wyred to the world
It’s just one of those times again where I fuck things up and piss off everyone around me. Well, a bad habit of mine. Losing self control. I should quiet down for a while, isolate myself from everyone if there’s a need, and rethink things…
This is what I hate about myself…
I’ll most probably stop blogging for a week or two.
Today is a nice day. Not too hot and not too cold. Perfect weather for a walk but instead, I chose to stay at home. Haha.
I have totally given up all hope on the AthlonXP [:(]. All those crashes and OS freezes have corrupted my web server twice, my irc script once, my monitor drivers once and my graphic card drivers once too, all on different occasions.
Going to sell it off. Before reinstalling my Thunderbird CPU, I made a second attempt to unlock it. Some CPUs come factory locked. Which means they are locked at time of manufacturing to prevent overclocking. There are many reasons to do this. One example, some evil scheming computer dealer would overclock a machine’s AthlonXP 1400+ to an AthlonXP 2000+ and sell it off to an innocent know-nothing-at-all buyer at a higher price. More profit.
There are many unlocking techniques for different CPUs, for mine, it was just simply drawing thick lines over 4 L1 bridges on my CPU with pencil. Yes! Pencil! Pencil leads are electrically conductive enough be used to join the bridges that had been cut off during manufacture. Unlocking it means I can now overclock my CPU by adjusting the multipliers. The speed of a CPU is determined by multiplier and FSB(MHz). The default config was 10x100FSB=1000MHz. I increased the multiplier, thus giving me 12x100FSB=1200MHz. [:D]
Registered wyred.nu like I said I would. USD$57.76, SGD $97.73. Both look like potential numbers I could use to buy 4D. Hahaha. It’s going to take up to 24 hours, from time of registration, for it to be activated.
The new blog image, was done without much effort but I felt a little satisfaction. I loved the colors. Gives me a nostalgic feeling, the days at Parry primary school, playing with my friends on the huge school field while waiting for the school van to pick us up and send us home. The full picture without the white highlights can be seen by clicking here. The female elf is from the game, Lineage 2.
It will just be another day with the guys out having fun and all that [:(]. All the pass 20 V Days have been spent either at home or with my friends. [:|]
I’m going to register wyred.nu on this coming V Day and make a new background image for my blog. [XD]
Here’s a portion of the conversation I had with my colleague on our way back to office from lunch yesterday:
Him: So how are you going to spend this coming Valentine’s Day?
Me: Stay at home as usual. Haha
Him: What you mean stay at home? Blah… Blah… Get a girlfriend… Blah…
Me: Don wan lah, it’s still early.
Him: What you mean still early?
Me: I’m still young.
Him: What you mean still young?
Me: I’m not mature enough yet.
Him: What you mean not mature enough?
Me: (I kept quiet hoping the conversation would die and it did.)
The new AthlonXP seems to be running fine. I hope the “burn-in” I did with prime95 has warmed up that little twit. My games are running more smoothly with the exception of Diablo2 which still lags at certain parts of the game. Everytime I climb the staircases behind Shenk the Overseer (Act 5 Quest 1), everything slows down a little. At least overall, it’s better than my older Athlon Thunderbird.
5pm: I had some spare time so I did a little flash for the top right corner of this blog. I don’t know what happened. It’s like all of a sudden, I know kung fu… nah. All of a sudden, I know how to use movie and graphic symbols. The concept just popped into my mind. Freaky… It was just like the other time at Nanyang Polytechnic, during my Final Year Project days. I had my lunch and was trying to take a nap while my partner and the other guys in the same lab were watching a Hongkong movie. All of a sudden, an idea popped into my mind for ABSOLUTELY NO REASON OR CAUSE and there, I was abusing the school’s high speed connection to send files to people at blistering speeds. [:D]
Argh. My computer hanged again. Troubleshooting ensues. I was able to run a CPU-stressing software for 19 hours straight with no problems. But when I play Diablo2 for 40 minutes, it hanged! [:(] . After rebooting, I was viewing my graduation photos and it hanged when I try to view a high resolution photo at it’s actual size. [X(]
Sigh…
Yay! [:)]
I made a thread at HardWareZone forums seeking help for my CPU hanging problem. Someone suggested increasing Vio (Voltage IO) and so, I did. Now, the new AthlonXP is running fine for the whole night~ What a relief.
