tangentmind.org

I just signed up for a month of carfax reports for 30 days, so if you ever wanted to see your vehicle history, send me the vin. If you are someone I know, I will run it, if not, I probably won't.

"While not a grievous crime, it borders on sneaky subterfuge... the deep dark place whence grievous crime comes." - A text message I sent to my girlfriend; I have no clue about the meaning or purpose.

More on my Chaintech 7njl6

Ok, so I loaded up the program cpu-z, which I only learned about recently, so I could get some information about the memory in my computer. Lo and behold it tells me my memory is in channels 2 and 3. Apparently, my motherboard is lying about which channels are which. They look like this || |. The motherboard labels the channels as 1,2, and then 3. I had the memory in what I thought was 1 and 2. So I switched the one in motherboard labeled 1 to motherboard labeled 3.

Lo and behold I boot up the computer and the BIOS boot up screen tells me that my memory is running in dual channel. Apparently they are something like 2,3, and then 1, and once again, they look like this || | and the motherboard says "ddr1, ddr2, ddr3". Also, at first the computer crashed when windows was starting, but I simply reset the bios to failsafe, and then to optimal, set my agp aperture to 64(for HD playback), and set it to "reset" in the menu for pci or something(I don't remember which menu it's under exactly. After that everying started up alright.

Now, apparently I never learned anything about dual channel or I forgot. My motherboard's chipset uses Nvidia nforce2, which supports dual channel and I have two memory modules of equal size, and the same brand but made by different manufacturers. Apparently, in general you need the memory in slots 1 and 3 for dual channel, but it varies by motherboard. The info is easily available using a google search. I may have tried putting my memory in dual channel, before, but as I can tell you now, my memory slots are not in order.

I do not know if this will affect my motherboard stability, but it would be awesome if it did because that would save me the $60-100 expense of replacing it.

However, I have found a new reason to upgrade from Athlon XP. Some of the new games, and possibly other software coming out right now require sse2, which athlon xp does not support. So far I have ran into Lost Planet, and Dirt, which need it.

If my computer stays stable I will post the good news here. I may still need to set the memory to the same frequency as the CPU fsb. I haven't done that yet. Hopefully Dual Channel should speed up a few things though.

So, the first week of both work and school is over. Not too bad.

Never buy a Chaintech motherboard. They're probably not all bad, but mine certainly is. They don't make them anymore so finding one might be difficult, but if you do, beware. I have a Chaintech 7njl6. Worst (new) motherboard I've ever had. A simple google searach for 7njl6 will verify my claims. At the moment it's stable but that comes and goes and I had to fidget with my bios settings for a long time.

I don't remember what my bios settings are now. I think I set it to optimal defaults, turned on resetting the resources, then I started up the computer and rebooted it. Then I turned off resetting resources, changed the agp aperture to 128...and I can't remember if I did anything else. I may have changed the cpu settings. I think I set them all to expert, setting all the settings to match my hardware so both the FSB and memory was set at 166 mhz, and then set something to aggressive that I don't think mattered that much because after the other two settings were set to expert all the aggressive setting did was grey out the menu options on the bottom about something like "spread spectrum". I'd have to look again to make sure.


I have tried getting a new power supply, a new cpu fan, a new video card, switching out sound cards, and many other things. It's just a complete garbage board. For now it is stable though, so I'll cross my fingers.

Worst part is that the processor is socket A and the video card is AGP. Socket A is basically dead, so getting a good motherboard for socket A is difficult and furthermore AGP is on the way out. Most of the motherboards I can find with AGP slots are socket 754, which is also on the way out. I haven't been able to find any AGP socket 939 boards, even though I know some exist. Even still socket 939 has been superseded by socket am2, which is soon to be superseded by am2+ and am3.

I haven't really bothered too much with Pentium sockets. Even though Pentium currently has the fastest processors, which I believe are all on the 775 socket, and they dropped the prices on some of their processors, in general I still find AMD motherboard/processors to be closer to my price range.

Still, I recently bought an AGP video card and I'm starting to feel that I should have gone ahead and upgraded to PCI-Express and gotten a new motherboard and CPU when I did that.

