Let’s talk about the Evo 4G camera…
the camera takes acceptable pictures, as has been mentioned online, it will NOT replace even a decent point and shoot, nor any quality of dedicated video camera. I have not yet tested the 720p video but should be able to today, so I will update this post with tha tinfo before uploading it to my blog. Right, here is my list of good and bad and somewhere in between things with the camera on the HTC Evo 4G:
1. The pictures are crisp, clear, and sharp, most of the time.
2. The pictures are almost always in focus and the camera can focus anywhere on the screen with just a touch from the user, else it auto focuses on the center most often (I believe if you are taking a full frame or closer shot of a person, it will focus on the face, as I have seen it detect faces, sometimes… the auto-focus is fairly quick, IF you let it focus before you hit the camera button (to take the picture), I have noticed it can focus in less than 2 seconds always, and less than 1 second most of the time, if you let it; however if you hit the shutter release button before the camera can focus it appears to go through a pre-programed focal distant test that follows the same pattern every time and basically starts at infinity and works it’s way closer, testing every setting in between. This process might take 1.5-4 seconds depending on how far you are from the subject in the center of the screen. again if you touch to focus before shooting, it is very quick to come into focus. still on the matter of focusing, it appears that there is also a 3-4 second time out set on the focusing script, if it cannot focus in that amount of time, it just gives up. So, if your subject is moving closer to, or farther away from you, or even back and forth, it might not be able to focus on it and will take a blurry picture (if you tell the camera to shoot the picture without picking a focal point or allowing it to come into focus first). my recommendation in this situation (ie with kids running around) is to pick a spot on the ground, touch that part of the screen, forcing focus there, and take your shot. one more comment on this part and I’ll move on… fast moving objects that are close to you are going to be blurry. my dog was walking and his legs are blurry, not running, not reacting to something, just walking along. maybe it was just a bad shot, I’ll keep trying of course…
3. Apparently the lens maximum opening is a wee bit larger then the sensor, this normally happens in a fixed lens system when the quality of the lens is subpar and it suffers from image degredation on the outer edges of the glass, as such a manufacturer would make the sensor smaller so that most if not all of the degredation would not be seen in the final image.
4. There also appears to be an issue with white balance/auto-adjust levels. I have an extremely white dog, when taking pictures of him with my Evo, he has this aura of pure white that creates a halo around his body, this appears to only happen when he is outside and in near direct sunlight. I do not have this issue with my 4 year old kodak 8.0mp point and shoot.
5. the digital zoom appears to be only 1.8x or maybe a full 2.0x. Definitely not enough to make anyone even think of replacing their digital camera, not when there are those two new sweet ass models from Olympus that have 30x optical zoom and 2x-5x digital!!
6. I have not been able to discover any way to manipulate the shutter speed or aperture in the default camera app, I will look later and see if someone else has made a camera app for Android that might be capable of doing this. But, you cannot use manual mode, there is no “active” mode for moving subjects, not night shot mode (although it does pretty good in loow light on auto!), no landscape mode, no portrait mode, no modes at all to be frank! (please don’t call me frank, I really don’t like that name…)
7. no option for taking panorama shots.
8. it does support ISO settings of auto, or 100, 200, 400, 800, 1250
9. quality settings of high, fine, and normal
10. resolution settings of small 640×384, 1mp 1280×768, 3mp 2048×1216, 5mp 2592×1552, or 8mp 3264×1952
11. widescreen 5:3 or normal 4:3 image ratio (most useful for video)
12. 2 or 10 seconds self-timer
13. the option to turn on or off geo-tagging; however it is always off unless you turn GPS on FIRST, then go into the camera settings and turn the geo-tagging on, as the geo-tagging reverts to “off” anytime the GPS is shut down on your phone. so you must do this everytime, or leave GPS on always (not a good idea for your battery)
14. the effects are interesting, none, greyscale, sepia, negative, solarize, posterize, and aqua (just turns everything smurfy) they work in less than .5 seconds on the current display. I will try later when I do some video tests to see if they effect the videos also.
14. there are manual brightness, contrast, saturation, and sharpness settings, but you will rarely need them. for some really weird reason the brightness setting has it’s own menu tab, and the other three are all together.