Everytime I buy new hardware or stuff related to computers, I would ALWAYS encounter problems. [:(]. Let’s start with my very first PC. A 286. Given to me by my mother’s friend. I had my first taste of DOS and I explored every folder on it’s C:. It had a bible inside! I read the first few chapters of Genesis and I stopped. It also contains the game, Civilization, which I loved to play. Then I tried installing a mouse, and even bought my first game on a floppy disk, The Prince of Persia, which bore me. After some time, virus struck. I remember the name of it was Stoned Virus. Pretty soon, the computer can’t be used and because I still don’t know much about them computers, it was sold to the karanguni man (rag-and-bone man) for a small sum of money.
A year or 2 later, I bought my second PC. Powered by an Intel Pentium 2 233MHz with only 32MB of SDram, 4MB AGP graphics card and a 3.2GB harddisk!! [8|] . At first, I played games on it. Command and Conquer: Red Alert! [X)]. Learned a lot of stuff like designing websites, mp3s, graphic design, computer hardware and overclocking. Hah! My design sense was piss poor then. (Not that I’m any better now). During the first few days, it would always hang in windows 95. Thinking of those problems sends shivers down my spine. The problem was eventually solved by bringing it back to the shop and the guy left it on overnight. Now, I suspect what he did was to “burn in” the CPU. Sort of like warming it up for the long run.
There was this girl back in secondary school who called me up once. Says she’s pissed at this guy in our class for this and that. And asked me to send that guy a virus. I accepted the task but not whole heartedly. I had some virus EXEs on my computer back then, which I kept just for fun. I registered a hotmail email account with a female name. Sent the guy the email with the virus programs. Few days later, I heard he had his windows reinstalled and was asking around for email addresses.
Around my first year at poly, I was able to buy a more powerful computer. My stepfather’s relative had given me a very big ang pow! (red packet) I think it was $300. So what I did with that money was to buy a new motherboard together with a CPU. My current MSI K7T Turbo + AMD Athlon Thunderbird 1GHz. I don’t remember whether I encountered any problems with the new hardware. Eventually, I saved up enough money for more ram and 6.4GB harddisk. Got a freelance work to do a simple, full-of-javascript website for this Junior College student at a price of $150 and wallah! Acquired GeForce2 32MB MX200! *Final Fantasy fanfare music playing in the background*
The next worse problems were viruses. I forgot the name but it struck computers on a certain day, wiping out a lot of MY PRECIOUSSSSSS data. [:(]. One distinct feature of that virus is it’s ability to cock up your BIOS chip making your computer unbootable, which fortunately, did not cock up mine. A reformat was done to get things back up.
During the years of 2003-2004, starting with my Industrial Attachment at MobileOne, I used the money I earned to buy a Creative Audigy soundcard. It had some audio glitches. I searched the net and fixed it. The cause was the CPU cooling software I had been using, called VCool. Just some minor changes in the settings of VCool. Then I bought a 120GB harddisk! [XD] The damn shop, Costronics, sold me the wrong model. Which caused me a lot of frustration. After getting the correct model, I excountered crashes while doing file transfers between harddisks. After hours of troubleshooting, and I even reinstalled Windows XP, I found out VCool was causing the problem! [>(]. That was when I stopped using it.
Lemme see… Next up is my CDwriter! I mentioned before in my blog entries. I had bought bad media for it. Experienced huge frustration. Soon, I bought my Radeon 9800PRO. A 128MB high end graphics card. Windows kept hanging and I found out it was because I had my CPU overclocked.
I think I’ve summed it all up. The stories of my hardware problems. My curse.