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It's supposed to take care of some bugs and also support the Voodoo Rush (meaning the Stingray 128/3D at present).
ftp://ftp.avault.com/patches/mdk3dfx.zip
Tom's Hardware Guide seems to be getting the scoop on a lot of new CPU's and motherboards nowadays (wish I could get all that free stuff!). He's got a review of the 6x86MX's performance on his page. The FPU performance, is, as expected, rather poor. A new F1 beta patch which is meant only to address performance issues in Formula 1 has been released. The patch supposedly breaks Stingray 128/3D support so watch out for that. Intense speed and awesome earth-shaking music made this one a killer classic on the Playstation. I played the hell out of this one and now it's come to the PC in glorious 3Dfx style! I haven't tried it out yet but I'm going to (maybe I can even pop in my Playstation CD and get some music, too!). Get it from these locations:
ftp://ftp.avault.com/win95/wp2097b.zip - 6 MB, no movie I wasn't even aware of this until just now, but Cyrix has just released their 6x86MX, formerly known as the M2. From the brief look I've taken at the benchmarks, it looks pretty killer, but there are two key issues right now: How is the floating point performance, and what is the street price of the chip going to be? The K6 is still suffering from high street prices, making it more of a new toy or anti-Intel statement than a serious alternative value. Go to 6x86MX Product Info. Be sure to click on the PC World link...they seem very hyped on the new chip. 1:57 AM There's a funny article at News.Com about the tornado that took DejaNews out of commission for about 8 hours. I was searching DejaNews when it happened, but that's about as close as I like to get to tornados. :-)
BTW, if you aren't using DejaNews to search
Usenet, you should be. Usenet is the most remarkable open forum that I've ever seen,
and you will almost always be able to find all the information you need to make
any informed decision if you just bother to search it.
Lots of good info from Infoworld today. The US government has really had its head stuck in the ground over this one, making it a crime for anybody to export greater than 40-bit encryption without giving them secret backdoor keys so they can just look at everything. Yeah right! Just another example of legislators trying to regulate what they don't understand. Read the article. 1:55 PM The XvT 1.10 patch is available from: The official site: ftp://ftp.lucasarts.com/patches/pc/xvt_1.10.exe http://xvt.scorched.com/Files/Tools/xvt_110.exe ftp://207.62.161.104/xvt_110.exe.
Click here for info about
what's new in 1.10. LucasArts has been busy! A new Outlaws patch featuring 3Dfx Glide acceleration (among other things, presumably) is available. The info is here, and the patch is at: ftp://ftp.lucasarts.com/patches/pc/ol_v11.exe. 2:55 AM US Robotics has finally put its money where its mouth is, guaranteeing free compatibility for all its X2 modems with whatever standard the ITU decides on, when it decides on it. That's great for the consumer because if you really feel the need for X2 technology now, you can buy in without worrying about investing in a dead-end standard. The press release is here. An official announcement on the Internet Gaming Zone said that a patch improving the internet play of X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter would be coming out on May 29th. That's today. :-) I'll post a link to it when it becomes available. This doesn't excite me all that much anymore, but maybe some of you still look out for this sort of thing. If you have a Stingray 128/3D, you are probably excited. It's available from http://www.3dfx.com/software/download_glqdrv.html.
Fixes:
Every so often I go looking for the viability of faster net access...I was particularly interested in those new X2 and K56flex modems which I mentioned in an earlier update. There's a cable company called Phonoscope here in Houston which is supposedly doing field tests of cable modem access in some apartment complexes but they give no details as to cost or even what areas of Houston they service. That 33.6 modem I bought yesterday was supposedly upgradable to K56Plus technology. That isn't the same as K56flex...K56Plus is Rockwell's own version of 56K modem technology before Rockwell and Lucent agreed to standardize on K56flex. So who even knows if that modem is upgradable to anything now. Now I wasn't buying it for 56K, but I thought it would be an interesting plus. After some thought, though, I decided they probably meant you could swap out a chip or something instead of just flashing a new ROM for free or something. So much for that. ISDN apparently is rather expensive here in Houston too due to the lack of phone company competition...we all know that's about to change, but right now the situation isn't very good. You can get decent prices by signing up for a long term contract of some-odd number of years, but who knows how fast things will be able to go by then.
