Archive for the 'Hardware' Category

VIA: Cheaper than your mom

Published on January 15, 2008 in Hardware. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

This is a quick one, but I have to say this while I’m sitting here.

I’m sitting at a customer’s house right now. I’m looking at a very, VERY nice 19″ LG widescreen monitor. It’s attached to an HP desktop with a VIA chipset. The onboard video does not support widescreen resolutions.

I WANT

TO FUCKING

VOMIT.

This is laziness, sloppiness, and whore..i..ness all rolled into one. In fact, I will paste some of my disgust in IRC format:

11:03 < Dan> i hate VIA
11:03 < Dan> I hate them good
11:03 < Dan> "LET'S ONLY CODE SUPPORT FOR 4:3 RESOLUTIONS INTO THE BIOS!!!!!!"
11:03 < Dan> "YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY"
11:03 < Dan> meanwhile I'm on a widescreen LCD
11:03 < Dan> this looks like shit
11:03 < lophyte> lofl
11:04 < Dan> I want to vomit
11:04 < Dan> I MIGHT VOMIT

This is a cheap HP desktop with an Athlon XP 3100+ seated onto an ASUS motherboard of shitty design. Since ASUS doesn’t support these OEM motherboards, there naturally isn’t a BIOS update capable of fixing this issue. As such I’m forced to sit here, unable to fix an issue that will likely drive me insane for the next few hours.

I suppose when you take absolutely no pride in your work, you naturally wouldn’t code support for anything but 4:3 resolutions. Fucking vomit inducing.

I believe I shall go home and masturbate all over my old hardware with Intel chipsets, because at least I can hook those up to a widescreen monitor and see EXACTLY WHAT I’M SUPPOSED TO SEE.

As angry as I want to be, I honestly have to point the blame directly at the consumer. HP naturally will pick the cheapest components possible when trying to sell a budget computer. If there’s one lesson I’ve repeatedly tried to teach, it’s that when purchasing a computer (or any electronics really) you honestly do get what you pay for. The practice of putting extremely cheap hardware into extremely cheap computers will never end—there’s no stopping the supply of cheapasses who need a new computer but aren’t willing to put any coin into it.

Just please, don’t look at me with that “well why didn’t you warn me?!” look when your computer dies a year and one day after owning it and you’re stranded with no warranty.

30 days with a PowerMac G4.

Published on June 9, 2007 in Hardware and Operating Systems. 1 Comment

Okay fine, it’s only been 2. But 2 days is not an impressive title. Go fuck yourself.

There’s been a rash lately of these “30 days with…” articles that have forced me, the lowest of the low on the internet, to respond with one of my own. Granted, it’s not going to be the 10 page extravaganza that the others have been, but I think it’ll be worth at least reading the first sentence before you shake your head in disgust and resume masturbating to your censored Japanese hentai. So bear with me while I write a humorless update.

I’ve not been using my computers lately. There’s nothing wrong with them, I just find that after I spend my days fixing other people’s horrendous issues with computers, I don’t even want to look at mine. I’d rather read a book or something. But this has forced me to sit up and do something: I scored a free dual processor PowerMac G4. And holy tits do I love it.

A list of specs, before I begin (for those too lazy to click the link… jerkbags.):
– Apple Mirrored Drive Door PowerMac G4.
– Dual 1GHz PowerPC 7455 processors.
– Originally 512MB of RAM.
– 80GB IBM DeskStar 7200RPM hard drive.
– Apple Superdrive (really a rebranded Pioneer 2X DVD-RW drive.)
– ATI Radeon 9000 Mac Edition with ADP.
– 2 USB 1 Ports, 2 Firewire 400 ports.

The very first thing I did with it when I got it home is yank out the pitiful 80GB IBM “Deathstar” hard drive. It was boring, slow, and apt to fail. It was quickly replaced with a (slightly more questionable) Samsung 120GB drive that I honestly trusted more. I also added an extra 512MB of RAM, bringing the total memory to a respectable 1GB. After these upgrades were complete, I popped in my the first disc of my spare OSX 10.4 installation media. After a zippy 20 minute installation—which surprised me, considering the hardware—I was all set and ready to go.

Initially I had some concerns as to how well Tiger would perform on the 7 year old hardware. Mostly concerns that began with “this shit is so old…” and ended with “predates cancer.” But, instead of being able to whine about the slowness, I was proven wrong; the damned thing was blazing fast. So, content with how things had turned out, I went to sleep.

But the second day turned out a few more realizations: I wasn’t satisfied. The GUI was somewhat choppy, I was missing out on the niceness of Core Image, and the CPU usage when scrolling down my Applications list or a website was just extravagant. I couldn’t deal with it—I demand hardware acceleration. So I set off to see if there was any way to get Core Image enabled on the awful included Radeon card.

There wasn’t.

