Category: Computers

Site Dry spell.

Posted on by Forge77

I’ve not posted in awhile , Just a little dry spell but, now i’ll get back up posting on the site. One of the main reasons was I updating my PC, The computer i was using has been having a rough time with things.  Upgraded to 2.7GHz processor and a new geforce 9800 gt  to boot.

so after going through a few reformats and 20 gallons of coffee I’ve finally got everything together. My biggest annoyance is Windows Activation, I’ve reformatted through almost every hardware change and activation for xp is just a big pain in the ass because you get the “you’ve activated this product to many times”.  Which is nothing short of saying FU to the customer who has a legit version of xp.

Also I have currently installed window 7, I had it installed before but made the mistake of installing it over XP, That was a huge mistake – for as well as 7 runs there are some things that just don’t run and your better off having a dual boot  to get around that.  Windows 7 as far as i am concerned is an improvement over Vista but, I am not totally confident that the current state of 7 will last. Microsoft started vista the same way , in the early beta’s it looked good but once they let the devs put all the crazy shit like UAC in it went down the hole. The methods they use to get to certain menus is silly.  Gaming for the PC with vista has been hit or miss but, mostly miss. the performance hits I’ve seen from vista keep me going to XP , With 7 I’ve actually seen some decent frame rates in games without taking a huge hit.  The annoyance factors with windows 7 Have been slightly minimized but not to a level I like, Its not like Vista where every action is followed by a warning (are you sure you want to breath *accept/deny). Also with Microsoft coming out with 7248572 version of vista is pure annoyance, Windows XP started with 2 editions Home and professional that was fine, They later added MCE (media center edition).  But when Vista came out they went with version clusterfuck, most sites list 6 version but in reality its 11+ versions of the same OS

  1. Windows Vista Starter
  2. Windows Vista Home Basic
  3. Windows Vista Home Basic 64
  4. Windows Vista Home Premium
  5. Windows Vista Home Premium 64
  6. Windows Vista Business
  7. Windows Vista Business 64
  8. Windows Vista Enterprise
  9. Windows Vista Enterprise 64
  10. Windows Vista Ultimate
  11. Windows Vista Ultimate 64
  12. Windows Vista Ultimate bill gates limited edition
  13. Windows Vista Ultimate bill gates limited edition 64

Sure you can say some of its redundant but its way the fuck too much. hopefully with 7 they have ALOT less versions  because going through all that feels like going through all the Sims 2 expansion packs from EA no thanks. Hopefully windows 7 will be like XP was after they released there nightmare windows ME

My printer is slightly confused today….

Posted on by Forge77

I’ve been having problems installing a printer, when i finally got it installed it threw an interesting error

Your
has less than 20% of ink remaining. Click Buy Now to purchase Genuine Epson Ink for your Buy Now/Where to Buy online. Shipping available only in the continental U.S. Click Remind Me Later to see this screen again when the level falls below 10107372%.

damn .. I want a printer cartridge with 10107372% ink

Phone Fun .. Katana LX mini-review

Posted on by Forge77

I was on a Pay as you go plan for AT&T and it worked out well if you made next to no calls. but then again there were times you were forced to make calls. That got expensive quick, the silly rounding rules for minutes killed off money faster than anything. After signing up to sprint on there low plan  29.99 for 200 minutes.

The Katana lx is decent looking phone but looks do not make up for its problems. the problem maybe more from my point of view, but moreso they tend to be things I look for in a phone and i have basic requirements for a phone.

1. to make calls
2. that the phone is somewhat configurable
3. can add/make own ringtones.
4. Durable

well the phone right out of the box passes only on #1 and #4. I had started with a bluetooth connector the phone connected right up but after that the phone really as far as accessing data and such was worthless, the best that could be done is a tether if you had a DataPlan.

Another issue i have with sprint is the fact that the phones dont use Sim cards which makes programing your phonebook a pain in the ass and you look like an ass doing it with 2 phones in hand. As Far as a Dead basic phone the Katana LX is just that.

