My Next Upgrade..

...although it won't be anytime soon, will most likely include an AMD board. With Rambus suing Nvidia's ass, with Nvidia's stock in a slide, and with the ATI Radeon 4870 stomping all over the new GeForce 280, there may be a new king in town. Apparently, over at AMD's HQ they decided maybe their old business model of competing with Intel and Nvidia's midrange chips only for a more suitable model of simply kicking ass in every department. The 4870 does just that and the 4870 X2 also shows some promise by housing two GPUs on the same board (yay dual-core graphics). Also, Crossfire will most likely be supported on Intel's new Nehalem based boards, which adds further punishment to Nvidia, who's SLI will be left in the dark on said boards. However, it is still in my opinion that one solid $600 GPU will perform better than two $300 GPUs in SLI or Crossfire. Hopefully my 8800 GTS can remain solid for at least another year before it and my Core 2 Duo E6400 are scratched for newer hardware.

Unfortunately, AMD has not been able to take it up a notch in the CPU department, with Phenom never failing to dissapoint. Also, their tri-core chips, while intriguing, are easily shot down by a slightly more expensive (e.g. the good old reliable Q6600). However, Intel's tick-tock approach has seemed to keep them in the lead over all competitors. With Nehalem and Larrabee on the way, AMD is all but dead and buried. Ideally, my next upgrade includes a mid-range Nehalem chip. A DDR3 board would be nice if DDR3 becomes affordable in the coming months, and as aformentioned, an AMD GPU. Other than that, possibly another 250 GB SATA hard drive, but thats not really necessary. I have networked hard drives that store all my movies and music at my house, and on the go my music fits nicely on my PSP. Storage is no concern for me (which is even more apparent by the fact I bought an Asus Eee Pc with a 12GB SSD!). So who knows what will happen in the coming months? The world of PC hardware is ever-changing, and all I can say is that it has never been a better time to be a computer geek.

Howto: Run Oblivion on Very Old Hardware

If you have not played Oblivion before, it means one of three possible things. 1. You are trapped on a deserted island with no contact to human civilization (but, of course, you are reading my blog because its that awesome), 2. You never thought about it/didn't want to, or 3. Your old piece of shit computer couldn't play it and you became very, very angry (in this instance you may or may not have bought an Xbox 360).

Well, if you are one of the few, the pissed off, and/or the ones who fall under category number 3, there is still hope. After purchasing an Asus Eee PC 901 XP, I decided to push the limits of what it can do for such a small computer (more on that in a later post). Anyway, after making sure it could do the basics (very well in fact) such as playing music, video, browsing the interwebs, IM, and checking my email..it was time for games. I knew this thing wouldn't be able to do much, and went in with incredibly low expectations. I was amazed that it could actually run Oblivion well enough to enjoy the game while ignoring the incredibly poor graphics. Before I explain how you too can partake in oblivion..ness on your old or graphically challenged computer, here is my disclaimer: THE GRAPHICS SUCK, I'm not sure if it works on Vista, and it is very laggy when in the "outside world" of the game. Overall, not a bad experience, and for on the go play is an excellent time waster. Now, here's how:

1. Install Oblivion but do not patch or update it in any way.
2. Download and install "Oldblivion" from here.
3. Now double click to start the original copy of Oblivion. DO NOT START THE GAME. Here is a menu that lets you configure some of the graphics settings. Mine (for the Asus Eee PC 901) are set to: 1024x600 (widescreen), no antialiasing, fullscreen mode, no screen effects, and "distant landscape" is unchecked.
4. Now close both windows after applying the graphics settings. It is now time to configure Oldblivion, which can be found in Start > All Programs > Oldblivion > Config.
5. In the Oldblivion configuration, click the "Low Quality" box at the top left, check all the crash patches, change lighting mode to adaptable, uncheck all the boxes under "passes" except for texture, and everything else should remain the same. Hit OK to continue.
6. Now, your ready to enjoy Oblivion on your old hardware. You'll need to run "Oldblivion" from the start menu to play regular Oblivion, but I remedied this by replacing the "Target" and "Start In" locations on the Oblivion shortcut on the desktop with the ones for Oldblivion (then when you double click the Oblivion shortcut, Oldblivion starts and you get right to gaming.
7 (optional). If your computer does not contain a CD drive, like my Asus Eee PC, and you don't wish to lug around an external one, grab the no-CD crack .rar file here (click the blue icon and select a mirror) and extract it to your C:/Program Files/Bethesda Softworks/ folder. Windoze should ask you whether you want to replace the existing .exe, you need to responsd "yes." After this, Oblivion works without a hitch with no CD necessary and you can play. Oh, and for the curious, I've including screenshots below with indoors, outdoors, and menu experiences with lowered settings. I averaged around 25 frames per second when indoors, and around 7 FPS when outdoors. Both playable, but indoors much more so. Have fun!


