Ranting Canuck : Just another blog by a Canadian.

Trip to Egypt - Pictures

In the last week of October and first week of November last year Heather and I went to Egypt for our first trip together, as Heather mentioned in this previous post. Heather had written a very nice write up of the trip but somehow it got lost when we moved computers.

Heather and I infront of the Sphinx

Anyway it was two trips and it was booked and organized by Gap Adventures, unfortunately it does not appear that this trip is offered anymore or I would post the itinerary. I believe the trip was called Egypt by Felucca and when we were on it our guide had told us this was the first time they had run this tour and probably the last. The problem with the tour was that you spent 4 nights on a Felucca, which is a traditional Egyptian sailing ship that has no washrooms on them. You do have a support boat that has washrooms and showers but GAP had issues getting enough people to take the trip.

Felucca
All in all it was a good trip and both Heather and I were happy to have gone on the trip. Although I did find the time on the Felucca’s to be a little boring at times. While on this trip we say most of the major sites in Egypt from Cairo down to Aswan / Abu Sibmbel. The one this I do regret is that we did not get up to Alexandria, I would have liked to have seen the remains of the light house.
Anyway here is a link to the picture we took while there, there a lot of them. <Coming Soon>

Our Tour Group and Felucca Guides

2009 01 02 Heather
Trip Comments (1) Permalink

World in Conflict

Today I finished World in Conflict for the PC, which is first game I played on my computer for a while, at least since Heather got me an X-box 360 for my birthday. I had tried to play World in Conflict before but my computer was not able to handle it, under Windows XP and also Microsoft Vista 32 bit. However, when I upgraded to Vista 64 bit the game ran fine. Which is surprising since I was still using the same graphics card at the time, it ran with minimal graphics settings.

World in Conflict Cover

With my new ATI 4850 graphics card I was able to pretty much set all of the graphics settings to max. This is a good thing because one of the best aspects of the game is the visuals and you need a pretty good GPU to run this game in all of it graphical splendor.

World in Conflict is real time strategy game based in 1989 and see you controlling the controlling American and NATO forces in World War III. The Soviet Union lunches’ a sneak attack and invades Seattle. This game is not a traditional real time strategy game in that you do not collect resources. Instead you have a set number of units that you can replace if you loose units. When you loose units can you choose what you want them replaced with and each unit has a set value. So a heavy tank is worth a lot more then a basic infantry unit.

Missouri Providing Fire Support

The game really focuses on small unit tactics; you are a Lieutenant for most of the game, so generally you only control a hand full of troops. One of the key aspects of the game is that can call in several types of artillery and different air strikes. You have to master doing this if you are to succeed in the game. If anything this emphasis on support is taken a little far, some of the later missions get a little much when you have four armored regiments against your company and just calling mass artillery and air strikes is required to win the battle.

Tank Battle

Graphically World in Conflict is best looking real time strategy game that I ever played, the units are very detailed when you zoom in. Also the maps and buildings take real damage as the mission’s progress. The sound in World in Conflict is pretty good also and this is a game that you want to turn up the speakers to play.

I took me maybe 10 hours or so to finish World in Conflicts 14 missions, so it is not all the long of game. But the polish of the game does make up for this fact to a certain degree. I would have liked to see maybe another couple of missions, but this could have resulted in the game dragging a little.

One complaint I did have about this game is that it really focuses on mechanized units, Armored Personal Carriers, Tanks etc. There are infantry units, but I never felt the need to use them, unless I had no choice but on a couple of the missions. Infantry are basically helpless against all other units in the game.

Close Air Support with B52's

I know there is an expansion coming out, World in Conflict: Soviet Assault. In the expansion you are going to take the side of the Soviet’s in the same campaign, am looking forward to this. Hopefully, there will be some sequels made for this game as well as I did really enjoy it and I could see playing it through again.

2008 08 16 Blogroll
Gaming Comments (0) Permalink

ATI 4850 Graphics Card

This week I finally bit the bullet and upgraded the graphics card in my computer, for those who have been reading you will notice I am slowly upgrading my computer piece by piece it seems. First it was my motherboard, then RAM and power supply and now my graphics card.

The reason that I wanted to upgrade my graphic card was that there was a couple of games on the PC that I want to play, specifically World in Conflict and the Witcher. I also suspect that latest Total war game in development Empire Total War will probably require me to upgrade.

So this week I picked up a Gigabyte ATI 4850 Graphics card, GV-R485-512H-B, I choose to go with an ATI 4850 since everyone seems to agree it is best bang for the buck on the market. The ATI 4850 is actually almost as fast $800+ cards from Nvidia at a fourth the cost. Recently I had stayed away from ATI since they had released some pretty buggy drivers, but at the cost difference I figured I would give them another shot. It is really good to see that it appears ATI has a real winner on its hands with the 4850 and 4870 graphics cards.

ATI 4850 Graphics card

The ATI 4850 is a huge upgrade from my previous card, an Nvidia 7600GT 256 megabyte video card. One thing is for certain this card is physically much larger then my old card, I had to move some hard drives around to get it to physically fit in my case. It also requires more power since it take a direct power line from my power supply. I believe the ATI 4850 is about twelve generations newer then my 7600GT. When I got my 7600GT it was getting old.

