Thread "Rant, moan, rave and share - for all your chatter, natter, and wildebeest needs" in forum "Comic Talk and General Discussion *"

Posted at 12:12PM, Dec. 2, 2011

ozoneocean wrote:

@ Lonne- I was joking :)

I know. But I just had to run with it. >:D

Posted at 7:12PM, Dec. 2, 2011

Dammit, now I want to go to Berlin… I've been to Trier btw.

Posted at 7:12PM, Dec. 2, 2011

@ayes
Its coming up to christmas. I forgot about that. Now its manditory that I become a massive tightwad and grump. Ill have to stick a paddle attachment to the cane so I can successfully get across the atlantic without freezing my hands off… as much. Glad to hear that the appendec-blah-de-blah-blah is better. Or getting there at least.
@Oz
I'll never be able to get rid of the northern irish twang so it'll just be a terrible immitation of the american accent. Meaning I must be doing it right.

Posted at 4:12AM, Dec. 3, 2011

Nice warm day today… and of course I chose today to do some long overdue gardening- cleaning up all those horrible leaves out the front of my house so the place doesn't look abandoned. :(
Worked at that till I almost couldn't stand. Frick it was hot out there! And I seem to have this idiot tendency to keep working at things beyond my natural safe level, like some brain dead machine…

Posted at 8:12AM, Dec. 3, 2011

ozoneocean wrote:
Nice warm day today… and of course I chose today to do some long overdue gardening- cleaning up all those horrible leaves out the front of my house so the place doesn't look abandoned. :(
Worked at that till I almost couldn't stand. Frick it was hot out there! And I seem to have this idiot tendency to keep working at things beyond my natural safe level, like some brain dead machine…

I guess what you'd call hot, us Brits would call the centre of the sun. I had to rake up leaves last month and it was about 3 degrees celsius and I still ended up too warm.

Posted at 2:12PM, Dec. 3, 2011

Here's something I'm trying to figure out…

Is my current computer (AMD Athlon 64X2 Dual Core 3800+, 2 gigs RAM) still relevant this day and all I need do is upgrade the video card? Or should I do a full system upgrade ASAP? Decisions, decisions…

Yet another reason why my father keeps telling me to get a girlfriend. She could make those tough decisions for me…. -_-;

Posted at 7:12PM, Dec. 3, 2011

@Lonne- Drunk Duck IS your girlfriend.

@Reve- At 3 degrees you were prolly wearing a whole lot more than I was out there yesterday! No wonder you got hot. :)
It's good to have it warm out there at the moment. So far Summer has been pretty cool. No more garden work for a while though.

Posted at 12:12AM, Dec. 4, 2011

Well… went and did it. Just got my upgrades, and it was worth it. Only thing I can't upgrade yet is my hard drive as the prices are very VERY HIGH at the moment. The reason? Apparently the factories in Thailand which make most of the world's hard drives have flooded and it'll be a few months before prices go down. There was another computer store that was offering me 500GB hard drives for under $100, but the owner of the computer store where I've always bought my computer equipment for many years warned me against it; their drives are probably refurbished and won't last very long. Worse… the store offering me cheap hard drives may not last too much longer. Doesn't help that the guy who opened that store was a former worker for the store I shop at, and that guy wasn't a very nice guy to deal with…

As for my system right now, I'll have to say that while I've used GeForce cards for a long time, I'm not fanboy. I'm now running an ATI card in my system and it performs better than the GeForce GT 520 they had there (and the 520 runs even worse than one of the GT 400 series cards!!!). Anyways… specs…

AMD Athlon II X2 260 Processor 3.2 GHZ
4 GB System RAM (only 3GB used as I'm running Windows XP)
AMD/ATI Radeon HD 6570 Sapphire with 1024 GB DDR3 video RAM
All on a Gigabyte S2P motherboard (with special adapters to allow my IDE hard drives to interface with the SATA parts on the motherboard as there are no native IDE ports)

Not the beefiest system in the world, but I'm not a hardcore gamer who demands maximum performance from his games and game systems. :)

Posted at 1:12AM, Dec. 4, 2011

Yeah hard drive prices have gone up recently for that reason but i found getting stuff from chain stores negates the rise, well with some of them anyway. It's the independents taht jack it up quickly as they don't hold loads of stock at giant warehouse and get it to order. I added 1TB to mine recently and it cost me £50.

Posted at 1:12AM, Dec. 4, 2011

Genejoke wrote:
Yeah hard drive prices have gone up recently for that reason but i found getting stuff from chain stores negates the rise, well with some of them anyway. It's the independents taht jack it up quickly as they don't hold loads of stock at giant warehouse and get it to order. I added 1TB to mine recently and it cost me £50.

I'll still wait. I've been burnt with a "refurbished" hard drive before (new ones will last 5 years, refurbs will last a year or 2). Hopefully prices go down in a few months. Not that I need that much space. I don't download that much anyways.