I also looked at some lists of ISP's that supposedly have deployed K56flex and X2
technology in their areas. Naturally, I looked at Houston. I'm pretty sure
I'd go with Texas.net if I wanted to go the X2
route. PDQ.net was supposed to go online with
K56flex May 1st according to a list (I think it was at Hayes?).
But I looked at their web page and they don't say anything about it. Well, I'm
not really about to go out and spend more money on a modem just yet. I need a job
for this summer, and then I'm going to go shopping for an SMP motherboard and
processors. Dual PPro 150's look pretty good, I think. I'm quite sure I know what registry settings to adjust now, but I still need to test my settings a bit more to tune them. I wish there was some sort of automated utility to do this (all the pinging and web page loading and FTPing, that is)! I had been playing around with the settings and it turns out that what I originally thought was a performance increase was actually an issue with my ISP (AT&T Worldnet; they absolutely rock, except their pings are a little too high). When you call in you get a random modem off the hunt group, and at this point it seems like one of the gateways that I occasionally got assigned to has much better ping times (~250-350 ms) than the others (~450-550 ms). Don't ask me why. Anyhow, after trying the settings through Rice, where I get faster pings (~180 ms) but slower connects (24 or 26.4k), I've basically concluded that these parameters haven't enhanced my pings or performance at all. How disappointing! Ping times did not drop when I changed the MTU or TcpWindowSize settings. Setting the MTU to 576 impacted FTP transfer rate negatively, as you would expect because of the increased overhead. Setting the size of the Receive Window has a serious impact on any transfer of extended length. When I set mine to 2144 (MTU was still 576), as is often recommended by others, my transfer rate dropped dramatically, from about 2.7-3.0 KB/sec to about 1.4 KB/sec. Setting it to a higher multiple remedied the problem somewhat. Still, although it didn't help me at all (I've got entries in there for MTU=1500 and TcpWindowSize=8760 now, which are the defaults), I believe the potential benefits are highly dependent on your ISP. So I'll still tell you how to change them for Windows NT. By the way, I don't take any responsibility for anything you do to your own system. Editing the registry requires some know-how, so if you trash your computer, it's your own fault. I'm just telling you what worked for me.
To change the MTU:
To change your Default Receive Window size:
I think you will have to reboot for these changes to take effect. Hopefully these
changes will actually help some people, even though they didn't do diddly-squat for me.
Hmmm...not a whole lot really happened today, I'm still trying to figure out whether that MTU fix helped. I went out and ate Mexican food and also took advantage of some great deals at local computer superstores. They have this tendency to sell things below cost to draw people into the store, like selling stuff for x amount of dollars and giving you a rebate for x dollars, which basically means all you pay for is tax and postage on the rebate. I bought a 33.6 internal modem for 39.99 after rebate, which is pretty decent for a friend of a friend who likes to play Warcraft II a lot but only has a 14.4. Oh yeah, I ought to point out, I bought it, but I'm not actually paying for it. The dude is so into Warcraft II but he simply refuses to get off his butt and spend $40 on a new modem. I wonder how many people like him lag the smarter people with 28.8 connections. Anyhow, I watched The Lost World, which was uninspiring, then I played more Warcraft II.
It's available from ftp://ftp20.netscape.com/pub/communicator/4.0/4.0b5/windows/n32e40b5.exe 8:05 PM Have you ever heard about this? You must be at least a little technically minded to play around with this fix, because it involves playing around with your registry. But once you get it working, it has the potential to really speed up the responsiveness of your connection if you are using a modem to connect to the Internet. It probably affects T1/Ethernet connections too, but I think the performance gain there is negligible. An fairly comprehensive explanation of the problem is available here, but it focuses mostly on Win95. Basically, some routers will fragment your packets unless you keep them below a certain size (576 bytes is the minimum size that routers will not fragment). The default size, or MTU, is 1500 for Windows. Fragmentation is bad, so setting your MTU to 576 fixes the problem.
My problem was that
there's almost no information on how to tweak Windows NT to fix the MaxMTU problem.
However, I believe I've found the fix for Windows NT after some heavy
DejaNews and Microsoft
Knowledge Base research myself,
so I'll post details on that as soon as I'm confident of it. | ||||||||||||||||||