I have not had much of an opportunity to play many games with it, other then quickly to see what I can get the graphics settings to and generally speaking I can run every game I tried to max graphic settings or very near the max. I suspect this card will last me along time since generally I don’t play graphically intensive games; I am more of strategy game player. But having this horse power is really nice, I don’t remember the last time I had a cutting edge graphics card.

Not sure what my next upgrade, but all that is left is my monitor, I am still using a Viewsonic P90f CRT or my CPU. Right now I am running an Intel Core 2 Duo 1.8 ghz processor and I am thinking of upgrading to a Intel Core 2 Quad 2.4 or faster processor. For monitors I am thinking dual or 22” high end Samsung screens.

I am a big believer in spending a little more on your monitor, for a couple of reasons. The first being the monitor generally last the longest of any component that makes up your computer, with exception of maybe your case. I got my Viewsonic P90f over six years ago, needless say everything else in my computer has changed several times since then. So I see my monitor as more of an investment and I justify spending more on it or them since I will using it for so long. The only reason I am looking upgrading up monitor is my monitor is starting to show it age and I want to go to dual screen setup.

The other reason I can justify spending more on my monitor is that I am already blind a bat without my glasses. So that last thing I need to do is strain my eyes looking a cheap monitor.

Inside of my case, maybe I should look at a larger case.

2008 08 09 Gaming
Geek
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Windows Vista Ultimate Edition 64 Bit

Most people who know me know I am pretty anti Microsoft Vista, it is a resource hog that is filled with DRM (Digital Rights Management) that gives very little to the home user and really nothing to the business user. Microsoft claims that Vista is more secure then Windows XP was; which is true. However, the main thing that makes it more secure is UAC (User Access Control) which annoys most users and they disable it. Actually it was the first thing I did when I installed Vista, UAC just annoys me to no end.

But now after getting back the RMA’d memory from Kingston I was running six gigabytes of memory in my main system. Which is a waste since Windows XP only seeing about 3.5 gigabytes of memory. So to use this memory I decided I would give Microsoft Vista Ultimate 64 bit a try. I was expecting a lot of problems with programs not being compatible with it, but I wanted to give it a try.

I must say I have been presently surprise Microsoft has made a lot of changes to Vista since the last time I got fed up with it and uninstalled it. They have resolved the file transfer bug that they denied existed for the longest time.

I must say I have been really impressed with Vista 64 bit, it is much faster then my XP install was. My computer now boots and shuts down faster and generally speaking it feels faster. I still had to disable all indexing to prevent Vista from trashing my hard drive; Microsoft still needs to improve their algorithms.

So far I really have not had any major problems running Vista 64 bit; I have been running it now for about three weeks. The only program that I have not been able to run is Quickbooks 97 or something like that, really can not blame Microsoft for that.

I am still having two issues but neither one are major. The first being every time I put DVD or CD into my optical drive “autorun” does not work and when I click to open it Vista wants to format the disk. I also at times have issues opening the disk, it is generally resolved by ejecting the disk and putting it back in. Autorun still does not work but I can open or explore the CD. Not a huge issue but it is annoying.

The other issue is not really a Microsoft issue directly but more an Adobe issue. Presently Adobe does not have a Flash player the works on 64 bit. This is a pain since you are forced to run the 32 bit version of Internet Explorer for most sites rather the 64 bit one. Vista has been out for a while and 64 bit XP has been out for what six years and there is still no Flash Player. Adobe really needs to get this resolved and Microsoft should be putting pressure on them to get this done.

So all in all I have been extremely impressed with Vista Ultimate 64 bit, I find it extremely fast and have no almost no problems. No where near the problems I had when I was running Vista before. I suspect one of the reasons I am having less problems now is that before I did an upgrade to Vista from my Windows XP install. This time I did fresh install, which is generally recommended. However, it is 2008 and I would hope Microsoft would have figure out how to upgrade their software…

2008 08 09 Geek
Trip Comments (0) Permalink

Kingston RMA Process

About three weeks ago I started to have some really odd issues with my main computer. The computer was blue screening at random intervals and just rebooting at times as well. One thing that I decided to do was run memtest since most many blue screens are caused by bad memory. As it turned out I did have some bad memory, some how the two one gig memory modules in my computer had both failed.

I ran out to and picked up a four gig of memory, cost me $140.00 or something like that, memory is cheap. I also decided I would RMA this now faulty memory to Kingston, Kingston has a life time warranty on most of their memory products.

I was expecting maybe a bit of run around on this since I did not have receipt etc for when I purchased the memory but I figured it was worth a try. So I called Kingston, I was on the phone for maybe 5 minutes they just wanted the model number of the memory. They gave me two options I could ship the memory back to them and they would ship out new memory. Or I could give them a credit card number and they would cross dock the memory too me, with the added benefit they would pay to ship the memory back. I choose to do the cross dock, next day my replacement memory arrived. Kingston had sent a commercial invoice and all information I need to ship back my memory.

