Firefox

I had to update iTunes the other day, a simple enough endeavor if not for the fact that Internet Explorer was rendered completely FUBAR'd after the patch. I have no idea what iTunes might have to do with IE, but I could not get Microsoft's browser to open links beyond a bookmarked site. Neither could I open the brower's preference link to further tinker. By way of Microsoft's surprisingly robust customer support knowledge base, I discovered a back door into IE's preference settings and the much needed factory reset that fixed my problem, but wiped out my cookies and bookmarks. It took me long enough to figure out the fix, I downloaded and tried out Firefox by way of retribution.

And now I'm almost exclusively using Mozilla's browser. I got some interface adjusting to do, but I already like some of the small things Firefox does differently, like password prompts and history bookmarks. Unless Firefox goes completely batshit on me, I'll likely make a new friend of it. I was almost livid with rage when IE busted on me (mixed with a generous helping of panic at being disconnected from the Internet), but perhaps it lead me to a better product.

GeForce GTX 280

GameSpot has a preview of Nvidia's latest and greatest GPU, the GeForce GTX 280. The thing eats games for breakfast. Little kids for lunch and dinner. The disclaimer is that games will have to be coded to get the most out of the card.

And it's only $650! Wait, that's really expensive.

*Pats his 8800 GT on the head*

More Crackling with X-Fi

I thought I had the problem licked with a driver update to my motherboard. But after a reboot, the problem returned. Interestingly enough, it's software specific. Lord of the Rings Online runs perfectly. Age of Conan exhibits some crackling. And Windows tools, like the media player, absolutely explode with the annoying distorted noise.

So, I flashed my BIOS. The most current version hearkened all the way back to 2007, which didn't bode well. Nevertheless, after I flashed it, the popping and crackling once again disappeared across the board. I rebooted to make sure and still no noise.

I'm hoping this finally fixes the problem. For those of you with a high-end system thinking about picking up a X-Fi, tread carefully. The noise problems seem to stem with high performance systems almost exclusively.

Snap! Crackle! Pop!

My new RAM came the other day. I popped them in no problem, except that my behemoth 8800 GT rested nearly flush alongside the RAM banks and made it a surgical effort to remove and replace the modules. I wanted Wifezilla to stand next to me and hand me instruments while I barked out things like, “Scalpel!” or “I need 1,000 ccs of compressed air, stat!” but she didn’t get back from work in time. Hallie eagerly offered to help, but I envisioned her pulling out gobs of wiring so I wisely placed her in front of SpongeBob instead.

My 64-bit OP recognizes all 4 gigs. And let me tell you, I’m gaming in flavor country now. Coupled with my monster 8800, games load lightning fast and render smoothly. Fps is simply not an issue any more at current games’ highest settings.

For now.

I had one snag though. I’ve got a Soundbaster X-Fi, mostly because the integrated sound that comes on mobos suck. After installing the RAM and rebooting, I noticed significant popping and crackling coming out of my speakers. I’ve read lots of people having this problem with the X-Fi series. I think it’s particular to Vista. Something about the new RAM sparked the crackling. Whatever the cause, the problem was a deal-breaker for gaming as the noise feedback is too pronounced to ignore.

I first downloaded and updated the X-Fi drivers. No effect. I next downloaded and updated my mobo drivers. That did the trick. Which is good because I love my X-Fi card, but not enough to put up with CB radio crackling.

I’ve been playing some Age of Nanoc these last few days and plan to write more about my adventures after the Memorial weekend. I haven’t played long enough to judge whether AoC will permanently pull players away from WoW, but I’m having fun with it so far.

No SLI, But One Card Should Do Me Just Fine

This bad boy just arrived in the mail today. I needed a new power supply to juice it. I'm going to pop them in right after this post.

Goodbye 15 fps in WoW!

I was going to order two 8800s, but it seems that none of the MMOs I play support SLI. So until I start spending the majority of my time playing games that take advantage of SLI, I'll stick with one card.

If I don't post anything to the blog in the next few days, it means I catastrophically damaged my computer. Please send the Geek Squad.

XP Not for Sale after June 30th

For all you poor slobs still hanging on to XP, Microsoft plans on halting sales of it this June. Looks like they'll stop software support for it early in 2009.