Posted at 1:12PM, Dec. 4, 2011

Heh… finished the last of my upgrades. Now in addition to the rainbow LED fan (yellow, red, green) that came with my case I now have red and blue case fans lighting up the interior of my computer. Now if only I can find a rainbow LED CPU fan…

Posted at 6:12PM, Dec. 4, 2011

Sounds like a good machine Lonne! But you really should make the move to Windows 7 soon…

I worked harder than I thought when gardening on Saturday- either that or I'm way less fit than I thought. Or maybe those damn shoes I wore were the problem since it's my feet and various leg muscles that are aching like a bastard two days later. Owwwww!

Posted at 11:12PM, Dec. 4, 2011

ozoneocean wrote:
Sounds like a good machine Lonne! But you really should make the move to Windows 7 soon…

Heh… thanks. Soon as I can (and when it's dark) I'm tempted to take a picture of the system with all its lights blazing. Heh… this thing has a lot of lights on it.

Posted at 6:12AM, Dec. 5, 2011

omaha, snomaha, homaha.
blech.

Posted at 11:12AM, Dec. 5, 2011

Lonnehart wrote:
ozoneocean wrote:
Sounds like a good machine Lonne! But you really should make the move to Windows 7 soon…

Heh… thanks. Soon as I can (and when it's dark) I'm tempted to take a picture of the system with all its lights blazing. Heh… this thing has a lot of lights on it.

do it!!!!!!

Posted at 12:12PM, Dec. 5, 2011

@Lonne: you definitely need to get a song to go with what sounds like a wmp skin. I suggest Sousa.

and Oz, how much is Microsoft paying you (windows 7: rah rah rah)?
XP is perfectly functional, and not every manufacturer (hard and soft) has their updated drives and patches so what worked before will continue to work with that which is Windows 7.

—

So you're all wondering, aren't you. (I know you're not). The good news: I AM back at work. The bad news, I AM back at work – and there's a month of insanity to instantly absorb. *where are those pain killers?*
Also, it keeps sounding like the microwave is finished zapping something, BUT there is NOTHING in the microwave . . . .

beep. beep. beep.

Posted at 1:12PM, Dec. 5, 2011

Well… here it is…

Luckily I also replace the power supply. My old 380 watt power supply would be weeping from having to support all those lights and equipment…

Posted at 1:12PM, Dec. 5, 2011

@Lonne: keepin those matches right there by the PC because . . . . ?

Posted at 1:12PM, Dec. 5, 2011

ayesinback wrote:
@Lonne: keepin those matches right there by the PC because . . . . ?

I have a set of candles nearby. Just in case the power goes out and it lasts more than a few minutes…

Posted at 2:12PM, Dec. 5, 2011

Playing through ME2, but this time with some downloaded content. Messed with that one glitch that the ME wiki mentioned. It was only supposed to be done twice and… well…

I normally would've gotten 900 credits from that last safe I bypassed, but this time I got 5400 creds instead. :)

Posted at 9:12PM, Dec. 5, 2011

Impressively pretty case!
I'd image the video card, CPU and ram gobble up far, far more power than a few LEDs?

@Ayes- Yep, XP is fine enough for older machines, but with something newer like Lonne's beasti it makes more sense to go with the newer OS.
My home comps are all XP and Vista and they work well enough for my needs. :)

Posted at 9:12PM, Dec. 5, 2011

ozoneocean wrote:
Impressively pretty case!
I'd image the video card, CPU and ram gobble up far, far more power than a few LEDs?

The CPU and RAM would eat more power, but the video card doesn't use as much as the high end ones. It doesn't require itself to have its own power supply connection. I was told that the ATI 6570 Sapphire is an entry level card just as the GeForce GT 520 is. However, the ATI card performs much better than the GeForce entry level GT. Just don't expect great performance if you're going to try running at resolutions higher than 1280x1024.

I have yet to be disappointed (my monitor can't handle resolutions higher than what I mentioned). :)

One thing about video cards I'm trying to figure out is this… how are some people able to tell the quality of the various video cards out there? Assuming the cards are running a game at the same frame rate, how does one tell which has great graphics vs not so great graphics? My personal standards for graphics must be low since I'm satisfied with XB360 graphics…

Posted at 2:12AM, Dec. 6, 2011

I shouldn't worry too much about graphics, what the 360 and ps3 push out is pretty good. Sure powerful PCs can do better but I don't see much point, which is why I do most of my gaming on console even though my pc is pretty powerful.

Posted at 5:12AM, Dec. 6, 2011

For me, I measure the worth of my card in that it doesn't use as much power as the last one and has no issues running my 1920x1080 TV and 1600x1200 cintiq, so I can watch a DVD on one screen while photoshopping on the other… or whatever. The only games I give a crap about thses days are the Mass Effect series, and it has no problem there.

Speaking of graphics, people seem to be going mad for that Skyrim game, but the graphics in all the vids I've seen look like something made for an iphone… Crude, chunky polygons, low textures and muddy colours. Looks about 10 years old… So the gameplay and story much be amazing right?

Posted at 6:12AM, Dec. 6, 2011

the graphics on skyrim are mixed, but the overall effect is good. It's the gameplay and depth of the setting that make it though.