Monthly Archives: May 2007

You can’t argue with free, but I will anyways…

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So, about a month ago my video card died. It was an MSI Radeon X1900XT 512MB PCI-e. Nice card, quite fast. One day, it just refused to show video.

I gave the part back to my vendor, since it was within 1 year and said “replace it”. The vendor sent it back to MSI for repair/swap.

Fast forward to yesterday. It took MSI forever to get my card back to me, but they did come though. I got the replacement card, and there was good news. It was an upgrade. A free upgrade. To a much nicer card. An nVidia 8800 GTS 320MB. MSI seriously pumped my video performance for free. WOOT! (Check ‘em out on Toms’ Hardware…)

I took out the crappy PCI Radeon 9250 I had been limping along with and installed the 8800GTS. Went to nVidia’s website. Installed the newest drivers. Everything looked great. My LDView models looked great, and rotated faster than 1 frame every aeon.

Naturally, because of the nice upgrade, this called for updating the 3DMark scores on the website here. I fired up 3DMark and ran it through the minimum tests required to get a score. I thought it ran slow, and I was right. The final score was 2000 points SLOWER than the card I had originally.

WTF!

I did some research and tried everything everyone said about this card, my Motherboard, and even the card brand. I uninstalled drivers, ran DriverCleaner, and reinstalled. No joy. I tried updating DirectX. No joy. I removed all unnecessary cards, drives, and peripherals. No Joy. I made sure my powersupply was properly rated for the card. It was. I even went so far as to disconnect my OS drive and connect a new one, then install a clean copy of Windows, then the chipset driver, then the
video driver, you know, the proper order to ensure happy video goodness. NO JOY!

The only thing that I could think of is that the CPU is overclocked, and perhaps there was some sort of odd timing thing. I dropped the Core 2 Duo E4300 from it’s happy perch at 2.7 Ghz back to is lowly origins at 1.8Ghz. Lo and behold, the card perks up and is nice and snappy.

WTF, part 2!

Now, I researched specifics about my card coupled with my motherboard, a Gigabyte 965P-DS3 v2.0. Nobody had any real suggestions. So I started playing with Front side bus settings, memory ratios, and PCI-e bus settings. Nothing I tried worked. I decided to flash the BIOS from the version I had, F9, to the newest, F11. No joy.

I then did some more Googling, because by this time, I am ready to try any hairbrained idea I could find, and I found this cool forum post talking about how to get the most out of your DS3 motherboard. I tried doing everything they said there, including increasing the PCI-e bus to 102mhz. Still, no Joy. I tried 104Mhz. No POST.

At this point, I start fudging around with the FSB setting, starting at the default of 200Mhz and bumping it one Mhz at a time, trying to see where the breaking point was. I found it, at a measly 205mhz. I needed to be at 300Mhz to get my machine back to 2.7Ghz. All of this leads me to think there is some sort of weird timing/sync issue between the FSB and the PCI-e bus that makes the video card wait for a couple of cycles before pushing out data, or whatever.

I went back to that cool forum post and read all of the comments at the bottom. Some people were reporting about instability issues, and stating that there are many people who had success with this instability by bumping up their PCI-e bus above 110-115mhz stabilized their systems. I thought “fork!” because mine would not work above 104! I dropped back into the BIOS and set it to 110, thinking “what the hell, worst that will happen is it won’t POST again.”

It worked. OMGWTFBBQ, it f***ing worked. At a PCI-e setting of 110 mhz, and with my CPU overclocked to it’s fast 2.7Ghz, the machine POSTed, booted, ran 3DMark06, and gave a nice score of 9551 3DMarks.

I HATE COMPUTER HARDWARE, and love it at the same time. What else can exasperate you yet engage your mind to it’s fullest at the same time?

Not much, that’s what.

Check out my new speccies, here.

I went old hat again.

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Yup, I love knowing all the old DOS/Win3.1/Win9x tricks. Another one of my technicians, D, was having issues with a Majhongg program. Whenever you tried to run the program, it complained of not having a “suitable device”, and to check DirectX and the display driver.

D is a very good thorough technician. He checked just about everything. D checked both DirectX and the video driver, and both were okay. He checked the program itself by removal/reinstall. That didn’t work. He tried the application on another computer to rule out the program just being crappy. The program worked on another computer.

To rule out basic “Windows-is-messed-up-broken” issues, he disconnected the customer’s drive, attached a new one, installed Windows and drivers fresh, then installed the program. Now, the program works. D was thinking “Format/Reinstall”. He had to leave for an appointment and was going to try the format/install when he returned. I had another idea however. I was thinking “program settings”.

My thought was that perhaps the customer put the game into some sort of resolution mode that the video card/driver just couldn’t handle, and because the game is crappy and cheap, it had no routine to catch this, so it just broke.

To test this, I put the machine in the “working install” mode and looked at the video card settings. My intuition voice called out to me “try that one”, a weird setting with options of HAL and REF. I switched it from HAL to REF. The once working program now crashed with the same error message the “broken install” crashed with. AH HA! But now a problem: How to change the setting back, so I can fix the “broken install”. Any normal technician knows settings are saved in the Registry, so in I go.