Suckers!

Gamespot Previews GeForce 9800 GTX

You can find the preview here.

Be sure to scroll down and read what the masses have to say about the card's performance rankings. They seem pretty unanimous in their disappointment.

I'd check some more sources to be sure, but if you've been holding out for the 98XX series, I'd wait no more. Go out and get a 8800 GTX or GT and save yourself some dough.

Boost Your Signal Strength AT&T

Well, I checked other HD channels and didn't see any evidence of the "artifacts" that I observed watching Lost last night. Experts don't agree about digital signal loss and its connection with HD picture quality. Some say, you either get the signal or you don't; any image quality issues you experience can't be from a weak digital signal. Others disagree, maintaining that signal strength can indeed affect your picture quality. I'm not sure what camp I'm in, though I see merit in the "you either get the signal or you don't" faction.

Nevertheless, Lost looked like crap last night. I had never seen such a lousy HD picture on my set before that. In addition, I noticed it immediately. Couple that experience with the fact that I couldn't get three or four other HD channels to replicate the artifacts, and I come away with the preliminary conclusion that either AT&T sent a weak digital signal for that particular episode or ABC somehow messed something up.

TV Fixed But Now Pixelates

The Best Buy dude was supposed to replace my TV's analog and digital boards today. But after spending twenty minutes tearing his van apart, he walked into my house with only a digital replacement board.

This pissed me off for a number of reasons. First, it's been more than three weeks since I reported to Best Buy the malfunctioning state of my TV. Three weeks seems to me an extraordinary amount of time to fix a TV. Secondly, Best Buy called me last week, confirmed that both boards had shipped, and rescheduled my appointment for the installation. But the Best Buy dude only had the one board, which he claims he got just today. He couldn't explain where the analog board was, though he seemed to realize he was supposed to have it. Showing up (for a second time I might add) with only half the parts was not just half-assed, it also signaled the likelihood that I'd need a third appointment

At any rate, he popped the digital board in. I supervised. I was curious to see what the TV's guts looked like. I wasn't surprised to see its internal make-up closely resembles that of my PC. I'm not sure why a HD TV splits its circuit board into two, analog and digital, while a PC motherboard handles both. I'm sure there's a technical reason for it. The digital board resides in a metal frame and sits on top of the analog board which is also attached to an even larger metal frame. A tiny heat sink fan is connected to the digital board, its vent hanging out when the entire unit is set in place. A monitor cable, surprisingly similar in size and shape to its PC counterpart, attaches from the side. The middle section of the TV seems to have another layer of circuit boards and the far right side holds the single lamp that lights everything up.

Though he or his company bungled the shipping of the analog board, the Best Buy dude did install the digital board quickly and expertly. He never paused or scratched his head or sighed with resigned desperation. I could tell he knew his way around this stuff and he had everything done in ten minutes.

And now the TV works like it did out of the box. Cycling with the remote's Source key no longer triggers epileptic seizures. It turns out the digital board was the sole culprit and the original analog board is working just fine. As for losing the replacement analog board, no harm, no foul.

I do seem to have a new problem however. At least I think it's a new problem. It's so obvious to me at the moment, I can't imagine that I've been watching the TV like this and not noticed it before. In the HD vernacular, they're called "artifacts." While watching the latest Lost episode, I noticed that when there is a dramatic contrast between light and dark, the dark area bordering the light area pixelates. The image quality reminds me of the early days of PC gaming, cut scenes done in VGA graphics at a low resolution. It's a strange phenomenon because it's so dramatic and obvious, I just know that it's new. The digital board reset all my settings, so I might be able to fix it by playing with the color options.

If not, I'll be seeing the Best Buy dude again soon.

Windows Vista SP1

I think this went live today, so if you run Vista and don't have the automatic update selected, make your way to Control Panel, System & Mainteance and select Check for Updates. The update weighs in at 125 mb, but I couldn't tell you what it fixes.

Breaking Boards

My TV is still busted, but I figured out a way to get it limping along again. Actually, for the limited amount of time he spent looking at the TV, the Best Buy dude accidently helped me understand what the problem is.