After the bluetooth try i figured maybe the USB Cable would be more fruitful in getting the phone to be somewhat responsive , I was wrong, as Far as drivers from Sanyo – Good luck with that. It took me two days of looking and when i finally did get it working , the phone did Even less than when connected to bluetooth.

But for being a basic phone it does have its pluses , You can hear it ring from jupiter on its loudest setting.  The T9 texting was decent..  but overall it was not what I would personally want in a phone.

So after talking to the rep at the sprint store I ended up returning the Katana after a good weeks use and learning its up and downs.

The phone would be good for someone who just wants to have a phone with not many bells and whistles.

Cuil sucks ..

Posted on by Forge77

Cuil A new search engine that came out, On the day it was released they plastered every site possible that they had come out with this. The company says that Cuil is Irish (Gaelic) for knowledge, It should stand for pile of shit. really what it seems is Cuil maybe knowledge but in no way experienced, there search just doesn’t make sense. Just a simple test will prove that. Cuil claims to have a larger index than any other search engine, with about 120 billion web pages. ok that’s stretching it there.. BADLY The only way for them to index that many webpages (4 times as much as googles index ) is to take every irrelevant page and index it , but thats cant be it , because why is it anything you search You get absolutely NO results relevant to your search, Dunkin donuts brings up the providence civic center. there Storage method for finding pages is insanity. you could Probably search what ever your looking for than type in moose balls in anger and find what your actually looking for .

Maybe someday this will be the next google but as far as knowledge that cuil claims to have its just not there. they basically make it where if you had a set of encyclopedias, and you searched “Car” the result would not be the “car” your looking for but rather opening up a random encyclopedia and finding a random Car stuff in under something completely irrelevant like the Carina constellation because it contains the word car.

from there site..

Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.

Translation: blah blah blah we’re jealous of google, cuil blindly picks out words we think are related, More useless filler words because we don’t know what the fuck we are doing, We like adding big words and make it sound really personalized to you!

That’s about the right translation.

Now that I’ve typed out this clusterfuck Lets see how Cuils Search Picks up on this and i BET it wont show up under cuil sucks or cuil sucks monkey nuts or cuil sucks buffalo ass.

One more Test

Cuil = 12 results for cuil sucks
Google = 9,330 for cuil sucks. (0.14 seconds)

seems strange for the lack of cuil  not indexing 9318 pages..

GTA Moronity part II

Posted on by Forge77

Went out to pick up a shelf today with bluesteel, We decided to stop at gamestop. so we poked around the Gamecube games and picked up a few. but in the time we saw at least 4 parents picking up GTA 4 for there kids. With the news going crazier than britney spears on a normal day about GTA it seems like parents dont give a shit about GTA/NEWs reports. so basically its a few crazy fucks going off on fictional material in the game that doesn’t exist. but Over all it was pretty entertaining to see that.

VD-W2 Wii VGA cable part III.

Posted on by Forge77

Over the weekend i picked up a few GameCube games, Metroid Prime , F-zero GX, Killer7and Need for speed Hot pursuit 2. Now i previously wrote about the VD-W2 Wii VGA cable, This is the first time I’ve had a problem with the cable. The first game i tried was NFS:HS the game starts up and the display on the monitor goes nuts. Typical, EA and more crap they put out, You would figure as the one of the “top” gaming manufactures, it would support 480p. The gamecube supports 480p , but theres a catch. in order to get the game in 480p you need to hold down the B button on the gamecube controller when starting the game.

this is a small problem in my opinion since i don’t play too many GC games. But, if you intend to play Game Cube games using the VGA cable There is a list too help you out at Mobygames.com .

