Patrick Vervoorn wrote:

In article <47383440@news2.actrix.gen.nz>,
~misfit~ <misfitnz@yahoot.com.au> wrote:

Patrick Vervoorn wrote:

Was this before or after the overclocking? :)

Before. I always like to get a new mobo stable, which normally means
defaults, before updating to the latest BIOS and downloading Windows
updates. OCing comes after established stability.

These new-fangled hardware seem to be very picky. I spent a week
figuring out why my new system seemed to trash the HD at random,
totally destroying the Windows install, and the partition table/MBR.

Eeek!

Finally turned out the Seagte HD I had in the system didn't support
Native Command Queueing, while the NVidia SATA drivers did. Swapping
out the Seagate for a WDC RAID edition drive solved this, finally.

Surely you could have just disabled NCQ until such time as you had a SATA II 
HDD? Buying a new HDD seems a little extreme as far as solving the problem 
goes. There should be an option for backward-compatability with older, SATA 
I drives.

By that time the final game should be about out. ;)

By which time I still probably won't be able to justify the
expenditure of buying it.

That's always a though decision to make, but it looks very very nice.

Something my mother told me, don't be seduced by looks alone. <g>

I'd have to see what the gameplay was like as well.

Ahhh, the reward systems in individuals varies so much doesn't it?
Also, so is the base knowledge, from which the "work" starts. As my
base knowledge of writing code is _zero_ the hill is steep indeed.

Undertandable. But a tool to switch of your computer on a timed basis
should be available for download somewhere, I suppose. ;)

Gary kindly pointed us to one.


<snip>

Ping times increase, throughput drops.. I can't tell you the ping
times as I on;y stayed on that plan for one billing cycle. However,
the ping time that goes up is the one across (or, more correctly,
under) the ocean, out of New Zealand. It's almost as if there's
several priority levels for international traffic that vary
depending on your ISP and what plan you have with them. Of course,
ultimately all data goes through the hands of the monopolistic New
Zealand Telecom. The giant of a company that used to be a
state-owned enterprise, that also owns 50% of the "Southern Cross"
cable that carries the bulk of data out of and into NZ.

Hmmm, yeah, that's probable a reason why NZ is different; due to the
remote location, bandwidth to other locations is pretty expensive,
and a sought-after commodity.

Yes. I tend to look at other plans, in other countries, and salivate. It's 
easy to forget the remoteness of this beautiful country. However, there are 
those who say that the Southern Cross cable has been paid for already and 
that it's  all pure profit now, that the owners/operators are holding the 
country to ransom.

If you want an ADSL line with that speed, you'd have to spend quite
some effort overhere. The 2M down is still with the same 1GB / day
limit? If I did my math wrong, you can spend your day's worth of
downloading in about 68 minutes using 2M down.

Something like that. However, I'd then get the data I can download
for the other 23 hours at 64/64kbps "free". Woohoo!!

Actually, my ISP, the best in the country, does have a window of free
download time for two hours every night between 6 and 8pm. During
this time whatever you transfer isn't counted against your daily
total. That's where the benefit of the 2M over the 256kbps comes in.
If I time my downloads right I can get quite a chunk of data during
that period, even though the whole system does slow down a bit then
as everyone is thinking the same thing.

Heh, well, this also something the 'cron'-alike tool mentioned above
can do for you too. ;)

Good point.

When I noticed the lower performance with the 6600GT (totally
unexpected, since the 6600GT blew the Ti4200 on all fronts out of
the water) I researched it a bit, and what I can vaguely remember
is that the 6600GT was an improvement on almost all fronts (more
units, each with more performance), except for one area, where the
Ti4200 actually had more units (with of course a lower
performance). My 'conclusion' then was that the units which were
left out when going from the Ti4200->6600GT were actually the ones
being used a lot for the Shenk Death Animation.

Interesting that you should mention that. My best cards for Diablo
II have also been the ti4x00 range. I have thre of them, two 4200s
and a "Golden Sample" 4400 that will run faster than a 4600 and is
stock-clocked at above 4400 speeds. I was quite disappointed when I
fired D2 up for the first time after getting this system going with
it's 7800GT only to find that it seems slower than my old
Barton/ti4400 combo. :-(

You _are_ running a Glide Wrapper? I recently had to switch back to
the Direct3D API for Diablo II, when the NVidia 169.01 and 169.04
broke the OpenGL stuff in such a way that the Glide Wrapper stopped
working. I found the Direct3D version of the game to feel much, much
'clunkier' than the game in Glide. Difficult to describe, but
everything seemed to run/animate/move much 'coarser'... So if you
haven't already....?

Twice I've been prompted to try Sven's Glide Wrapper, usually due to your 
mentioning it. However, I've never had it work for me for some reason. 
Perhaps if I try again....

Indeed. However, I don't see this group being used for much else in
the last few weeks other than threads that I've started. :-)

It's indeed frighteningly quiet in here. Hopefully that's because
everything SetiBOINC related is running smoothly and without any
problems for everyone. ;)

Hopefully.

Regards,
-- 
Shaun.