Ok, I’ve got a bunch of assorted updates:

Last night, I installed a new Hard Drive: Snake‘s old Western Digital 5.1 from the POS Packard Bell. It’s pretty good though, considering it’s 3.5 years old. I’m using it for backups and the files for this site. When I installed it first, I got a big problem w/ my video drivers, but now they’re ok. And speaking of video drivers, nVIDIA’s newest reference driver, v21.81, is out @ their site. These are extremely stable.

What else… I got Mr. Roboto mp3 yesterday, it’s great (thanks to hearing it @ Snake‘s house). Big Daddy was right: “Styx was one of the greatest American rock bands, but they caught a bad rep cause most critics are cynical assholes.”

Physical news: 2/4 panels of my case are painted beautifully, and I put a lot of custom stickers on the front. Also on the MOD front, I put a gheTTo-style fan in the lower front bay area and hooked it up to fan3 header, to suck air in. I moved my VCR to hook up to my sound card for recording more easily, so I may have some good movies segments up for download soon.

Bleys and I just OWNED in CS… check out the stats page, we might not be rank 3000 this time 😛

Columns in the making:

• Snake‘s BiosTweak
• Snake‘s Demoboard Setup
• Snake and I’s MOD
• My GeForce2 GTS

As I said, Loogie and I engaged in some two-mouse split-screen Doom Legacy yesterday. It took about 10 minutes to set up the controls and sensitivity, but after that, it ran without a hitch for the two or more hours we played. We only played DM, starting off with Minge and then mostly the classic Addictive and Marines. Some time during X-Rivers in Addictive, Loogie claimed “this is the best gaming experience I’ve had in 10 years”. That’s probably an overstatement, but it certainly was goddamn fun, especially for people who are used to lagging so much. Here’s some screens I grabbed during X-Rivers:

Damnit all, I’m tired of this shit taking over all of the media. I haven’t gotten to watch Letterman all week because of this mass hysteria over the goddamn World Trade Center/Pentagon voodoo poodoo. I mean no disrespect to the thousands that died, but “Terrorists Win”. Just wait til next round and then “CounterTerrorists Win”. All they do most of the time is interview biatches that think they know shit…I need Dave, damnit!

Anyways, I got this drive benchmarked and while it smoked that old Western Digital POS, I thought the Burst Read Rate was still a little low for UDMA66. Maybe I’m wrong. Anyways, it’s a great drive. I found that even with the “Acoustic Management” turned off, there was still little seek noise. A millesecond of seek time was lost when the drive is set to no Acoustic Management (that’s a good thing, llamas). Here’s the benches:

I totally updated the Columns browser, so eveything (even partially finished stuff) should be there. I also made some charts and stuff for the next part of the VT6X4 Tweak Guide; look for an update to that soon.

Loog’s probably gonna chill over here tomorrow. We’re gonna try out the splitscreen mode of Doom Legacy…but, with two mice. My initial tests confirm that it works well, but it’s hard to play Deathmatch against yourself 😉

Snake out. Have a nice Day After the Day of Remembrance Day…or …ummm… …yeh…damnit

I just got my PCG CD and decided to give Red Faction a whirl. When I told Snake, he told me to write up a review on it. With an “arg,” I set off. Installation was fine, but I had to update my video drivers, which means that I had to reset my monitor settings. Anyways, check it out here.

I forgot how much a pain in the ass it was to start over with a new format, but I went ahead with it anyways. I believe that being in the woods for a couple days washed away some of my tech knowledge, because I made a little mistake and nearly a huge one. The little mistake was formatting the previous 5.1GB WD drive before taking it out (forgot to copy my favorites…damnit!) and the close call was leaving the 4.3GB Maxtor slave hooked up while partitioning and whatnot. I nearly erased all my 1.7GB of backup data!
Currently, I’m downloading IE 6 and then will queue Half-Life 1107 full patch and Paint Shop Pro 7. I would have had all the patches and editing applications, but my backup CD-RW got seriously corrupt (never again am I buying a Creative burner). I should have AIM and MSN installed later tomorrow.
I haven’t even gotten to really bench this new thing, either. All I have is the logged startup time from UT. It used to be about 60 seconds…but check this out:

I don’t know about Infiltration, yet…I can’t get it to run, probably cause I’ve got v428 instead of v436 (again, another patch that got corrupted). I wanna get HDTach again tomorrow and compare it with the scores I got 3 days ago. I’ll also have a few DCam pics, but not until I get PSP.

Also, I saved a screenshot from a few days ago of my MBM systray temperature display. It got suprisingly low; and I believe that it was the lowest I’ve ever recorded the North Bridge at and in summer, too! Take a look.

I can’t get enough of that Lost World ][ map in Quake3. Luckily, I did have the 1.29g patch locally.

Happy Partitions!