If you have a good socket A motherboard, cpu, and AGP video card and none of the parts are going to die, and you don't need to upgrade, then you'll be fine. However, if any part dies or you ever want to upgrade, you're screwed.

I would recommend anyone who is building a new system or replacing some expensive parts, to go ahead and upgrade to PCI-Express, and at least socket 939, if not am2 if they're going with AMD. Currently there are still some socket 752 amd stuff out there, but they may go the way of socket A sometime soon. Intels pretty much all use 775 so that's not as big an issue, but PCI-express is still the better bet. Also, the 939 and up motherboards and processors are generally better than the older ones, and also pci-express is better than AGP. I don't think AMD motherboards below 939 had dual channel ddr, among other things.

So, let that be a lesson to you. Get the newest or newer AMD socket motherboards or an Intel, and shy away from AGP or you might regret it later. Also, stay away from Chaintech, and if you have a Chaintech 7njl6, I feel for you.

I added a bit more info under my profile. Also, I added a "Currently Playing:" section to the section on the right. I considered adding "Recently Watched" or something like that to show which movies I've recently watched. I'm not sure. I maI'm trying to decide whether or not I should sign up for adsense. I doubt I would get much from it, but you never know. In general I don't like ads. I do like getting paid. I'll have to think about it.

I may have a job. I may know Monday. Also, school starts on Monday. I have 3 classes.

I did get Myth and my Kworld 110 working in Ubuntu somewhat. I haven't worked out all the kinks. I'm taking a break from it. I may go into more detail about it later.

Labels: adsense, games, job, kworld atsc 110, mythtv, ubuntu linux

I haven't used Ubuntu in a long time, because I basically switched to using windows full time so I could always run the programs and games I wanted or needed to run. I also switched video cards, tv tuner cards, and hadn't updated Ubuntu in a long time. Most of the time my computer has something it wants to record, and since I have Beyond TV set up with my Kworld ATSC 110 in windows, I want to make sure I'm in windows when it decides to record.

KWORLD ATSC-110
However, the Kworld drivers in windows do not support QAM-256 in windows, because the drivers are BDA drivers. I wanted to try to set up my card in Linux with QAM-256 so I could see if I could pick up digital channels over COX Cable. I don't presonally have cable TV, but I do have cable internet, and my girlfriends parents have Digital Cable. I was wondering if I could pick up the channels for free, because usually you get the Digital signal as long as you have TV and you just have to rent an extra cable box to pick up the signals.

Installing Ubuntu
However, upon booting into Ubuntu I decided that my Ubuntu installation was too old to upgrade easily, and I decided to start over with 7.04. Most of my important information had been on a separate fat partition anyway. I formatted my two Ubuntu partitions which were "/boot" and "/", installed Ubuntu and booted it up. I had to turn off the "SB Live Analog/Digital Output Jack" because there was static coming out of the speakers. Then I ran all the updates. I installed the gstreamer plugins so I could watch videos while I'm working on the computer, and will probably install VLC soon for the same reason.

NVIDIA Restricted Drivers
Next, I needed to install the Nvidia restricted drivers. I could have just done it the easy way, but I decided to install the latest drivers from the Nvidia website(100.14.11).

Edit: I forgot an important step when I did this. Before installing the drivers, I should have opened up "/etc/default/linux-restricted-modules-common" with root privileges and put "nv nvidia-new fglrx" in "DISABLED_MODULES". After rebooting I had some issues with the Nvidia driver having the wrong version, and X not starting before I fixed this.

To install the drivers, I first downloaded them from the Nvidia website. Next I had to install the libc6-dev package. After that I ran "sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop" in the console. After X closed, I went to the directory I downloaded the drivers too, which was my Desktop, and ran "sudo sh (driver file)". The installer then compiled a new package, and I chose to run Nvidia's X configuration program. After that I tried it out by restart X with "sudo /etc/init.d/gdm start". Everything seemed to start ok, except that the resolution was wrong. I checked my "/etc/X11/Xorg.conf" file, noticed that the highest resolution was labeled "1440x1440" instead of "1440x900" like it was supposed to be, so I fixed this. After that, I restarted X and everything seemed good. System>Preferences>Screen Resolution seems to think that the frequency of the screen should be 50Hz or 57Hz, which is wrong. However, the Viewsonic menu says it's 60, so I'm not going to worry about it right now. Finally, since I have an LCD screen, I went to System>Preferences>Font and set the font to "subpixel smoothing" so the font looks better.

