Dirk's Blog Thing

I decided to return the graphics card I'd ordered.

It's incapable of displaying videos / DVDs properly on the secondary monitor. I think this is due to the PCIe slot being slow (the fast one is of course taken up by the primary graphics card).

I'm also going back to old drivers - latest ones are just unacceptable for the second monitor. Pity about the games, but those just aren't a priority these days.

I just wish nVidia / Microsoft would get their act together and adress this issue. I can't believe how few seem to be affected by this anyway. It's quite difficult to find any results on the issue on the google.

Btw, I wrote an e-Mail to Tale of Tales. I'd bought The Path (aka Best "Game" Ever) from them two years ago, and the installer had got corrupted, so I needed a new download.

I'm sooo glad ehrec.exe has been maxing out one of my cores for the past four hours.

Also. Gay Warden. Tehehehehe!

A year on, and apparently you still haven't fixed the dual screen issue where animations run smoothly on the primary screen while being all jittery on the secondary?

Now I've got to go back and try to find drivers from two years ago once again, just so that I can *use* the desktop.

Btw, Amnesia - The Dark Descent appears to be an interesting game, but unfortunately it doesn't work properly with two years old drivers. A proper desktop is a priority though.

( Quality documentation made by digitus ... )

The irony being, of course, that there's no "trigger port" field to set. Might be the reason I can't get steam to work via the router ... Also, there's no firmware update available for the router.

Mmmh. It appears that the connection between my computer and the router occasionally just dies. The router's fine though, I can still use the Nexus to access the 'net. It's also not an issue with DNS / IP resolution, if it was then utorrent would still work.

If I disable and enable the adapter, it works again.

Need to figure this out, it's rather annoying ...

Froogle is a useful service and all ... as long as you're searching for the cheapest way to obtain one product.

Doesn't help me much though. I've decided to buy:
- D-Link DIR-655 WLAN router
- D-Link DWA-556 PCIe adapter (because PCIe is the only free slot left in my PC)

So, I can do a froogle search for the router to find the cheapest place to buy it, but the adapter might be more expensive, or unavailable, in that shop. So I'd have to froogle the adapter to find a shop selling that one cheap.
Since I'd end up buying from two different shops I also pay twice for shipping. Worst case, I end up paying more than if I'd ordered from a shop that offers both, but at a higher price.
So, why is it that froogle doesn't let me search for multiple products and displays shops that have all of them, combined?

BTW, some shops offer those two D-Link products bundled, so I get sort of a proper result. But still, froogle should be able to do that IMO.

Why oh why is it that every time I re-install my system I forget to note down the advanced title formatting I'd set in Winamp, and also forget the tag I used on LJ to find that entry again where I noted it in the past?

Grah.

A few days ago I encountered an error when trying to install Windows Updates. Since none of the solutions I found via google worked for me, I contacted Microsoft Support.
Since then I was walked through those solutions I'd found via google again. None of them worked of course.
I also tried system restore but it "restored" to a black desktop with only the mouse cursor visible.

Yesterday I tried the latest suggestion by Microsoft Support. Do an upgrade install, thus replacing most of the system while leaving programs, settings, and personal files intact.
So I started that yesterday, then went to bed. This morning it wasn't done. I took a picture of the screen and when I returned from work this evening found that it had done absolutely nothing in these past 11 hours. So, no luck there I guess, but I couldn't cancel the upgrade installation either because it might leave my system "in an unusable state".
Thinking it sure can't get any more unusable than it is now, I cut the power anyway, then booted a Knoppix DVD to grab some more files off the ssd, and intending to do a fresh install.
Turns out I could still "rollback" to the previous install. That worked for the most part (except that my Windows now thinks it's not genuine) so I'm now back to being unable to doing any updates.

I guess I'll just have to do a fresh install, probably will do that this weekend. I don't really know what else might be not working properly at the moment, so I'm going to make sure.

For now I can watch the soccer though.

Oh, I also need a backup solution since Microsoft's isn't very good. Any recommendations? I'll need something that backups an entire system volume and individual folders to an hdd. Should be easy to schedule to running once a week.

I've got a new Nzxt Sentry (the old one died, remember?) ... And I've put it up on eBay. Let's face it, it's a nice little toy to add to your computer, but you don't really actually need it do you?
It displays the current time, but turns itself off when the computer is powered down, so there's no point to it really, since I can just as well check the time via the task bar.
Also, it displays cpu and hdd temperatures. That gets boring after a while though, nothing much ever happens in that respect anyway. The CPU temp goes up to about 42°c max under full load. That's less than deadly for the CPU and if the fan ever died I'd surely notice.
After what happened to the last Sentry, I wouldn't hook up any fans to it anymore either.

So I'm selling it. Should be worth around 25€ since it's new and unused.