Tag Archives: laptop

Personal, Site News

Fears about Suzaku…

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I love my little laptop… I really do. Though the last few days have me concerned. I have had Suzaku for nearly 2 years now and it wasn’t until recently that the poor machine has been heating up at a vast rate both in Linux and Windows XP. In Linux, there is minimal processor strain as I usually turn off the Compiz-Fusion effects and just keep my system functional. In Windows, I use it mainly to back-up my phone, hack/upgrade my phone, and (as of late) World of Warcraft. I know I had blasted a whole ton of latent dust bunnies out when I did the RAM install for my machine on top of ripping out caked up dust on the cooling fans as well.

It concerns me as my machine is usually on for a good few hours be it doing some bittorrent streams of Linux distros, movie/anime watching, web surfing, and games. If Suzaku is on the verge of death… I need to try taking the machine apart and see if it is due for another cleansing of dust and debris. I would hate to find that my machine that has treated me so well wants to give up. Let’s pray that is not the case.

Games, Personal

Realizations on Modern Day PC MMO Gaming.

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Boredom is a powerful and deadly drug in this modern day world… It can cause us to view some rather awful things that our human eyes were never ever meant to see. Great example was the viral “2 girls 1 cup” video that many laid eyes to and lead to some great “reaction” videos on YouTube. However… It has lead me to a rather interesting cross-road. I have lost quite a number of friends from the ex wreaking her drama around town which is a terrible shame really. In turn, this has caused me to play with an odd thought my cousin Sol tuned me to…

Zero, I dare to say that that your laptop could run World of Warcraft… I know you are getting cabin fever when people call out and cancel to your hang-outs. I have had friends who couldn’t even run Guild Wars with low settings on their machines, but somehow World of Warcraft runs like a champ. Plus you may have some fun on top of everything. Just hit up Blizzard’s World of Warcraft site and get your free trial key.

I would give it a shot and see what could come out of it… but sadly… there was one thing limiting me from playing. The updates. World of Warcraft’s base install from a v1.0.0 DVD took 20 minutes and about 2GB of hard disk space. Then add that there are several patches that lead to v2.4.0 that are about 450+MB a piece and NOT a direct “update to 2.4.0 patch” upgrade… Over a base DSL connection, that’s a rather agonizing download… I am on v2.0.1 updating to 2.4.0 currently at 24%, the patch being about 1GB in size, and my speeds from P2P downloads reading at 26 kb/s to 76 kb/s. The estimated time of completion being close to 5-6 hours. I could deal with slow updating, but that’s a rather hefty lot to be downloading almost 3-4GB of compressed game data just to enter the game. At the same time… Guild Wars has it’s own share of things… If you install the client, it does have to sync up with the server to download client software updates which can be agonizing as well. I assume that having to download all of the data before playing is much better than entering a zone and being prohibited from playing until the zone data completes, which is a slight issue I have with Guild Wars.

Why?

I would try to go somewhere like a zone after entering a town and my in-game friends would message me to death but due to the zone loading, I couldn’t see squat. I digress…

I haven’t played World of Warcraft in a long while, save for the one time Cousin Sol let me have a taste early on just to see… I didn’t care for it much then, as I had liked how polished out Guild Wars was with regard to errata. It should be interesting to see how things are now in the game after so many “nerfs” that have balanced/unbalanced (depending on your take) the game play.

It’s a shame my family doesn’t want to step into Verizon FiOS but I don’t have much choice. I will say that if World of Warcraft does run on my laptop, albeit crudely… 1) I will probably be seeking a dedicated Windows laptop for gaming and proprietary program use. Even if it does mean I have to donate Suzaku to my family and means I may not be using Linux too much… I don’t mind charity for them. 2) I will probably ask family to consider FiOS for bandwidth reasons.

I will say that I don’t plan to have World of Warcraft take over my life, I have decent self control from working out and knowing I only have a few years left in my pharmacy studies anyhow.

Personal, Technology

Picture Post: Suzaku’s Operation on the Lab Table

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So… I got my RAM in yesterday and the modification part of me went absolutely nutty! I removed the sticks from the Crucial/Newegg parcel and beheld the RAM in their electro-static shielding bags.

After beholding the RAM, I had to get my “tools” for the procedure. The tools of the trade: a magnetic tip screwdriver with a small bit-driver and a vintage Revlon nail file to be my “scribe” tool to pry up the plastic bezel.

I would go ahead and loosen the screws holding in the plastic bezel as a preparatory step so I would have to have less hassle with that.

I would unbolt the second DIMM slot and replace the first stick as it is the easiest to access.

The original stick of 256mb

“Prepping for the Operation”

Check out the 1GB versus the 256mb!

Bolting up the first stick

The next daunting part was using the nail file to slowly pry up the plastic bezel without breaking anything. Luckily, the bezel doesn’t require too much pressure to pop off. After the bezel came off, it was time to pry off the keyboard and then find DIMM slot 1 waiting for me.

After popping offer the DIMM 1 cover I’d drop in the second 1GB stick and “sew the incision site” to a close…

Check it out! A 1GB stick literally “under the hood”!

After every screw was bolted up, the Dell PhoenixBIOS had a “cute” message saying “It appears you have increased RAM installed on this system”. I would take Maczimus’s advice and get Preload installed to cut load times from programs… After the install… I would notice a surprising drop in load times. For example, Open Office Writer went from 15 – 20 seconds to now 2.3 seconds. VirtualBox seems to lap up the 1GB of allocated RAM from my total 2GB and it was wonderful! I would say that the install was rather great and it’s shows that RAM does make a difference.

Site News, Technology

Under the Knife – Suzaku’s Upgrade Teaser

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So my computer’s steroid injection came in at 6:07pm… I am fucking stoked… Time to rip my machine to pieces to install! I’ll post with results!

Teaser Update: The install literally took me 2 minutes and on rebooting… the BIOS had a comical message “It appears you have increased memory” More benchmarks later and all after my gig!

Second Update: I am a bit exhausted from my side gig and the paid dinner from it… so if you folks can sweat out another day… then well… Check the blog after 5:30pm! Promise!