BFG GEFORCE 6600GT MESSED UP
Lastly, what I said about the Nvidia drivers causing that odd triangle on the top of my screen was wrong. I also may have forgotten to mention that my HD videos are kind of stuttering. The cpu usage stays slow, so it's probably something to do with the hardware acceleration on the video card. Also, ocassionally when I restart the computer, the screen will flash on and off, displaying the screen as it should be as well as with graphical errors. I don't know why. The only fix I've found so far is to turn the computer off for 5-10 minutes and then turn it back on.

I have no idea what's causing this. My BFG Geforce 6600gt OC might be a little bit messed up. It does have a tendency to run a little hot - about 60 degrees celsius but the shut off heat is well above 100. Also, the video card fan sometimes makes bad noises. It could also be an issue with the motherboard though. My motherboard is cheap. Of course, so was my card, but I got it on rebate.

The triangle is still on my Linux desktop as well.

I'm going to try to figure out the ATSC 110 HD TV QAM Linux, Mythtv thing now so more updates later.

Labels: computers, mythtv, nvidia geforce, ubuntu linux

VLC CRASHING
I recently had a problem with VLC crashing on me. I don't know why or when it started. It would just simply crash every time it started. I found some info online however that fixed it. What I had to do was go to the vlc install directory, rename the plugins folder, open VLC(it won't open), wait for it to try to start and not open, then rename the plugins folder back to "plugins", and open it again. This resets the plugins and for some odd reason, fixes it. Your guess is as good as mine, but it works.

NVIDIA DRIVERS
I recently tried to install the Nvidia 162.18 drivers for my geforce 6600gt agp. The drivers have something wrong with their widescreen support, so the screen didn't look right. Then I uninstalled them and installed the NGO 158.22 drivers. For some reason my nvidia control panel doesn't work, however if I install ntune, the ntune control panel will open install of the nvidia control panel. I also have a weird dark triangle up at the top of my desktop. I don't see it in games though. I will probably go back to the 78.01 drivers, which were the last ones I know of to offer wmv HD acceleration for my 6600gt AGP. I might just wait for another driver update though. The Nvidia settings taskbar thing still works.

Labels: crash, nvidia driver, video lan client, vlc

So, I moved out of my parents house and in with my girlfriend. Very fun. It took me a little while to get the internet up, and when I did, I didn't really feel like posting.

I have a fixed a number of random things and learned some interesting things though, and I just decided that I should be posting them, because someone else might find them useful.

Let's see..where to start...

PCCHIPS M810LMR
I have a pcchips m810lmr motherboard. I have a Sapphire Radeon 9600xt plugged into it. I had Ubuntu running on it but Ubuntu never seemed stable when games and videos were playing, which is annoying, because stability is a big reason I bought the board in the first place. I thought it might have been Ubuntu, because I had upgraded it many times and it was low and hard drive space it had hard restarted many, many times, and the installation came from the old motherboard. So I reinstalled Ubuntu, and also Windows 2000 on a larger hard drive. I then found out that games and video were not stable under windows either, so I looked online and decided that I probably needed to turn down the AGP speed. I now know that I have to set the AGP speed to 1x in order for the computer to be stable, even though the motherboard can do AGP 4x and the card can do AGP 8x. It's stable so I'm happy.

Next, I've had a lot of problems getting windows update to work on a couple computers. I've solved some problems with it and ran into others. I know that's not helpful, but I'm throwing it out there anyway.