15. there is a timeout of about 3 minutes where the camera will shut off and the phone will display a message telling yo uto touch the display to activate the camera, which is a nice feature, IF that actually saves you any battery life…
That is about it for the camera at this time, I will be posting images here every now and then, most likely I will be dropping lower rez versions on the blog, but will link to full rez images so you can click to see the whole thing for detail.
I have not yet been able to output HDMI video, nor have I been able to sync any BlueTooth devices to it yet; however I have a handsfree car speakerphone with FM transmitter in the mail on its way to me, and a stereo Bluetooth Headphones/Headset coming as well. So, I will have some more information on this soon. I will be ordering a new HDMI cable in another week and will post up how that goes then too, I actually ordered a cable before the phone launched, but apparently there is a special cable for the Evo, and the one I bought (a really nice HDMI 1.4 5 meter cable too) does not have the correct connector plug, so I will have to buy the special HTC Evo cable for $20 instead of the $4 cable I already bought…
Let’s talk about the Evo 4G camera…
While the camera does take some pretty acceptable pictures, as has been mentioned online, it will NOT replace even a $100 point and shoot, nor any quality of dedicated video camera. Here is my list of good and bad and somewhere in between things with the camera on the HTC Evo 4G:
1. The pictures are crisp, clear, and sharp, most of the time.
2. The pictures are almost always in focus and the camera can focus anywhere on the screen with just a touch from the user, else it auto focuses on the center most often (I believe if you are taking a full frame or closer shot of a person, it will focus on the face, as I have seen it detect faces, sometimes… the auto-focus is fairly quick, IF you let it focus before you hit the camera button (to take the picture), I have noticed it can focus in less than 2 seconds always, and less than 1 second most of the time, if you let it; however if you hit the shutter release button before the camera can focus it appears to go through a pre-programed focal distant test that follows the same pattern every time and basically starts at infinity and works it’s way closer, testing every setting in between. This process might take 1.5-4 seconds depending on how far you are from the subject in the center of the screen. again if you touch to focus before shooting, it is very quick to come into focus. still on the matter of focusing, it appears that there is also a 3-4 second time out set on the focusing script, if it cannot focus in that amount of time, it just gives up. So, if your subject is moving closer to, or farther away from you, or even back and forth, it might not be able to focus on it and will take a blurry picture (if you tell the camera to shoot the picture without picking a focal point or allowing it to come into focus first). my recommendation in this situation (ie with kids running around) is to pick a spot on the ground, touch that part of the screen, forcing focus there, and take your shot. one more comment on this part and I’ll move on… fast moving objects that are close to you are going to be blurry. my dog was walking and his legs are blurry, not running, not reacting to something, just walking along. maybe it was just a bad shot, I’ll keep trying of course…
2b. There is a setting in the camera for standard metering modes: center, average, and spot.
2c. Also white balance modes: auto, Incandescent, Fluorescent, Daylight, and Cloudy.
3. Apparently the lens maximum opening is a wee bit larger then the sensor, this normally happens in a fixed lens system when the quality of the lens is subpar and it suffers from image degredation on the outer edges of the glass, as such a manufacturer would make the sensor smaller so that most if not all of the degredation would not be seen in the final image.
4. There also appears to be an issue with white balance/auto-adjust levels. I have an extremely white dog, when taking pictures of him with my Evo, he has this aura of pure white that creates a halo around his body, this appears to only happen when he is outside and in near direct sunlight. I do not have this issue with my 4 year old Kodak 8.0mp point and shoot.
5. The digital zoom appears to be only 1.8x or maybe a full 2.0x. Definitely not enough to make anyone even think of replacing their digital camera, not when there is that new sweet ass model from Olympus with 30x optical zoom and 5x digital!!
