Ok, so first, sorry I have not posted in a while. First I was out of the continental united states for a couple of weeks in December, then had some pet problems in early January, followed up with breaking the crap out of my leg January 16th. I cracked my Tibia clean through about 3 inches above my ankle and then the tibia split up the bone about 6 inches, followed by cracking my fibula clean through just above the split in my tibia. I have a lovely 8″ metal plate in my leg with 15 screws now. so I do actually have a couple of good reasons for not posting. I just started feeling somewhat better, I got my appetite back this past Saturday and my pain is mostly manageable even though I rarely find a comfortable position to sit/lay. in
Happier news…
Sprint is finally getting an Android phone with the new 1GHz SnapDragon processor by Qualcomm (extra cool it is capable of going up to 1.5 GHz if I remember correctly). The HTC Super-sonic. Hopefully late March, early April!! finally! I’ve been waiting since October…
Next up, back to my lovely PC, most everything seems to be working just fine now, I am running with the default BIOS settings and it works at least; however the PC sits on the BIOS POST image for almost 2 minutes before it actually starts POSTing. Not sure what to do about that, I think I need to wait for the next BIOS update to fix that, but for now… it works.
So, I used a bootable CD with Paragon Defrag on it to Defrag my Windows 7 boot HDD and then used the Fedora 12 KDE x64 Live CD to install Fedora on the HDD by shrinking my Win7 partition by 100Gigs and then installed Fedora on it.
Now, the next time I booted into Windows 7 I got a message that my copy of Windows was not Genuine. Not sure what’s up with that, but I haven’t done anything about it, and I have not gotten the message again.
Now back to Fedora… I added the proprietary drivers for my Motherboard’s ATI Radeon 3300HD in an attempt to try to use wine to play Dungeons and Dragons Online (DDO) and a couple of other things, mostly some older games… after rebooting, I no longer get a GUI, just a blank black screen and about 8 lines down a blinking cursor. I can type, I can hit enter, but it does not respond. This has been going on since January 5th or so. Today I found out that Fedora has Virtual terminals just like FreeBSD, so very cool, I can at least get to a prompt today. Now I cannot find any assistance online for configuring the ATI drivers so I can get them to work. I know that a couple of versions ago they changed the command to configure the drivers, but I can’t find any helpful, current, information for this. I am lucky I found the aticonfig command again. I think I can figure it out from here though. It just bugs me that the only info I could find said not to use the drivers, then if you go to Wine‘s website they tell you if you don’t use the proprietary drivers that you can expect your games not to run well. What a pain. (not as big of a pain as my leg though) after searching for “aticonfig linux” I found some more info…
Will try and update again this week on how things are going, I am also working on my taxes so who knows… right now I am doing it on TurboTax.com but I think I will try a couple of others before I submit, even though I have used Turbo Tax for 15 years or so.
going back any farther would be trying at best…
Ok, the second Monday of the month I started my new job (still there at the time I am writting this) the last week of the month I ordered a Sheeva Wall Computing Plug Developers kit (wikipedia page, Marvell page, where to buy the developers kit) estimated shipping 6 – 8 weeks, was hoping it would arrive on my B-day…
I already added the tags for this page (and there are a lot) so I’m just going to jump down to May 2009…
I decided it was time to upgrade my computer, I had an HP Pavillion A730n with a Pentium4 530 3.0GHz HT and 2.5 GB of 184 pin DDR1 PC3200 RAM, I did have a GeForce 8800GT in it at least. So, I bought some new hardware to build my own computer (much cheaper, and you really can pay as you go…)
Total spent (including shipping) $514
I missed out on all the mail in rebates, because you only get 21 days to get them sent in AND you cannot return or exchange something if you clip the UPC out. well it actually is a good thing I didn’t do it, as I had to return the RAM I bought for a replacement (accidently got the DDR2 the first time)
Added the HDD’s I already own, a Rosewill 450W powersupply I already had (almost 2 years old) and used an HDMI cable to connect it to my 42″ Sony TV, had a heck of a time setting everything up, first there was a BIOS update so that my CPU and RAM would be recognized by the MB. Then they were correctly identified in all ways but one… the MHz rating on the CPU was showing as 800MHz per core, and the ram was coming up as 7-7-7-24 (and still does, but this does not bother me, after what I was using before)
Everything was starting to work ok, I had my system running stable and had started installing my apps again (was using Windows Vista Ulitmate x64) and a new BIOS update was available, I gave it a shot and it fixed some of the “automatically detected” settings in the BIOS so I was happy. Well then I tried going dual monitor with a 19″ HDTV I have, that way I did not have to remote in when my wife was watching tv in order to do anything. That is when all the problems started happening. The computer would just turn off randomly after 4-30 minutes of use. So I submitted a help ticket with ECS as when I dug into it, co-workers started to tell me it sounded like a “bad pipeline in the video card” which just happens to be the on-board video (AIT Radeon 3300HD).
After I was given that information, I started testing it, and sure enough, if I ran SETI at home GPU edition, the computer would crash, if I loaded the ATI Catalyst Control Center and went to the 3D settings screen, as soon as the demo animated the PC would crash, if I loaded World of Warcraft, the PC would crash before it even finished loading the login screen (note here, I was playing WoW on this computer before; however it would crash faster and faster. It started after 2 hours of play, then each time after that was quicker and quicker and at first I thought it was the game), so I quit playing WoW as I could not get it to work, not even after new video drivers came out. I Tried DDO Unlimited when it went free, the Game would crash as soon as it tried to load the characters on character select. After a few hundred attempts to get something to work, I finally got a pop-up message from windows, telling me the Video Card Driver had recovered from an unexpected crash.
ok, so I covered part of July in there too, new post and I’ll pickup some June stuff then move on…
- New blog post... Diablo III closed Beta http://t.co/dKC2ChWm
- New blog post... resolving video problems with K-L-Ubuntu and XFX Radeon 6850 http://t.co/H6bXuMqi
- New blog post... Computer upgrades http://t.co/6PWVNy4m
- $7 for $15 Worth of Hand-Tossed Pizza, Calzones, and Drinks at Andolini's Pizza Charleston, SC http://t.co/QnKwPwB
- New blog post... is zdnet.com/news down http://t.co/DThuI4r
- New blog post... Netflix Down? http://bit.ly/q74Svu
