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Thanks to a friend of mine, I was able to try out Ultima Online today. Unfortunately, I didn't find it very enjoyable. The game was lagged to hell and everything just went really slowly. I didn't have any idea what I was doing either. I assume it gets better once you figure out what's going on and if you can travel around with a party of friends.
Well, if you'll recall I remounted the fan inside my case a couple of weeks ago in order to try to improve the air flow in my case. Simply moving the fan in a little so that it wasn't mounted flush against the case improved air flow dramatically and reduced the temperature of my chip by about 5º. The downside was that there was a lot of air recirculation going on. Well, I decided to take the final step today and cut a hole in the front of the case where the fan goes. That way I could mount the fan in the bracket and still have adequate air flow, plus all the air being sucked in would be fresh cool air instead of recirculated air inside the case. There were holes punched in the front of the case to allow air flow, but in reality the metal was still blocking all the air flow. I really didn't feel like cutting the hole because it would have necessitated disassembling my computer first. However, we managed to get around that by using some big snippers and cutting between the punch holes, instead of using a jigsaw. There's a fairly jagged (but open) hole in the front of my case now.
Anyhow, man, making this modification had a HUGE effect on the CPU temperature. It was around 65.5º when the case was in its original state, 61º when I moved the fan and enabled it to actually blow air, and now after cutting the hole and moving the fan back the temperature hasn't gone above 52.5º!!! That's nearly a 10 degree difference from before and around 13 degrees less than the original case with no changes. Well, it just goes to show you, big heatsinks aren't all that matter, you've got to have cool air coming into your case too.
I used to be really into this game. Damn SPOD, never could master that move... Hexen 2 demo is due tomorrow, watch for it.
http://www.sega.com/spotlight/features/vf2_pc/download_game.html Tom's Hardware Guide got updated with some 100 MHz bus speed results for Socket 7 motherboards. Other than that, not much. I learned a lot today about heatsinks, more than I really expected to. I added a link on my Thermal Specs page to some technical papers from Aavid. If you are really interested in how heat sinks work, this is good stuff.
Seems like the word is that the card will be in stores around the 22nd of this month. Although the chipset itself looks to be very fast, the 4MB seems terribly inadequate for a third-generation card, however. Also, Matrox confirmed that their new 3D add-on card will be PowerVR based and will also only cost $99. That kind of deal is hard to pass up if you don't have a 3D accelerator already. Some minor revisions to the Perfect System and Thermal Specs pages. 6:30 PM I don't think this is a big upgrade but it's there. Head on over to this page to get instructions on how to download it.
http://www.microsoft.com/netmeeting/features/?/netmeeting/features/pp1.htm Ever think about getting ISDN service? Wondering what the hell you have to go through to do it? Well, it appears the preferred solution is to purchase an ISDN router (the popular model seems to be the Ascend Pipeline 25 w/Dynamic IP support...about $470 new and $250-350 used). An ISDN router is an external box which you plug an Ethernet card from your PC into. The router itself actually establishes the connection, and it has analog ports for more mundane devices like telephones and fax machines. Lower cost solutions involve ISDN adapters, preferably internal ones (external adapters attach to the serial port, which can't handle ISDN bandwidth very well).
Phew! Now I don't have to worry about how I'm going to get my stuff to school! UPS secured a five-year contract, which is more than the union would have liked. On the other hand, the union got a pay raise for the part-timers and a promise to create more full-time jobs, as well as no change in the current pension plan. There will be a temporary shrinkage in jobs at UPS because of business lost permanently during the strike. But hey, at least you can get that mail-order stuff now! 7:14 PM The next and long awaited version of Internet Explorer (taking over your desktop) is officially slated to ship Sept. 30. I personally can do without the channels and such but it's going to be a worthwhile install for the other things which it adds, like nicer looking icons, a Show Desktop button, and some other stuff I can't remember off the top of my head. Sounds cool, doesn't it? It's only going to cost about $2,645 per chip. And you thought the 300 MHz Pentium II was expensive?
Free?!? How can you possibly turn that down? The idea behind this is that you use it as your primary e-mail address and whatever mail is sent there automatically gets forwarded to your real e-mail account. That way, if you ever need to change providers, you won't need to change your e-mail address, just where it gets redirected to. The free offer at iName only lasts until August 31, so get in there and get yours! 7:18 PM One of the favorite thing Mac advocates like to point to in the advocacy groups is how secure the Mac is. Nobody has ever cracked a Mac web server, they say. Look at the Crack a Mac challenge, it been up for 6 months. Well, look at it today. Haha! The bug exploited apparently involved a buggy third-party plug-in. The plug-in has been fixed and they are continuing the challenge. This is about a week old news but I haven't mentioned it yet so what the heck. RC5 is an effort to break an encryption message in order to prove the inadequacy of today's laws and restrictions on encryption. V2.004 is slightly faster than V2.002 and pushes my machine over the 1 Mkey/sec mark. Neato.
Yes! Now finally you can trash all that dumb stuff that Communicator does (the jack of all trades, master of none) and use it for what you really want, browsing. This move is in response to pressure from companies (notably Lotus) who want to bundle Navigator but don't want the extraneous messaging features. Some people speculate that this may mean Netscape's bid to move onto the desktop is failing. | ||||||||||||||||||