6. I have not been able to discover any way to manipulate the shutter speed or aperture in the default camera app, I will look later and see if someone else has made a camera app for Android (there is one I saw “advertised” on AppBrain, haven’t tried it yet) that might be capable of doing this. But, you cannot use manual mode, there is no “active” mode for moving subjects, no night shot mode (although it does pretty good in low light on auto! see the fountain shot on part 2!), no landscape mode, no portrait mode, no modes at all to be frank! (please don’t call me frank, I really don’t like that name…)
7. No option for taking panorama shots.
8. It does support ISO settings of auto, or 100, 200, 400, 800, 1250
9. Quality settings are fairly standard: high, fine, and normal.
10. Available resolution settings of small 640×384, 1mp 1280×768, 3mp 2048×1216, 5mp 2592×1552, or 8mp 3264×1952
11. Widescreen 5:3 or normal 4:3 image ratio (most useful for video but not available when shooting video)
12. 2 or 10 seconds self-timer
13. There is the option to turn on or off geo-tagging; however it is always off unless you turn GPS on FIRST, then go into the camera settings and turn the geo-tagging on, as the geo-tagging reverts to “off” anytime the GPS is shut down on your phone. so you must do this everytime, or leave GPS on always (not a good idea for your battery)
14. Special effects, which are interesting to play with: none, greyscale, sepia, negative, solarize, posterize, and aqua (just turns everything smurfy) they work in less than .5 seconds on the current display. I will try later when I do some video tests to see if they effect the videos also.
15. Additional settings are available, including: manual brightness, contrast, saturation, and sharpness settings, but you will rarely need them. for some really weird reason the brightness setting has it’s own menu tab, and the other three are all together on one.
16. The Evo does have a sleep timer of about 3 minutes where the camera will shut off and the phone will display a message telling yo uto touch the display to activate the camera, which is a nice feature, IF that actually saves you any battery life…
Some video settings include:
1. Switch camera front/rear.
2. The same white balance options of the camera.
3. The same brightness, contrast, saturation, and sharpness settings screens.
4. The same effect screens.
5. Resolutions: 720p (1280×720), WVGA (800×480), VGA (640×480), CIF (352×288), QVGA (320×240).
6. Encoding options: H.263 and MPEG4.
7. Defined recording length: 1MB, 2MB, 10 secs, 30 secs, 1 mins (yes mins), 3 mins, or unlimited.
8. Record with or without audio.
9. The same metering modes as the camera.
10. Review durations: no review, 5 seconds, 10 seconds, no limit (seconds is spelled out on this screen, but not on the recording length screen).
11. Flicker Adjustment: auto, 50 Hz, 60Hz.
12. Auto Focus: on/off
13. Face Detection: on/off
14. Shutter Sound: on/off
It seems as though they left the setting there from the camera and just made changes for the options that needed to be different.
That is about it for the camera at this time, I will be posting images here every now and then, most likely I will be dropping lower rez versions on the blog, but will link to full rez images so you can click to see the whole thing for detail.
I have not yet been able to output HDMI video, I did get to sync my Hands-Free Bluetooth car speakerphone with FM transmitter to it and I have been using that quite happily for 2 days now with only one issue, it appears that the BT speakerphone goes into sleep mode after 10 minutes if you don’t hit a button, as it did to me this morning while listening to music pushed out to my car speakers via the built-in FM transmitter, even though I did receive a 5 minute call in the middle of that 10 minutes. I also have a stereo Bluetooth Headphones/Headset coming in the mail that I will let you know about too.. So, I will have some more information on this soon. I will be ordering a new HDMI cable in another week and will post up how that goes then too, I actually ordered an HDMI cable before the phone launched, but apparently there is a special cable for the Evo, and the one I bought (a really nice HDMI 1.4 5 meter cable too) does not have the correct connector plug (and I cannot find any adapters…), so I will have to buy the special HTC Evo cable for $20 instead of the $4 cable I already bought…
10 seconds of the ending credits of a movie taken on my Evo in 720p – details: 3.97MB, 1280×720, 12 seconds, 9fps, 6.00000 Mbps, type:video/4gpp video MP4V-ES
a video out the front window of my vehicle while someone else was driving taken on my Evo in QVGA (the lowest quality setting) details: 0.97MB, 320×240, 9 seconds, 29fps, 800Kbps, type:video/3gpp video MP4V-ES