That angered me. So far, all of the upgrades to my Mac were just random bits of hardware I had laying around my apartment. The idea of this setup is to keep everything absolutely free, so I wasn’t going to go drop $200 on an overpriced Radeon 9600 Mac Edition. There’s gotta be a better way.

After some lengthy research, I found that it was possible to flash the firmware on my old, unused GeForce FX5200 to make it compatible with Mac hardware. So after some more digging, I came across StrangeDogs, a forum dedicated to flashing PC cards for use on Macs. Great! I downloaded the closest firmware (although it needed to be edited to keep in sync with the clock speeds of my godawful FX5200) and flashed the card. I installed it in my Mac and…

…Nothing. Well poop.

As it turns out, you need to somehow disable pins 3 and 11 on the card. To make a long story short, those pins regularly used to force recognition of AGP 8x speeds on standard PC motherboards were used for enabling Apple’s ADC (Apple Display Connector). At the time of the PowerMac’s design, AGP 8x was unheard of, so the pins were unused. Fine. So I grabbed some scotch tape and carefully taped over the pins, rendering them useless. HEY COOL THE CARD WORKS OH MY GOD.

The result was beautiful. Instead of a laggy GUI that was bottlenecked by the awful video card, I now had a snappy, responsive, and feature-intensive interface with all the bells and whistles that come with CoreImage being enabled. I could scroll, dock events could bounce, I could even use fast user switch! OOOOOH!

So 2 days into my PowerMac experience, I’m very pleased. I’ll keep updating as I find more and more neat features to wax on about. Until then, die in a fire and stop reading this drivel.

Pentium D’s suck

Published on January 2, 2006 in Hardware. 0 Comments

Nevermind I guess I’ll just start technology bitching now since this is a new issue that really is driving me nuts.

About a month ago I got my hands on a Pentium D 840 with 4 gigs of RAM and an Intel D955XBK motherboard (I also got an Asus P5LD2 but I really don’t care about it.) All right, that’s all well and good, but here’s a little secret about the Pentium D’s—they’re fucking INEFFICIENT and they run hotter than Satan’s balls. I would assume Satan has hot balls. And not the “well damn those are nice balls” hot, the “OH GOD MY HAND IS ON FIRE WHY IS MY HAND TOUCHING YOUR BALLS DEAR GOD NO” hot.

Complete System Specs

Honestly, I’ve been pretty satisfied with the performance of the machine. My biggest problem is how awful the heat is. Right now I have this thing sitting with both sidepanels open, with a nearby fan blowing towards it. Check this out:

Seriously, this is hot stuff people. Granted, I’m pretty sure the temperature sensor on the motherboard doesn’t work (look at all the errors Speedfan is spitting out) but still, it’s pretty bad.

Regardless, Intel’s latest processors have run hotter than hell. Ever since Prescott, Intel has pretty much thrown thermals into the wind and built the hottest processors I’ve ever seen. In all honesty, the Pentium D’s run hotter than my old AMD T-Bird 1.2GHz box. Not to mention Intel’s rushed design of the Pentium D to compete with AMD’s X2 line of processors. Basically you have two cores sharing the 800MHz bus speed. And without an onboard memory controller, in order for this processor to communicate with the second core instructions must be sent from the first core, out to the bus to the memory controller and BACK along the bus to the second core, when the two are basically sitting nanometers apart.

That’s pretty bad, guys.

So the bottom line: if you were to pay full price for these CPUs, I have to laugh at you. You wasted your money.

Blu-Ray woes

Published on October 2, 2005 in Hardware and News. 0 Comments

HP in battle with Microsoft and Intel over HD and BluRay
Fort Collins (CO) – In response to Microsoft’s and Intel’s joint announcement on Monday that they had joined the HD DVD Promotions Group, citing six of what they consider failures of rival Blu-ray high-definition video disc technology, an engineer for Blu-ray proponent HP, who is close to the standards process for the Blu-ray Disc Association, is claiming Intel and Microsoft have been extensively misled, and are spreading misleading information about Blu-ray Disc.

“I think there’s some misinformation being spread about the Blu-ray Disc format,” Josh Peterson, director of strategic alliances for HP’s Optical Storage Solutions group, told Tom’s Hardware Guide. HP is an outspoken member of the Blu-ray Disc Association, and an active participant in building standards for that format. “Certainly, Microsoft and Intel carry big brand presence,” Peterson added, “but we don’t really feel that their support of either format is really going to change the landscape with respect to hardware availability in the marketplace, or the consumer choice…when products are on the shelf next year.”

full article

If there’s one thing I’m tired of in today’s marketing is multiple standards for something that performs the exact same task. Yet another prime example is the ongoing battle of Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. Now I understand that we live under the lovely umbrella of capitalism, but there’s a point where diversity among product bases is just completely unnecessary. This seems to be a recurring theme when looking at the DVD market. DVD+R and DVD-R anyone?

WHY?