GRANDPA'S LAPTOP
I tried installing a belkins wireless usb adapter on my grandpa's old presario 1235 laptop. It has, I think, an amd k6-2 266mhz processor, 96 mbs of ram, and no network ports. The drivers, under 98 caused the system to crash. 98se might have worked but I just went ahead and install windows 2000. It's relatively slow, but I turned off as many services as I could, I installed AVG, which is one of the least resource hogging AV clients I could find, and I haven't installed any other programs that start with the computer, besides the belkin wireless client. I'm having problems with the windows update website, but I got all the major updates installed and automatic updates is working. I did have an annoying bug where an update kept asking to be installed constantly even though it had supposedly installed sucessfully, but I got rid of it by installing an MDAC thing..I googled it.

MOM'S CD DRIVE
My mom's cd drive quit working. It acted as if the power was gone. I just unplugged the dvd drive, which I knew was getting power(and doesn't actually work correctly), and plugged those plugs into the cd drive.


INTERNET HOOK UP
I had a little fun getting the internet hooked up. By fun, I of course mean pain. First of all, Cox seemed to think my duplex neighbors address was mine, even though the duplex neighbors mailing address was correct. I had to go to the Cox service building with my lease, but it got all straightened out. Then I found out that the Cox cable modem that I had, I couldn't use because the people who had it before me had a delinquent account. I ended up trading the duplex neighbors their extra cable modem, for me fixing their computer.

The computer was a total wreck though. Pre SP1 install; No windows XP updates installed ever; No antivirus installed; No antimalware; limewire with undoubtedly p2p malware; malware from bad porn sites; installation of bogus programs. I got sp2 installed by running a windows xp home sp2 repair cd, and I ran a number of antimalware programs and antivirus. There were something like 20 viruses and 200 infected malware files. I got some of the updates installed but some of the other ones hung at the installation. I tried about a dozen things, but I'm not sure if any of them helped.

I chose Cox cable over DSL for a couple of reasons. First of all, I didn't have to get any other services, like a phone line. Second of all, it was $15 for 6 months. Even after it goes up to about $30 that's still pretty good considering that I don't have to pay for a phone line. The blocked all the tv signals with some signal splitter blocker thing. I can't get at it to take it off. They have some weird lock on the box. I can still get QVC, local access channel, and TBS though. Not sure why. Installation was free, but I had to use this old dirty rg-59 cable or it would have cost me something like $30-60 for a nice new rg-6 cable install with a nice new wall plate and everything.
Edit: I forgot to mention one of the biggest reasons I got Cable over DSL internet. At my parents house which is only a few blocks away, the DSL is very slow, about 40 KB down, because of old phone lines. The same may be true where I live. However, cable is not affected by old phone lines, so cable speeds are about 200 KB down. Possibly more if I opted for the RG-6 cable. However, this is faster than the advertised speed of the Cox internet package that I have, so I'm definately not complaining. Upload speeds are only slightly faster than the DSL speeds at my parents house though.

CABLE TV
I can get cable channels 2-29 for about $12 a month, which is the cheapest tv offer by far, but that's not a lot of channels. That would however get that tv blocker off, and if I could get my HD tv card set up with qam256 support(which I can only do in Linux because of Kworld's stupid BDA only windows drivers), then I might be able to pick up hd channels over cable, for free which would be completely awesome. Especially if I could get all of them, like Discovery HD, National Geographic HD, all the local channels(except a few multicast PBS channels), and Universal HD(stargate and Firefly in HD is awesome).

I may try the whole Linux QAM 256 thing in a little while.

In the meantime I'm picking up my channels from a midsize directional antenna I've got mounted to the top of the roof. I'm kind of down in a valley though so it's not really tall enough to get the best signal. I was using an amplified indoor antenna, but it wasn't the best quality and I live on the bottom of the duplex so I'm basically in a basement-like situation, and then there's the valley thing so the signals were sporadic. Also, my back yard floods when it rains...looks like a 1-6 inch deep lake. The valley thing. Seriously.

NEED A JOB

Did I mention that I need a job? Really badly need a job. Looking for one. Took a break. Had some leads, and interviews, but didn't pan out. I'm pretty much up for anything at this point.

Labels: computers