The week before the Evo launched I read about the SD card error, which I immediately wrote off as “idiots trying to use a class 2 SDHC to write 720p video” when any photographer could tell yo uyou need at least a class 6 to do HD video. so I was not worried I had already planned to spend the money on a 16GB class 6 micro SDHC card. then they started complaining about battery life, the lack of an AMOLED screen, then it was confirmed it was shipping with a 8GB micro SDHC not the rumored 16GB card. Then there was the extra $10 fee to “unlock greater than 5GB data usage per month” NOT for 4G access like everyone kept saying, please read the fine print people! Next came a charge for tethering, then you needed a special HDMI cable to do the HDMI out, next was the supreme compression level of the 720p video and the 8mp images, the final issue was the monthly charge for Qik!! I could not believe how badly Sprint and HTC had fucked up the perfect cell phone. At least the promised to give Froyo to the Evo before years end, that was the only bonus to look forward to…
then I started using the phone, I installed 259 apps that I had preselected using appbrain.com (also an android app called “app brain”) that uses the Android Marketplace to search for and “queue” apps to install on your phone. what you do is go on the website, find apps you want to use, and then you click install and it loads them into a queue on the website. then when you get your phone (as was my case, since I did this 3 days before the Evo launched), the first thing you do is go to the market and install “app brain” then unfortunately you have to launch the app and login, then it will check the installed app database and compare it to what the website says you want/have installed. DO NOT CLICK THE SYNC BUTTON AT THIS TIME!!! I did not on my phone, but when I upgraded my wife’s Samsung Moment to Android 2.1 I used AppBrain and hit the “Sync” button, instead of updating the phone to match AppBrain’s database, it made the AppBrain Database match the phones (which at the time only contained AppBrain), and I had to go through the marketplace and manually locate and install everything again.
Ok, back to using AppBrain on my Evo, I clicked the “Install” button to add the 259 apps to my new Evo, this sucks, the only thing AppBrain is capable of doing (I think it is a security limitation set by google) is to:
1. open the Android marketplace
2. insert a search query for the apps you selected on their website, one at a time.
So, after clicking install you are provided with the marketplace search screen and after a few seconds it pulls up the app you were looking for (if it is available in your country/OS version, while there is a filter on AppBrain’s website for OS version and country, you may still find and select apps that are not available to your phone, personally I selected about 12-15 that were not found in the marketplace when I tried to install them). from this point on it is almost like doing it yourself, you have to click the install button (or buy if it is a paid app, but I recommend doing th efree version first to make sure it runs well on your device. I ran into several apps I wanted to buy after trying them on my wife’s Moment, only to find out they REQUIRE a physical keyboard, or a ball, or a D-Pad), the install button gives you the warning page of the access that the app wants (if any), just the same as if you did this without AppBrain, select OK and it will initiate the install. NOW, to get to the next app in my huge list to add to the phone (by the way, after 8 days I still have not narrowed the list down to less than 200, but I am working on it) you MUST HIT THE BACK BUTTON on your phone, some apps when they start downloading the MarketPlace will automatically take you back to your search results (which by the way, AppBrain searches by the Unique Identifier for the app, so only the correct app will come up in the search, or no apps), some apps will leave you on the details to watch the progress meter go by while it downloads and installs, if yo uare on the details page, press the back button to get to the search results, once you are on th esearch results page, press the back button again to get the next app on your list. This seems to be the only way to do it, so yes, I had to do this process more than 200 times to get all those apps installed on my phone.
The only benefits I found to using AppBrain, was that I was able to use my laptop to interface with the marketplace and I did it days before I hand my phone in my hands, saving me hours after I got the phone. Now, one more limitation on AppBrain, their website can only show you 50 pages of 10 apps each per category. this means that the maximum number of apps you can browse from AppBrain without doing a search is about 15% of the current android marketplace. So to compensate for this without doing specific searches (yes I looked at all 50 pages of almost every category) they place a “similar apps” and “others by this developer” list on the right hand side of the screen when viewing the details on an app, very handy.
Not too long after I started this process (at exactly 8:00am) my Evo received the now famous SD card patch OTA update.
