It seems the good hotel has a few “less than computer savvy” employees. I’m not the most follow the rules type of guy at a workplace. But if your going to be stupid enough to download a torrent of the movie Boondock Saints at work you may want to stop the torrent from seeding when its quitting time.

Minor update that has continuity with the last few posts. Here is my speed test for the damn near 90 buck a month charter internet I’m paying for:

Just for comparison this is the Charter internet I’m paying for below.

Charter High-Speed® Internet Max

1. Get the fastest speeds available – Get speeds up to 20Mbps to surf 13X as fast as 1.5Mbps DSL!
2. Automatic detection from viruses, hackers and spam – Charter Security Suite™ has the fastest response to new virus threats and best virus detection††.
3. Download in seconds, not minutes – plus a reliable always-on, always-fast connection.
4. 10 e-mail accounts – enough for the whole family plus 20MB of Web space.
5. Exclusive content on charter.net – get your local news, weather, movie listings and more!

Plan price: 79.99/mo

©2009 Charter Communications. Offer valid to new residential customers only who have not subscribed to Charter High Speed Internet within the previous 30 days and have no outstanding obligation to Charter. Standard rates apply after promotional period ends. Installation, taxes, fees and surcharges are extra. Certain equipment may be required at installation and charges may apply. ††Defined as fastest response times to new threats and overall detection rates. Source: AVTest.org, Q1-08 world renowned 3rd party testing company. Defined as best detection against new virus threats. Source: AVTest.org, Q1-08 world renowned 3rd party testing company. Charter reserves the right to determine the level of service to which this offer applies. Valid service address required. Credit approval, prepayment or major credit card may be required. All services provided are subject to the subscriber agreement which is subject to change. Visit charter.com/30day for full details on 30-Day Money-Back Guarantee. Services not available in all areas. Other restrictions may apply. Call for full details.

It’s time for a new computer. I used the Tech Report 2008 system guide The Grand Experiment as a blueprint. Here are the parts and Newegg prices:

• Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 $199.99
• Asus P5N-E SLI $119.99
• Mushkin 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR2-800 $75.99
• XFX GeForce 8800 GT 512MB $229.99
• Western Digital Caviar SE16 500GB $89.99
• Samsung SH-S203B $26.99
• Creative X-Fi XtremeGamer $90.99
• Antec Sonata III w/500W PSU $129.95
• Grand Total Spent: $963.88

I’ve been wanting to get a duo core processor for a while. Also Age of Conan is coming up and I had concerns if my current pc could handle it. Luckily I came into some money and I had a $1000 buck budget to build a new computer. I lack the initiative to select my own items so I usually find some tech site that has this kind of info put together before hand. I had some worry about getting the processor from Newegg, as it has been out of stock. It seems to go fast. Hopefully this build will last me for a while. I also hope to be able to play Crysis on this machine as I would like to see what all the hype is about. Now I sit back and wait for UPS to get my stuff to me. And hurray for being able to spend hundreds of dollars in a matter of seconds. What a rush.

I ordered my new video card for my computer. It’s a Sapphire Radeon X1950 XT and with the ram I bought last week this will be the last upgrade I do to this PC. About the only thing I can upgrade now is the hard drive. Which I do have my eye on this 500 gig hard drive.

Because this video card I ordered is a huge bastard I had to get a new power supply just to be able to run it. The card is huge. It’s almost two pci cards long. And it takes up two slots in the case. It is my last hurrah to get this year old pc of mine into shape to be able to play Supreme Commander, Vanguard, Gothic 3, and all the other PC games coming out that need the extra horse power.

I really need to build a new computer again. Which I’m doing for a buddy of mine. Just picking the parts for him made me mad. He’s getting an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.13 GHz system. All of which costs under thousand bucks. Just about the same amount I spent on my PC last year. How computers age. That’s just the way it is.

As long as this new card lets me play Supreme Commander at more than 10-15 frames per second I’ll be happy. I’m really doing all of this for this game. I could give a shit about Vanguard really or anything else. But the spiritual successor to Total Annihilation I’m willing to blow the dough on just to play it. Of course not that I have the cash on hand to buy the actual game. But that will be a purchase I make next check I guess.

Edit/Update

It turns out that the power supply I ordered is shit. The thing has way to many negative reviews about it dying. I don’t want to have to get it replaced in 1-6 months as many reviews say. So I’m going with this one, which I have in my second older PC and have had no problems at all.

It kinda pisses me off in two ways. First it pisses me off because it’s my own damn fault for not reading the reviews for that pos power supply. Secondly it pisses me off that Newegg can charge me right away, yet I have to wait 2-3 business days before I get a credit.

Well I’ve learned my lesson. Next time I’ll research the product out before I go and buy it. I’m just lucky I was able to catch it before Newegg shipped it out.

Since I got my Xbox 360 I’ve been letting my PC gather dust. The last four games I’ve bought have been for the 360. I picked up Rainbow Six Vegas, Dead Rising, Viva Pinata, and Crackdown. The last PC game I picked up was Star Trek Legacy.

Recently there has been a few PC games that just performed poorly on my PC. Gothic 3 and Vanguard are two I can name off of the top of my head. Both of which sounds like that unless you had two gigs of ram of more you would have trouble. So last week I ordered two gigs of ram from Newegg.com. The 2 sticks of Crucial Ballistix DDR 500 (PC 4000) Ram arrived on the 20th (the same day I picked up Crackdown). I have yet to put the ram in to my PC.

I really hope going from 1 gig to 2 gigs will give me that extra punch to play some of these PC games. Specifically I want to be able to play Supreme Commander without having to worry about turning down the graphics and still getting 10-15 FPS. I realize I may need to upgrade my ATI 1600 XT at some point to really get a performance increase. I think my next purchase will be the ATI 1950 Pro before I just go and build a new PC for myself.

Sometime later today I’m going to force myself to stop playing Crackdown and I’m going to install my ram. Then all I have to do is install Gothic 3 and see if I do get a performance boost. Which may lead me to buy Vanguard. And then theres always Supreme Commander.

SALastRead (SALR for short) is a Firefox extension to enhance your Something Awful forums browsing experience. It adds several features to the forums, including highlighting threads and posts you’ve already thread, adding a “Jump to New Posts” button to threads on the thread list page, Quick Quote and Quick Reply windows to post new replies to the forums without having to wait for the forum reply page, Text-to-Image functionality to convert links to images into inline images, tracking threads you’ve posted in, and a SA Menu allowing quick access to your favorite forums.

New Version
SALR Nightly Build from the official site

Not dead yet. Been playing with the computer I built. To lazy to download a benchmarking thingamabob. Screenshots will be coming and in excess. Here is the dxdiag report for those who want to see the what I bought:

——————
System Information
——————
Time of this report: 2/18/2006, 02:07:52
Machine name: TURK-6D1A6B065
Operating System: Windows XP Professional (5.1, Build 2600) Service Pack 2 (2600.xpsp_sp2_gdr.050301-1519)
Language: English (Regional Setting: English)
System Manufacturer: System manufacturer
System Model: System Product Name
BIOS: BIOS Date: 09/19/05 12:07:53 Ver: 08.00.10
Processor: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.20GHz (2 CPUs)
Memory: 1024MB RAM
Page File: 367MB used, 2094MB available
Windows Dir: C:\WINDOWS
DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)
DX Setup Parameters: Not found
DxDiag Version: 5.03.2600.2180 32bit Unicode