Jump to content

Pyrion

Members
  • Posts

    627
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by Pyrion

  1. I don't understand why everyone is so hard on IE, it's a lot better than you give it credit for, and a lot better than Firefox. You act like a bunch of freelance web designers could actually produce something of higher quality than a corporation with actual, you know, funding.

    Since the IE coders are paid, it doesn't follow principle to fix problems unless the company pays them to fix them. As a result, the company has to decide to pay the programmers to fix the problems before the programmers even get around to doing it. If the company decides the problems aren't worth paying the programmers to fix them, then the programmers don't fix them, even if the problems are very serious.

    Contrast to free open-source software, where there's no corporate bureaucracy getting in the way of improving the product.

    Of course, we could all just put 24-bit PNGs with alpha transparency channels in our sigs and you'd wonder why the damn things don't display right in IE. Not our problem: Firefox displays them perfectly. :)

  2. this isn't really an option. i have too much stuff on here

    And that is why, ideally, you don't rely on a single partition. Reformatting Windows becomes so routine that losing all of one's precious shit ceases to be a problem if you store it all on something other than C:\. You know, as long as the drive itself doesn't die. But that's why you then use a combination of optical media for backups and maybe even a second hard drive. Still though, multiple partitions FTW.

    As to the original problem, the "thinking light" is the HD access light (it'd be awesome to have a front gauge for CPU usage tho) and heavy HD access on startup is unsurprising for most Windows systems, especially those that haven't been reformatted in a while. My suggestions there are to defrag the drive, and either remove some things from startup, or just remove some things altogether. Even with 1GB of RAM (which is pretty much standard these days) HD thrashing will still occur, especially if you're loading a lot of stuff, and killing explorer.exe won't help because Windows Explorer doubles as the Windows shell.

    I also suggest replacing Task Manager with SysInternals Process Explorer (it's free), since Process Explorer is a much better tool for figuring out what could be causing a bottleneck in performance.

    EDIT: Or just use this to figure out wtf is causing the HD thrashing on startup.

  3. The above is why it's a good idea to have some sort of updated active virus scanner installed on a system, even if you generally don't get viruses (like me).

    Ramp the heuristic up to max on both the scanner and the guard, if you're as paranoid as I am about that kinda crap. The only false positive that's gotten on my exclude list was moo.dll in my mIRC directory.

  4. Wireless networks will always be iffy. Did you do any renovation, moving or construction at the house that would've put something large, solid and/or metallic between the wireless router and the computer you're using?

    They're also limited by distance, and since wireless is two-way, it doesn't matter if the router itself has a really powerful antenna if your computer doesn't have a good wireless network card with a good antenna. Other considerations are upgrading the router's firmware, or the router itself may just be dying for whatever reason (they are made pretty cheaply nowadays).

    Also, you finding yourself a victim of intermittent lag in games? Disable Windows' Wireless Zero Configuration service ("net stop wzcsvc" at the command prompt) before you load the game and that shit should stop.

  5. Vid cards are oh so easy to get, and really good ones at that. I just got a Radeon X1600 Pro 512Meg vidcard, and man...it rocks the socks.

    OK, I'm ready for the Nvidia crowd to show me ATI hate now.

    Why? I have an ATI Mobility Radeon x700 in my laptop and it's of comparable performance to my GF6600GT. No complaints here.

  6. I haven't checked the board or the video card, but all GDDR3 means is that it's DDR memory (I'm assuming you know what that means, ask if you don't) in it's third generation, and the G means graphic/graphical. Basically, it's the kind of memory on the video card itself, and doesn't matter what kind of system memory you have.

    Although you'll want to have the fastest form of system memory your system supports because you'll inevitably be swapping textures between vram and sysram (yes, even with 256MB of vram, at least with the newer games that practically require 512MB of vram), and there it doesn't matter how fast the vram is, it'll be limited by the read speed of your sysram.

  7. One thing to note for Mozilla/FireFox users is that if you change network.http.sendRefererHeader to 0, you trade some functionality elsewhere (like on download sites that check to make sure there's no external linkage) for .jpg/.gif sigs hosted on Geoshitties & AngelFire to work properly.

×
×
  • Create New...