Alright, so within 2-3 hours I had all 250+/- apps installed that were found, time to start loading them and testing them out, several were duplicate apps that I could not decide which I wanted to use without having actually used them. To this day, I still have not loaded all of the apps on my phone, I have purchased 3 or 4 total, 2 or 3 of which were planned purchases before I even got my phone, I was just waiting to make sure the demo’s worked first (that means 1 was not a planned purchase and just plain surprised me when I found it). There are others that I intend on buying, but need to wait until my next paycheck to afford it, as Android apps on average cost 2-4 times as much as comparable iPhone apps AND the graphics on almost every single Android app looks like an 8 yearold designed it. I really feel that google needs to step in and regulate some quality controlls over the apps, not content, but quality. I am sick and tired of loading an app and finding stick figures, or a plain black background and hand drawn squares and circles and teardrop shaped drawings (see a couple of pictures below for examples, what is sad is those are some of the games I really like too, but won’t buy because they are $2.99 or $4.99 and the graphics are a blank screen with “stick figures”). If you really want to understand my frustration with the graphics, go find someone who is an Apple lover, and has owned more than one iPhone, and ask them to show you some games, then you will understand. some of my favorites are the rogue trainer, field runners, rocket bears (I think that is the name, it’s a teddy bear looking brown bear that is under attack by zombie panda bears), and pocket god (I’ll have to check out my friends iPhone and see what some of the others I like are called, so you can go check them out. trust me there is a huge difference and almost everything he buys is either $0.99 or $1.99 sometimes he waits for it to go on sale before buying, but never pays more than $1.99 for an app).
People complain about the “fart” apps on iPhone, well I think there are more on Android than iPhone, AND Android has a ton of freaking jigsaw puzzle games, I cannot understand that, why is there not 1 or 2 apps, and the rest could be download add on packs that give you more images to use in the jigsaw app…
right next post will be about the phone itself, I’ll post it in a few minutes…
The week before the Evo launched I read about the SD card error, which I immediately wrote off as “idiots trying to use a class 2 SDHC to write 720p video” when any photographer could tell you you should use at least a class 6 card to do HD video. So, I was not worried I had already planned to spend the money on a 16GB class 6 micro SDHC card. then they started complaining about battery life, the lack of an AMOLED screen, then it was confirmed it was shipping with a 8GB micro SDHC not the rumored 16GB card. Then there was the extra $10 fee to “unlock greater than 5GB data usage per month” NOT for 4G access like everyone kept saying, please read the fine print people! Next came a charge for tethering, then you needed a special HDMI cable to do the HDMI out, next was the supreme compression level of the 720p video and the 8mp images, the final issue was the monthly charge for Qik!! I could not believe how badly Sprint and HTC has fucked up the perfect cell phone. At least they promised to give Froyo to the Evo before years end, that was the only bonus to look forward to…
then I started using the phone, I installed 259 apps that I had preselected using appbrain.com (also an android app called “AppBrain”) that uses the Android Marketplace to search for and “queue” apps to install on your phone. what you do is go on the website, find apps you want to use, and then you click install and it loads them into a queue on the website. then when you get your phone (as was my case, since I did this 3 days before the Evo launched), the first thing you do is go to the market and install “AppBrain” then unfortunately you have to launch the app and login, then it will check the installed app database and compare it to what the website says you want/have installed. DO NOT CLICK THE SYNC BUTTON AT THIS TIME!!! I did not on my phone, but when I upgraded my wife’s Samsung Moment to Android 2.1 I used AppBrain and hit the “Sync” button, instead of updating the phone to match AppBrain’s database, it made the AppBrain Database match the phones (which at the time only contained AppBrain), and I had to go through the marketplace and manually locate and install everything again.
Ok, back to using AppBrain on my Evo, I clicked the “Install” button to add the 259 apps to my new Evo, this sucks, the only thing AppBrain is capable of doing (I think it is a security limitation set by google) is to:
1. open the Android marketplace
2. insert a search query for the apps you selected on their website, one at a time.
