The Anticipation Is Killing Me

Woo, the new parts I ordered arrived today, much earlier than expected. But I can’t actually install them yet.

I only want to crack the case open once, so I have to install everything at the same time. But if I install the other hard drives, I’ll lose the OS and have to reinstall it. But Win7 isn’t ready yet for me, so I’d have to either reinstall Vista or restore the old install from the current drive, and there’s not much point in wasting time on that when I’d have to do a new install in a week now anyway.

So, for now the parts all sit on my kitchen table, taunting me, tempting me…

The End Of An Era

After talking with Shaw support, they’ve decided that it’s probably best if they just replace my cable modem with a newer one. They can’t really say if it’s the specific cause of my problems, but it’s a Motorola CyberSurfr, a positively ancient model at this point, and they’ve been trying to get people off of them anyway. I’ve been using this one for over ten years now, and the tech was surprised I’d still had one for that long, since most people experience problems and swap it out long before that point.

So, tomorrow I say goodbye to my old friend as I drop him off downtown. It may be old, but it served me well for an awfully long time.

Where Did 2008 Go?

With Windows 7 being released soon (less than two weeks away now, for us MSDN members), I figured it was time to consider upgrades for my main PC, so that I don’t have to mess with hardware changes post-install. Some upgrades are already essentially here — with the recent order of my backup drives, I’ve got a couple spare drives with plenty of space for games and apps, and I have another 4GB of RAM that I’d snuck into that same order.

I’d thought about upgrading the video card, but it felt a bit early since it wasn’t so long ago that I’d installed this one and my previous card lasted almost four years. But then I realized that, um, April 2007 was over two years ago, dumbass… It doesn’t feel like I’ve had it that long though, for some reason. The CPU is also starting to be a bottleneck in some cases too (I’m looking at you, GTA4), so it could use a bit of a bump as well.

I don’t really feel like going all-out with a completely new system though, especially since a Core i7 CPU would also require a new motherboard and expensive memory, so this is only an interim upgrade and the next one will be the big one. I’m going for good performance/price ratios rather than raw performance, so I finally settled on getting a Q9550 CPU and a Radeon 4870 video card. They should easily tide me over at least a couple more years.

I’m also going to try to add another 120mm fan into the case. The drives run a little bit warm, and these new parts aren’t going to make things any cooler…

Latency Killed The Video Star

As I briefly mentioned before, streaming video has been the main victim of my recent network problems. It’s been an interesting opportunity to examine just how the different services are handling it:

YouTube: Videos load more slowly than usual, and I can’t start watching them right away. Given enough time, though, it does eventually load the whole thing, so I just have to pause it and wait until a decent amount is preloaded. A.

Google Video: Likewise, it’s slow to load but eventually gets there, though a bit slower overall than YouTube, I think. It just suffers its usual usability and quality problems, being the abandoned orphan of Google’s video services. A-.

Viddler: The loading bar sometimes stops and gives up in the middle of a video, causing playback to stop when it gets there. You can get it started again by clicking near that spot on the bar, though, and skipping around like that is fairly robust in general, so there’s at least a workaround. B-.

Dailymotion: Unfortunately, the loading bar stops frequently here, and seeking around its progress bar isn’t nearly as robust. Trying to click outside the already-loaded areas usually just gets me a “There were technical problems, reload this page” error. In order to watch the video, I’d need the entire thing to load in one shot, and I failed to achieve that in what must have been at least a dozen tries on a short, 4 minute video. For not even letting me get to a significant chunk of the video, they get an F.

The Darkness Attacks

I just had my first ever compact fluorescent bulb burn out, after being installed for…I don’t even remember how long now, but it’s been years. I was confused at first because there was no flash or pop or anything; it just didn’t come on, and initially I thought there was something wrong with the switch.

It’s the first time I’ve had to change a light bulb at all in years now, after switching over to CF bulbs.

Lazy Packets

My Internet performance at home has had these occasional bizarre hiccups lately. In the above example, not a single packet in a string of 100 pings between me and the cable modem head end was lost, but just look at the latencies. There’s no physical-level problem with the data getting through, but the gateway’s holding on to packets for up to five seconds?! Good luck playing WoW under conditions like that…

Never Enough Space

After having bought a pair of 1TB drives for my new Linux box, I now have a set of three 1.5TB drives on the way to me. Damn, that’s a lot of storage.

I was actually waiting for 2TB drives to come down in price, but two 1.5TB drives together are still cheaper than a single 2TB drive. These ones will be used to complete the rest of my backup plan — right now I only have a 500GB external drive for my Linux box’s backups, and it’s 95% full. And that’s doing a straight mirror, without any room for daily differentials and rotating sets. Two drives will be used for that so I can keep one offsite, and the third drive will be for the Windows box’s backups.

Then, I can take the current backup drives and swap them into the gaming PC at the same time I upgrade to Windows 7, which should take me from 480GB to 1.2TB on there. Then I’ll never have to uninstall anything ever again…for a couple years, at least…