He said the TV has two boards, a digital and an analog. I assume they’re the TV version of a computer’s motherboard. If they are, they pretty much run the whole shebang. Based on the problems my TV has been experiencing, he said it has to be the failure of one or both of those boards.

Well, I noticed the day he visited that the TV worked perfectly for him at first. It wasn’t until I hit the remote’s “Source” button to change components that the TV began to freeze and reset. At first I thought this was a random occurrence, but it turned out to be a completely predictable phenomenon. The TV only froze when I cycled past the analog TV setting. If I avoid that component setting and stick to just a cable, DVD, or HD-DVD setting, the TV works fine.

Long story short, the TV’s analog board is kaput. I still haven’t been contacted on when he’s going to come out and replace it, but at least we can watch TV and movies again. And not a moment to soon. I think more book reading and spending quality time with my family was going to kill me.

TV Repair = Rocket Science

I just knew it was going down like this.

I knew the Best Buy tech was going to show up without ANY parts to fix my TV. And sure enough, that's exactly what he did. After I repeated what I had reported over the phone and he actually witnessed it for himself, he proclaimed it was either the TV's digital or analog board. I asked him if it could be anything else. He said, no, that when the image freezes in color, it's not the lamp. The only other thing it can be is the two boards that run the TV. That, coupled with the remote control functions not working, all equaled bad boards.

My next question was, why didn't they listen to my report on the phone, assume it's either the lamp or the boards, and bring those freaking parts with them when they're scheduled to "fix" my TV? He had no good answer for that.

So, TV still broken. Parts to be ordered Monday morning.

Arrival time for parts? Unknown.

Scheduled time for repair? Largely in doubt, though realistically at least another week away.

My fuse? Short.

No TV for a Week

Yup, that's right. I can't watch TV until this Saturday.

At the earliest.

Yesterday, I went to turn on my 50" HD TV and lo and behold, it wouldn't power on. This occasionally happens, but unplugging it essentially reboots it, a technique that almost always works. Until yesterday.

After I plugged it back in, the TV did power up but froze on a random image. It then proceeded to reset every minute or so, a twenty to thirty second pause where the screen went black until it regained the signal. In addition, it didn't respond to Source remote control commands and didn't power off either.

So, it's majorly messed up.

Thankfully, I have an extended Best Buy warranty. I don't usually buy warranties since they almost always turn out to be a waste of money. But HD technology is new enough that I doubted my TV's long-term reliability. So, the earliest Best Buy can send a technician out is Saturday. And if he can't fix it on the spot, we could be going even longer without TV.

Perish the thought.

Toshiba Throws In the Towel

I don't have any official source since I heard this from the Rod Ryan show (The Buzz) driving into work this morning: Toshiba officially announced it will no longer manufacture HD DVD players.

This isn't exactly surprising coming off the heels of movie studios abandoning the format themselves in favor of Blu-ray. I do feel burned somewhat, though maybe not quite as bad as people who not only bought the player but also a library of movies.

This will get me seriously thinking about buying a PS3. I mean, if I ever want to get a Blu-ray player, for another $100 I could also get in the door of a next-gen console. The sticking point: I can't think of one game I want to play on the PS3. In fact, the only console game I really want to play is Mass Effect and that's coming to PC this May.

In the meantime, my Toshiba plays DVDs in near HD quality. In fact, I can't discern a visual quality difference between Lost on DVD and Lost broadcast in HD. So it's not a total wash.

I'll just keep telling myself that.

AT&T > Comcast (It's Comcraptic!)

AT&T hasn't done anything lately to piss me off. I can't say the same thing for Comcast (It's Comcraptic!). In a behind-the-scenes deal this past summer that I'm sure involved plenty of brimstone and soul-selling, Time Warner hastily abandoned the Houston market to Comcast, much like a lion leaves the husk of a wildebeest for the circling hyenas.

Within days of the take-over, Comcast promptly jacked their rates while also cutting their television line-up. I went from paying $120 a month, to $148. And that's for less channels.

Hmm? Satellite you say? Yes, that had crossed my mind. However, my brother regaled me of satellite installation horror stories. Couple that with the tiny need I have for broadband Internet, and you can quickly see how satellite was not the product for me.

