Category: Tech

My previous combo cdwriter/dvdrom drive runs fine, except it leaves some sticky substance when it reads a disc. My original CnC3 Kane Edition DVD is now damaged because of this. That sticky substance is hard to remove. :(

So time to buy a new drive. These things are so cheap now. Years ago, cd writers sell at around SG$200 (US$130). My new one costs only SG$79 (US$50).

A lot of people gave good comments on this drive in the local hardware forums, which is why I chose this without much consideration. Max write speed: 18X, and it doesn’t run on those old fat IDE cables but the thin SATA cables.

This drive also has the lightscribe function. Which means your drive can "print" onto your DVD. But your DVD too, must be made for lightscribing.

Here’s a picture I downloaded from the lightscribe site above, and I added a few lines of text of what the disc contains.

Here’s the result:

My first 3 burns on the new drive failed. I think the bundled Nero Express software is buggy. I had to use a full version of Nero and burns were successful.

Bought a new SATA DVD writer that supports lightscribe, but it seems to be having problems and I’ve wasted 3 DVDRs.

UPDATE MySQL SET version=’5′ WHERE version=’4′;
SQL Query executed successfully.

In layman terms, I’ve upgraded my MySQL database server from version 4 to version 5 successfully. The MySQL Administrator tool helped a lot in the backing up and restoring of databases.

Next, I upgraded PHP from version 4 to 5, and a lot of things broke. Particularly the mbstring support, that makes the input/output of Japanese text possible. I may revert back to version 4 or upgrade to the latest version 4 releases.

I’ll post some pics up of my new DVD writer over the weekend after I’ve sorted out all these problems!

Last week, I went down to Sim Lim Square, a famous place in Singapore for computer hardware and other computer related stuff.

Bought everything at once. A new bigger case, Antec P180 (which ended up a little disappointing), an Intel Dual Core E6600, Gigabyte P965 DS4 rev.2, 2 sticks of 1GB cheap Corsair rams, MSI 8800GTS 320MB Overclocked version. Spent a total of SGD$1790 (USD$1179).

I had to carry all these back home myself! I took a cab of course.

The motherboard. I had the people at the shop install the CPU for me.

Notice the capacitors are solid capacitors. These are supposedly better and last longer than the normal capacitors. My old socket A motherboard’s capacitors leaked and some sort of orange crust formed on top. It’s still working though.

The PCIe graphics card. It uses solid capacitors too.

The new casing.

I’m not experienced in setting up a PC, thus I wanted a large one to make things easier.

But I ended up having a hard time putting everything together. It’s… cramped…

But it has good airflow I assume. 2 chambers, an upper chamber for the motherboard and stuff, and a lower chamber for the PSU and 4 harddisks.

A close up shot on the lower chamber, these are my SATA harddisks.
Notice how there’s very little space for the SATA cables?

Also, that’s actually a 120mm fan on the left side of this photo!

Some stuff I’ve learned: If you want to install RAID drivers during the setup of Windows XP, it does not detect USB floppy drives. I’m running RAID0 WD Raptors for performance.

As to how the gaming performance was, I bought Command and Conquer 3: Kane Edition, Nod version, and I can play the game at 1280*1024 with all graphic settings set to max and no lag at all!

Funny thing is when it comes to FFXI, graphics get a little choppy easily and the improvement over my previous setup was like only 15%? Either the drivers for my new card still needs more work or FFXI (A 3~4 year old game!) has really bad support for new cards.

There’s also a few graphical issues with FFXI with the new 8800 series cards. Bright menus is one of them. You can fix it by downloading a hacked beta driver for your 8800 card from the windower.net forums. There’s a stickied thread about it.

Click for larger version

It was 2am I think. Off peak hours in Singapore. There’s rumours that Singnet (local ISP) throttles down our bandwidth during peak hours so all it’s customers can have a smooth internet experience.

Anyway, I was very suprised to hit my maximum downloading bandwidth. I’m on 10mbps ADSL2 plan. The max theoretical download in MB I have is:

To hit 1.3MByte (point 1 in screenshot) is very suprising.

Take a look at point 2 in the screenshot above. That’s a truncated list of people I was connected to for that torrent. The top 3 uploaders to me were uploading at 400~500KByte/s to me.

Point 3: They were from Japan.

Recently a JP friend of mine in FFXI told me upgraded to a fibre optic connection. Seems like it’s very common in Japan?

I’ve been noticing in a few forums that some unscrupulous companies have been making fake threads to advertise their products/services.

I recently reported one such case to HWZ’s mods and the threads/user have been deleted.

Here’s what they did:

1) Scheming person creates an account user_A and makes a thread in a help forum stating he’s having problems with his harddisk and asks how to recover the data.

2) Other forum users come in with honest replies suggesting using techniques/software to recover the data.

3) Scheming person then creates an account user_B and makes a reply in that thread some time later, proceeds to mention a company name that provides such recovery services and how it has helped them.

I don’t know if a lot of forum moderators have noticed this already. At first, it’s hard to tell or notice this sort of thing. But once you’ve gotten the hang of it, you can easily tell which users are doing this.

Key points to watch: post count, previous posts he’s made (you can usually tell from here whether he’s an honest user), difference between the account registration date of both user_A and user_B.

These fuckers waste the time of honest users who make effort to provide help.