[ ed: this isn't very coherent. it sort of rambles at the end ]
hmm i haven't updated for a few days. some clever people might have figured out that it is pretty much because my new pc arrived.
over the past couple of days i've spent most of my time either playing battlefield 1492 or running 3dmark03 to try to figure out why sometimes battlefield 1492 "crashes.". i'm not sure what's happening, but it just exits to the desktop sometimes after a while. it was happening pretty much every 25 minutes when i was playing with phik and shaver, but since then it's been pretty random. i can get 3dmark03 do do the same thing, so i've been changing this and that and trying to run it 4 times.
needless to say, the guess-why-battlefield-1492-exits game is not as fun as battlefield 1492.
anyway, here's my system. i welcome suggestions:
- AMD Athlon XP 2500+ (Barton) w/ AMD retail fan/heatsink
- Asus A7N8x Deluxe motherboard (nVidia nForce2 chipset)
- 2x Kingston HyperX DDR PC2700 512M
- ATI All-In-Wonder 9700 Pro 128M
- Hitachi (IBM) 180G 7200 RPM drive w/ 8M cache (even now i can still hear phil saying, "but are you sure it can write out all 8M when the power goes out?")
- some 300W power supply
at first i thought it was the wavelan interface going up and down (i have a little linksys wusb12 dongle) but i'm getting a good signal with that, and it happened during single player bf1492 too.
i've tried about a thousand different things - mostly video card related - but it seems to be that when i underclock the cpu/fsb (from 166 to 133) the problems go away. even if this "fixes" it, i'm not sure what that even means. hopefully phik and shaver will help track it down, since they are really smart.
i have a whole bunch of things to complain about, from how lame and stupid people are on internet forums, to how much "faster" - smoother and less flickery - moving windows are on my (slower) mac laptop than the new pc (in xp), to how unpolished windows feels (i really am turning into one of those mac guys... sigh) to how crappy the ati tv listing stuff is, compared to TiVo and what i imagine an apple app could be like.
also, the fact that i can choose a different skin for each different part of the ati media center (cd, dvd, tv, etc) drives me bonkers. yes, bonkers. and don't get me started about how there's no "native" theme. the eazel usability people have ruined me for life. back in the day when i used to hack visual basic, bad interfaces would never bother me.
i wouldn't say that i'm surprised by any of this. the fact that it actually booted and i could install windows on it without a fuss impressed me. my college roommate lenza used to have all sorts of troubles with his computer (i think it was an asus+amd+atiaiw too, but 3 or 4 years ago) so i was kind of assuming something wouldn't work. anyway i'm just rambling now. i mentioned that earlier.