However, in the room leading to this room with the printer there’s a small bookshelf that has on it a glass bowl. Sporadically the glass bowl is filled with candy, presumably from some of the people who work in those offices. Consequently, despite having to go further down the hall and walk through two different rooms to get to it, this printer is probably the most popular on the floor.

What’s funny is that there’s a guy whose office is right in front of the bowl, and he’s turned to where he can see the bowl. This is mainly because he didn’t want his back to the door but it means he’s like the watchdog of the bowl. I always feel kinda bad when I take something from the bowl since I don’t work in the offices there and I’m always nervous he’s going to say something. This is of course silly – if it were a problem they’d take the bowl away – down in the Pavilion they had to start locking the fridge because the janitors kept stealing Cokes. Still, I usually don’t bother to take candy from the bowl if he’s in his office with the door open. With my luck there’s some sort of webcam experiment going on (it would be a good one).

Usually there’s a good assortment in there – someone goes to Albertson’s and buys a bag of “fun size” candy. Sometimes it’s like Halloween – there’s the good shit which goes away quickly and then there’s the crap candy (like the ones in the Valentine’s Sampler filled with snot) but eventually the bowl is usually emptied – someone decides to suck it up and eat the Hershey’s Special Dark bars.

The bowl I believe is never refilled until its empty – even if there’s just one piece left in it. It’s kinda like when I was a kid and my sister would take all the ice cubes except one from the tray – that way it wasn’t empty and she didn’t have to refill it. Apparently some people never grow out of this habit. I don’t drink coffee but in the break room there’s a coffee pot with the proviso “he who drinks the last cup must refill the pot”. People apparently regularly walk in with empty mug, see that there’s only one cup left in the pot and then walk away. Some people here are adamant about how shitty that is – I say that perhaps the person with the empty mug was just too busy to take that much time.

But a funny thing happened week before last. Someone decided to restock the bowl with little green and yellow hard candies in wrappers. Pretty much every time its been restocked it’s been with some sort of chocolate variant – which is a good thing in this somewhat manic environment. But these little candies have been staying there – hardly anyone has touched them. I took one of each one day – they’re still sitting here on my desk. One of them is green in a clear wrapper with “Venadito Cardamomo” written on it in white – the other is in a yellow wrapper with a bee, a honeycomb and “Venadito Miel” on it. Obviously these ain’t from around here. I think the writing is Italian. I don’t know what these things are and they sound harmless enough as I write this but something about these guys is completely unappealing.

Part of me is tempted to go guy a bag of better stuff, chuck the stuff that’s in there, and move on – part of me is wondering how long before someone else does it, since it’s obvious no one’s eating these things.

Oh well, at least the printer in 325 is getting a break.

I guess it kinda looks like I started playing Neverwinter Nights and never came back. Not exactly, but NWN is a damn fine game. Sure, it’s an American RPG based off of Pen & Paper rules so if you prefer the Japanese styles of RPG (realtime like Zelda or turn-based like Final Fantasy) then stay away but for others, go for it.

Since my system is aging (mostly in the CPU department) I’m always scared that “game X” that I just bought won’t run on it. I attacked NWN with a lot of trepidation. When I came home with it I fired it up right away. My Wife thought I was being a bit obsessive but really I just wanted to know right away how/if it ran. It selected by default the lowest resolution tileset and a modest amount of graphic detail. I played around for a bit and just for the hell of it I cranked up all the details – it drops some frames but it looks awesome, so yay system – that GeForce3/XP combo really does the trick. Of course I’m still not too far into the single player game since I keep running against the “oh shit I’m dead” problems which irked me about Baldur’s Gate (from the same developer).

I haven’t tried multiplayer simply because when I looked there weren’t any custom modules yet so people were playing through the included campaign online – I figured it would just give me spoilers, so I decided to finish at least Chapter 1 before venturing online – but that hasn’t happened yet. Actually the one time I thought of going online the Master Server was down, so no go.

Anywho, I just thought I’d check in again. I’ve got more to post on including the two (!) new (old) games I got today, the used game buying experience, patches, and fanatical communities.

Oh and Odd Todd, just because your cat is scared of new people doesn’t make her a lemon.

3:45. I call Best Buy. I had just read a forum post or two wherein BB employees were deemed incompetent (p.s.: Google makes a great spell-checker) since they had a tendency to go ahead and sell preordered copies of NWN. I was going to call them at 4:45 on my way out but I decided to go ahead and call.

“Do you have any copies of Neverwinter Nights?”

“Yes and no. Yes we do but they’ve all been preordered.”

“Oh, so since I preordered it you’re holding onto one for me?”

“Yes we are.”

“OK Thanks”

Score! Best Buy rocks! (today)

Best Buy is still telling me that NWN won’t be out until tommorow. Either the guy on the phone just wants to get rid of me (so I won’t call back on his shift) or they actually have the game in the back room and are sitting on it. Neither would surprise me. If it weren’t for the fact that I preordered and I have a nice coupon with them, I would so head off to Babbage’s.

Of course, it doesn’t take any time for bug reports to filter in. One thread I read said it runs like a dog on his system, a system which “meets all the requirements – except video card”, which is akin to having a car that “meets all of the road requirements – except for wheels”. Others are complaining about random crashes – and inevitably they’re running a rare piece of hardware or have old drivers, etc. If Bioware patches the game then they’re seen as having put out an incomplete game rushed to market. Of course the bugs probably only occur on a configuration they’ve never seen before, so they were supposed to fix those bugs they had no way of knowing were there. And if they throw up their hands and say “it’s the hardware makers fault” then they’re seen as irresponsible for not fixing the bug that’s not their fault.

Of course if, when I get the game, it won’t run or it crashes I’ll probably change my tune completely…

I wonder how often I should pester Best Buy…

Still no NWN. Something odd I’ve noticed about people with this game though. A number of people won’t buy it because it’s $59.99. I have a 30% off coupon for Best Buy and I think it won’t be full rpice day one, so it’s less of an issue, but some people refuse to pay more than $40-$50 for a game. Others claim “this game sucks!” or “this game kicks ass!” right before or after they indicate that they don’t own the game yet. Remember – there haven’t been any reviews of this game yet, so people are mostly “rating” their game based on their affection for the genre or based off of previews. The most interesting however is the sheer number of people who refuse to buy the game until it gets a patch or two. No one has had the game long enough to have huge issues but yet the public is so distrustful by and large of 1.0 releases that they’ll stay away until the inevitable patch, especially for games where the “day one patch” is a custom.

Oh well, perhaps tommorow…

Yeah. So, I called Best Buy at 11:30 and they said they didn’t have Neverwinter Nights in, but that they would have it “soon”. K, so there went my lunchtime plans. Just as well, though – shit blew up here shortly after and it took until now to sort it all out. I’m going to call Best Buy again at 4:30 and see if they have it yet – I’ll pick it up on the way home. Failing that I’ll call at 8:30 since they close at 9.

I started to wonder if I was being a little too obsessive with this game but then I noticed GameSpy, whose website color is mostly green, went purple for the day in honor of NWN.