Overall the cable in my opinion is worth it with the one minor downfall of not supporting GC in 480i , but Most of the good games are supported in 480p for the game cube.

overall i’d say the cable too me is a 9/10 with that small drawback (to me)

Console Gaming without a TV part II..(VD-W2 Wii VGA cable)

Posted on by Forge77

I do not usually watch TV, the last TV i had I ended up giving up because it just took up too much space. So I’ve always used my PC to watch Movies, Play games and such , until i purchased the Wii. From my last post
Console Gaming and Movie watching

I have tried almost every PC HD TV card under the sun in order to get a better picture/ less lag time out of the display with results fairing for the worse rather than better. One of my biggest problems was screen lag time.. On the HD Cards you had at least a full second of delay while moving the cursor around, on the analog card the lag time was barely perceivable but enough where it was noticeable if you had played on a TV, also If the PC is doing ANYTHING what so ever , you will get graphical corruption in the display thats the fault of the PC not the Wii. As far as using a TV card the display is fuzzy in fullscreen.

Wii On TV Card
After all those cards my thoughts on internal tuner cards for PC’s are they are all piles of shit… But, looking around i saw one possibility the VD-W2 Wii VGA cable from Vdigi I had taken my time on ordering this because I didn’t see any sort of review for this cable. Also being from HongKong and I am weary of Ordering from sites i don’t know. Resellerratings.com had next to No information about them, After much thinking I finally decided to order the thing…

After an impatient 2 week wait the cable arrived in a simple brown envelope from hongkong. Following the USPS tracking site.. Not really worth even tracking because they barely update you on the location of your goods. Anyways the packaging is dead simple , right to the point, you don’t need user testimonials on how it works. Anyways anything with a billion testimonials usually is a pile of shit.

the cable seems to be built of really good quality, Setup is a breeze as long as you understand the basic premise of what your doing. since the monitor your plugging into does not have an analog tuner, you have to use the component cable plug in on a tv

Wii VGA cable closeThe Green RCA jack you just plug into a TV and power on the wii , After doing so you goto your system menu and Display selection of 480i or 480p , You want to choose 480p , but doing this will look like something bad is happening . the screen will look completely fucked, don’t worry here,  because the TV doesnt know how to handle the signal. after this Power down your Wii , Disconnect the Green RCA than proceed to connect the Cable to the monitor , you will need a male to male VGA connector/Wire to complete this action, After that you should be all set on Connecting up to your monitor.

As far as quality goes , the cable kicks ass.

it removed every problem you would have with a TV card and basically gives you the same response as you would get on a TV screen. with the added bonus of You can turn off your PC to play the console if you run your Console like i do.

Lets see where this goes… Logitech this is in your hands now. Part I

Posted on by Forge77

I’ve always loved logitechs mice and keyboards , I would recommend them to anyone in the past … but now since having multiple hardware failures with the G7 double clicking when your just trying to single click. my confidence has been shaken. Hopefully I wont have to jump through 87 hoops to get this replace but this is chapter one in firing emails off to logitech. I just want a damn mouse that works without being fucking possessed to completely screw up at anything its doing.

Continue reading “Lets see where this goes… Logitech this is in your hands now. Part I”

Logitech G7 reloaded… ftw

Posted on by Forge77

looking back I first posted about the logitech G7 mouse in one of the very first posts to this site.

Ever since logitech came out with its first ergonomic keyboards I jumped ship from microsofts Ergo keyboards because they kept shrinking the keys. back in 1997 i had the mouseman pro, ever since than i’ve kinda stuck with logitech.

Well since the MX1000 i’ve had a small problem that crops up after while of using the mouse which the left click decides to start failing, if you read the original post you can see that a left click acts like a double click no matter how tactful you are with the mouse. after getting fully annoyed at the G7 i purchased another one at Circuit City and started to use that one. same problem cropped up . so getting a little sick of going through mice so fast i finally decided to talk to logitech about it.

Finding the receipt for one mouse came about quickly but as for the second mouse , that is more of an issue , so logitech so far has replaced one G7 with short notice and thankfully quickly. because the temp mouse i had was starting to make me go blind. It has a Blue LED you could use to grow plants with.

After searching this page i came up with the date i had bought my original G7 , i dont know if that will help with the RMA , maybe it will maybe it wont

we shall see….