I mucked around in the registry looking for settings for the game, but I simply couldn’t find anything other than user registration info. Then, my old hat voice spoke up and said “ini file”. AH HA again! Ini files, the way Win3.1 programs saved their settings. I mucked around the game’s program folder, and found an ini file loaded with settings. My intuition voice spoke up again and said “try that one”. I changed the setting called VideoMode from =1 to =0. Game works again.

At this point, I had to leave, so I told T how to fix it without giving him the details of how I came about it, so he could tell D when D got back. I returned to the shop after D had returned and left for the day, and T told me:

“I gave your message to D. He said ‘how in heck did -inanis- figure that out?!?”

Ah yes, old hat strikes again. You can’t get this at Geek Squad.

I hacked my own blog’s core code…

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So, the search function in the Presstopia blog software used for my blog is kinda broken. If you do a search for a term, and that term happens to be part of any non-display part of an <a> tag (i.e. an attribute) embedded in one of your posts, it will break the <a> tag.

Until now.

I made a custom hack to the highlighter algorithm that seems to work. Now I feel really smart, because I don’t know the first thing about advanced code. I sent an email to the blog software developer letting him know of this bug. Hopefully he can come up with a much more elegant solution. Below is what I said:

Salutations. I use the Presstopia Blog, and it works very well for my
needs. It’s simple, no frills, and efficient, just how I like things. I
also like your focus on styling everything, making it extremely
customizable. This allowed me to integrate it into my pre-existing
website without requiring me to redesign the site around your blog
software. Even though the “blog” link and everything under it are
entirely controlled by the Presstopia Blog software, the efficient
coding allowed me to change the blog’s layout to make it completely
transparent. You can check it out here: http://www.inanis.net

I noticed a bug in the Search feature, however, that was really
annoying. If you did a search for any word or single character, and
said item happened to be inside or be a part of an <a> tag
embedded in a post, then the code would surround said item with the
<span> highlight code, and break the <a> tag.

For example, if I had a post with an embedded link to another page on my site, like this:

Some post text and other crap.

<a href=”/home/music.html>Music!</a>

More post text about music.

The code would not only match the “Music” in the text and between the
<a> opening and closing tag, but also the “music” inside the href
of the opening <a> tag. This would, obviously, break the
<a> tag, resulting in this:

Some post text and other crap.

<a href=”/home/<span
class=”highlight”>music</span>.html><span
class=”highlight”>Music</span>!</a>

More post text about <span class=”highlight”>music</span>.

This obviously breaks the tag.

Since I love to take code into my own hands and destroy the hell out of
it just to see what happens, I created a quick and dirty hack that
seems to fix the problem. I am by no means a programmer by any stretch
of the imagination and my understanding of VB is basic at best, so my
code is quite crufty. Replacement code is below. If it finds a match
outside an <a> tag, the behavior is the same. If it finds one
inside an <a> tag, it prepends a little notice to the front of
the post body (Text) saying that it found a match inside the tag. I’m
sure you can come up with something much more elegant and faster…

In my opinion, the search system overall needs checking added to it to
catch embedded HTML (for example: the < and > brackets of tags)
so it doesn’t break other formatting. Right now, if you search for
those things, it WILL break any formatting embedded in the post. I
believe this is an issue with both the search algorithm and the
“highlighting” algorithm, but I don’t have the knowledge to do any more
complex hacking on the idea.

Oh, and by the way, do you plan on adding more features to the
Presstopia blog in the future? Personally, I would love to see a way to
administer the BlogRoll via the user interface. I also like the idea of
tagging. I wouldn’t be surprised if you said “no”, as they are not
trivial additions. I am sure they require changing the database layout
along with a chunk of new code, and if people upgrade to a new version,
there will have to be some sort of database upgrade script… :oP

Oh well, here is my dirty hack, from {ommitted for security}. Enjoy, and keep up the excellent coding.

‘FUNCTION : Highlight words in a text string

{ function code ommitted for security }

Favorite Video Game Music

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Just thought I would jot down the names of some of my favorite video game songs and/or whole games with great music:

  • Super Mario Bros. – NES: Main Theme. Need I say anything.
  • M.C. Kids – NES: The thing that’s really cool about this game is how cleverly they -engineered- the music, along with the creativity that went into making the music fit the game and sound really memorable. My favorite here can be heard in level 4 of Ronald’s Clubhouse, or on track 6 in the NSF file from the game.
  • Megaman 3 – NES: The whole game has awesome f***ing music, but Magnet Man in particular is great.
  • Dr. Mario – NES: Fever. Catchy Tune
  • Final Fantasy 7 – PS1/PC: Gold Saucer Music

New post on ShatteredWindows, and XP Pro CD

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Just wrote a cool new parody article for ShatteredWindows, making up crap about Apple, and iPods and the recent news about them potentially killing people. It’s funny stuph, but totally untrue …. but still funny anyways. Check it out here: iPods found to kill pacemakers

On another note, because we see this in the shop all too often: Dell’s “Windows XP Pro Pre-activated with Pre-programed Product Key” discs when installed in any computer other than the one with which the disc came will not stay pre-activated, will not activate with the pre-programmed key, and will not pass Genuine Advantage validation. So if you thought you could use one to get around buying Windows, tough luck. Besides, there are better ways for you thieves to do it. No, I won’t tell you how, go away.