And then, almost as quickly as Comcast took over Timer Warner, AT&T started flooding my mailbox with offers of cable TV AND Internet. I rebuffed the offers at first. I used to have AT&T as my cell phone provider and I was, uh, unimpressed. But the marketing fliers kept coming, and when my Comcast cable went out for an entire day and then returned with dancing, zigzagging lines in the picture, I called AT&T and booked the installation.

So now I'm paying $120 for 3Mbps Internet and an HD cable package that includes Showtime, StarZzZzZz, Encore, and TMC. Not to mention hundreds of other channels I never plan to watch. I've only had the service since Sunday, but so far so good. Even better, their cable modem doubles as a router. In fact, I think the cable TV signal goes through it as well. It looks to be the cutting edge technology for cable TV and Internet. All I know is that returning Comcast's DVR receiver game me a thrill of consumer satisfaction.

Free market competition. It's what's for dinner.

The Disintegrator: a Rubber Band Gatlin Gun

I think it'd be fun to sic this on some unsuspecting woodland creatures. Like the squirrels that hang out in my backyard.

This main site outlines how to build your own.

I think I can almost hear my backyard squirrels scurrying away. Forty rubber bands per second is nothing to mess with.

HD DVD Sinks Faster Than Titanic

Just weeks after I took the plunge and went with a HD DVD player, the major backers of the aforementioned format appear to be abandoning it in favor of Blue-ray. Just a month ago, the two formats were dead-locked, but now it appears that Blu-ray will emerge victorious.

Why in the hell couldn't this have all gone down last month? It's like the executives at the major studios got a memo that James Thomson of Houston, Texas purchased a HD DVD player, so it was time to switch to Blu-ray.

I imagine holiday sales had much to do with the HD DVD death-knell. But I saw no indication from any media source that Blu-ray was so close to eminent victory. If I had even a hint that Sony was winning, I would have went with their player. As it was, I chose HD DVD over Blu-ray because multiple sources cited the former as the superior format because of its cheaper production costs and studio support. I also shied away from Sony because they are the originators of Betamax, and we all know how that ended.

It's not the end of the world or anything. My Toshiba displays normal DVDs in near-HD. I never intended to purchase HD DVDs, but instead rent them for Netflix. Blu-ray players are $300 right now, a price point that should go down when Sony finalizes its dominance and their format mainstreams.

Still, the timing is aggravating. And slighty dangerous to my health: Wifezilla is going to kill me when she finds out.

Black Bars

I was a little freaked out when I first fired up my new HD DVD player. My Comcast (it's Comcraptic!) cable shows HD movies fullscreen, at 1080i. My HD DVD player also shows movies in 1080i, not fullscreen though, but with thin black bars above and below the main picture. I checked my setup to make sure that both my TV and DVD player were configured for 16:9 ratio picture, the standard for today's widescreen sets. They were.

So why the black bars?

Well, I did a bit of research on the Internet and discovered that most theatrical movies are filmed at a 2.3-2.4:1 ratio. That doesn't match the 16:9 ratio of today's widescreen HD TVs, so the bars are needed to depict the actual movie. Without it, the left and the right sides would be cut out of view. When Comcast (it's Comcraptic!) broadcasts theatrical movies in HD fullscreen, they essentially crop the movie to fit the screen so. That's not the end of the world or anything, but good to know when you shuffle between HD cable and HD DVD.

I popped in a regular DVD in a regular DVD player as an experiment to see if I could discern a difference between it and HD DVD. The difference?

Huge.

First off, I estimate the top and bottom black bars on a regular widescreen DVD are more than twice as wide as the HD DVD bars. And the picture resolution is dramatically worse. The difference between regular DVD and HD DVD is at least as great as that between VHS and DVD. Likely greater, when you throw in 1080p and Dobly TrueHD 5.1 support.

And upscaling works spectacularly well. I popped in a regular DVD version of Live Free or Die Hard (great movie, by the way, my favorite of the series) into the HD DVD player, and as promised, it looks almost as good as actual HD formatted DVD. This is a relief, as I have no intention of replacing my current DVD collection. I've also noticed the Blu-ray DVD library seems larger than the HD DVD one, so I'll likely need to rent regular DVDs for those titles that are exclusive to Blu-ray.