So, after clicking install you are provided with the marketplace search screen and after a few seconds it pulls up the app you were looking for (if it is available in your country/OS version, while there is a filter on AppBrain’s website for OS version and country, you may still find and select apps that are not available to your phone, personally I selected about 12-15 that were not found in the marketplace when I tried to install them). from this point on it is almost like doing it yourself, you have to click the install button (or buy if it is a paid app, but I recommend doing th efree version first to make sure it runs well on your device. I ran into several apps I wanted to buy after trying them on my wife’s Moment, only to find out they REQUIRE a physical keyboard, or a ball, or a D-Pad), the install button gives you the warning page of the access that the app wants (if any), just the same as if you did this without AppBrain, select OK and it will initiate the install. NOW, to get to the next app in my huge list to add to the phone (by the way, after 8 days I still have not narrowed the list down to less than 200, but I am working on it) you MUST HIT THE BACK BUTTON on your phone, some apps when they start downloading the MarketPlace will automatically take you back to your search results (which by the way, AppBrain searches by the Unique Identifier for the app, so only the correct app will come up in the search, or no apps), some apps will leave you on the details to watch the progress meter go by while it downloads and installs, if yo uare on the details page, press the back button to get to the search results, once you are on th esearch results page, press the back button again to get the next app on your list. This seems to be the only way to do it, so yes, I had to do this process more than 200 times to get all those apps installed on my phone.
The only benefits I found to using AppBrain, was that I was able to use my laptop to interface with the marketplace and I did it days before I hand my phone in my hands, saving me hours after I got the phone. Now, one more limitation on AppBrain, their website can only show you 50 pages of 10 apps each per category. this means that the maximum number of apps you can browse from AppBrain without doing a search is about 15% of the current android marketplace. So to compensate for this without doing specific searches (yes I looked at all 50 pages of almost every category) they place a “similar apps” and “others by this developer” list on the right hand side of the screen when viewing the details on an app, very handy.
Not too long after I started this process (at exactly 8:00am) my Evo received the now famous SD card patch OTA update.
Alright, so within 2-3 hours I had all 250+/- apps installed that were found, time to start loading them and testing them out, several were duplicate apps that I could not decide which I wanted to use without having actually used them. To this day, I still have not loaded all of the apps on my phone, I have purchased 3 or 4 total, 2 or 3 of which were planned purchases before I even got my phone, I was just waiting to make sure the demo’s worked first (that means 1 was not a planned purchase and just plain surprised me when I found it). There are others that I intend on buying, but need to wait until my next paycheck to afford it, as Android apps on average cost 2-4 times as much as comparable iPhone apps AND the graphics on almost every single Android app looks like an 8 yearold designed it. I really feel that google needs to step in and regulate some quality controlls over the apps, not content, but quality. I am sick and tired of loading an app and finding stick figures, or a plain black background and hand drawn squares and circles and teardrop shaped drawings (see a couple of pictures below for examples, what is sad is those are some of the games I really like too, but won’t buy because they are $2.99 or $4.99 and the graphics are a blank screen with “stick figures”). If you really want to understand my frustration with the graphics, go find someone who is an Apple lover, and has owned more than one iPhone, and ask them to show you some games, then you will understand. some of my favorites are the rogue trainer, field runners, rocket bears (I think that is the name, it’s a teddy bear looking brown bear that is under attack by zombie panda bears), and pocket god (I’ll have to check out my friends iPhone and see what some of the others I like are called, so you can go check them out. trust me there is a huge difference and almost everything he buys is either $0.99 or $1.99 sometimes he waits for it to go on sale before buying, but never pays more than $1.99 for an app).
People complain about the “fart” apps on iPhone, well I think there are more on Android than iPhone, AND Android has a ton of freaking jigsaw puzzle games, I cannot understand that, why is there not 1 or 2 apps, and the rest could be download add on packs that give you more images to use in the jigsaw app…
right, next post will be about the phone itself, I’ll post it in a few minutes…
outdoor image in full sunlight taken with the Evo
outdoor image in full sunlight taken with the Evo
taken indoors with minimal lighting from about 6" away
taken outdoors in early morning sunlight in the mountains with the Evo
taken at the same time and place as my dog (the previous picture)
taken about 5 minutes after the last picture of the house from about 2' away
taken just after dusk outside
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