the rest are linked here (I'm too lazy to show them, and besides I'd like to go play oblivion =P)
http://i173.photobucket.com/albums/w50/natetenz978/Oblivion2008-07-2223-23-18-42.jpg
http://i173.photobucket.com/albums/w50/natetenz978/Oblivion2008-07-2223-23-48-07.jpg
http://i173.photobucket.com/albums/w50/natetenz978/Oblivion2008-07-2223-24-21-39.jpg
http://i173.photobucket.com/albums/w50/natetenz978/Oblivion2008-07-2223-25-07-75.jpg
http://i173.photobucket.com/albums/w50/natetenz978/Oblivion2008-07-2223-26-01-75.jpg
http://i173.photobucket.com/albums/w50/natetenz978/Oblivion2008-07-2223-26-06-31.jpg

FRAPS

Well, if you've never heard of Fraps before, you sir, are missing out. Fraps does everything you always wished your video games did, and more. The application itself runs in the background (namely the system tray) and unless you play around with the Fraps control panel, you probably won't even notice it until you fire up a game. Even when the game is on the loading screen, you will notice an bright yellow number in the top left (default corner) corner of your screen. This can be modified in the FRAPS control panel or by hitting the F12 hotkey in-game. The number itself constantly displays your current FPS, or frames per second. Also, Fraps can write an average of your FPS when you hit F11, the benchmarking hotkey. This is useful for those who want to take in-game benchmarks of their PCs (for bragging rights, of course!).

FRAPS is also great for video developers and people who just love screenshots. For the inspired movie makers, a video game is a great developing ground for some movies, even comedies. Therefore, using Fraps, you too can make another copy of Monty Python's sketch "How Not to Be Seen." For example here is one of my favorite ones presumably done using either Halo: Combat Evolved for the PC or the original Halo for the XBOX.


In my opinion, Fraps is a very useful tool, consumes little memory, and is great for the everyday gamer who wants to ensure a quality gaming experience and for the Indy movie developer alike. Who knows? You might create something interesting.

Verdict: 10 out of 10
Pros: Displays FPS, allows movie capture while in games, allows one to take screenshots while in a game that doesn't have a built in screenshots feature. Light on memory.
Cons: No foreseeable problems here. Carry on.

Convert Your Songs to MP3s Using....iTunes?

Hopefully, not many of you use iTunes. Quite frankly I think it is a bloated memory hog that is vastly overrated as a system of playing music and movies and downloading said media. This said, some of you may have ripped your tracks from CDs using iTunes, unaware of the evils that may ensue. Much to your dismay you then realized that iTunes had ripped them to a format that didn't work on your awesome MP3 player (anything that isn't an iPod). I personally noted that none of my songs worked on my brand new PSP. Unable to contain my dissapointment, I franctically searched for a way to convert the files.

First, I found MediaCoder, an app designed for syncing various media to a most audio devices, including the PSP (in fact they have a PSP version). This application worked quite well....for everything except my songs. It masterfully encoded my movies to a format that the PSP could comfortably play fullscreen at the native PSP resolution, but converted the songs to mpeg-4 files, destroying the tags I had created for them. Thus, most of the songs on my PSP were gracefully titled "07 Back in Black -" with no artist or album cover. Not wishing to pursue MediaCoder as a solution, I instead browsed the web for various third party applications that claimed to accomplish this daunting task. But wait? What is this? Someone has posted on their website how to use iTunes to convert your songs to MP3s? A simple yet hidden setting in the preferences menu actually allows users to create MP3s from songs ripped from CDs or other methods (just not any songs downloaded from the Apple store). Here's how you do it (I wish I noticed this earlier, iTunes actually allows you to rip songs automatically to MP3s...):

1. Open up iTunes and head to Edit > Preferences.
2. Select the "Advanced" tab and under that the tab labeled "Importing."
3. Change the "Import Using" field to "MP3 Encoder."
4. Click ok multiple times to close these windows.
5. In the main iTunes window select the songs you wish to convert and then head to Advanced > Convert Selection to MP3.

After this wait some time (it takes an average of 30 seconds per song), and eventually your tunes will be free to play on any media or MP3 player!

I've Been MIA

After a two week family vacation, I'm back here blogging once more. Also, the podcast has also been missing in action. Unfortunately, its been very difficult to produce one because of internet screw ups and dropped calls (in fact we tried tonight). Skype simply doesn't work nicely anymore. Anyway, we're working on the technical difficulties and hopefully we'll be spitting out podcasts in the coming weeks. Also, I'm currently working on a Firefox 3 feature for the blog, so check in here in a couple days for that.

Its good to be back.