I must say this is probably one of the easiest RMA process’s that I have experienced. Before this experience I had generally recommended Kingston memory to my clients, now I only recommend Kingston memory.

So I am now running six gig of ram in my main system and XP only sees 3.5 gig of memory. So I figured I would give Vista a try again but this time the 64 bit version, more on this later.

While the new memory did resolve the blue screen issues I was having my computer was still rebooting at random intervals. I reinstalled the OS and was still having the issues; reinstalling the OS pretty much eliminated it being a driver issue. So this pretty much left a couple of possible culprits for causing this, bad Motherboard or more likely a bad power supply.

Sure enough I discovered the fan on my power supply was stopping randomly, which I presume caused the CPU to overheat and reboot. The power supply failing explains why I had a motherboard fail and then bad memory; the power supply had damaged them. Luckily it did not damage any of my hard drives, CPU or Graphics card.

The power supply that failed was Antec Smart power 450 and I replaced it with a Antec Neopower 550. I really Antec power supplies, I find them to be the most reliable on the market, but sometimes they can fail also as I experienced. I like tike the Antec Smart power and Neopower series since they are modular power supplies. So you only connect the number of power connectors that you need for your computer which reduces cable clutter in your computer. This reduction in cable clutter makes for a cleaner looking case and also improves air flow which helps with cooling.

2008 08 09 Blogroll
Geek
Tech Comments (2) Permalink

Wii Fit

For Heather’s birthday I got her a Wii Fit, among other things I am not that stupid, Kitchen Cabinets being the big ticket item. Anyway I got it off E-bay since they are next to impossible to actually find in stores right now. I was lucky in that I did not pay all that much more MSRP including shipping, they are generally selling at double MSRP on E-bay right.

Anyway both Heather and I have been pretty impressed with Wii Fit. The exercise’s / games make it fun and they seem to be effective. You can feel your muscles working in the strength training and the Yoga section does all the standard poses / moves. One of the main criticisms of Wii Fit has been that it does not actually give you all that good of work out. Well I agree it is not as good as going to a gym it does give a better workout then what a lot of people get, especially gamers.

The other main criticism of Wii Fit is that it is very easy to cheat, something I must admit I have fun doing at times. Having saying that if people choose to cheat well that is there loss, if you follow the exercises you should get a decent work out. Again not as good as going to a gym or with personal training but better then no workout at all that most gamers get.

For Heather and me, the most effective thing will is that Wii Fit weighs you and calculates your BMI. We have started a bit of competition to see who can loose the most weight etc and the fact we can both see out weights means we can not cheat. The scale is also pretty accurate.
I would recommend Wii Fit for anyone who is looking to loose weight and does not like going to the gym. Personally I go the gym three or four times a week but I still find it useful those days when I do not want to go, or do not have time.

Both Heather and I have set a goal to loose 22 pounds over the next three months. I think we will both reach our goals and Wii Fit will help us.

2008 07 20 Blogroll
Fitness
Gaming
Heather Comments (0) Permalink

Halo 3 What is the big Deal?

Today I finished Halo 3 on my Xbox 360 and I really do not see what the all the fuss is about with this game. While I did enjoy the game especially the last mission, I really don’t see why this game seems to have such a cult following. Before I go any further I will point out that this is the first Halo game that I have played. I am not really into FPS games and up until recently I old played PC games.

Halo 3

Because of this I guess some of the story of the game was lost to me, not that there was a lot of story in the game. Also I have only played the game single player and I have no intensions of playing it multiplayer. I am sorry but getting slaughtered by a bunch of 13 years olds and welfare shut-in’s does not appeal to me. I know a lot of people say that main attraction to Halo 3 is the online game play, but this just not appeal to me.

Anyway Halo 3 is pretty good game and I enjoyed it for the most part, but it is also extremely short. I finished it in maybe six to eight hours, but I was not tracking my hours. If I had paid $80.00 when this game was released I would be annoyed but I only paid $30.00 for it off of E-bay. It does say a lot for a game that is this short and for me to say that at times that game dragged. But to me Halo 3 did drag at times, some of the levels where longer for the sake of it.

Graphically Halo 3 is pretty good, I have seen better and I have seen worse. A lot of enemies I the game where brown blobs that run at you. Sound wise it was pretty good but the weapons really did not have humph to them. I would have enjoyed the game a bit more if the weapons sounded better.

One area that I thought Halo 3 really shined was the controls. The controls in Halo 3 are very fluid and precise, which make the game a joy to play. I think it has the best controls of any FPS (First Person Shooter) that I have played on the Xbox 360 to date. The controls in the vehicle sections where especially crisp. The wart hog felt nimble and swift and the tank felt like well a tank.

Anyway I like Halo 3 but it was does not deserve the worship that so many people seem to be giving it. It is a decent short FPS game that could use a bit more story.

Zero Punctuation did a review of Halo 3 please see below.

via videosift.com

2008 07 20 Blogroll
Gaming Comments (1) Permalink

\SystemRoot\System32\RDPDD.dll failed to load

In 2008 you would think that the two main graphics card companies left, AMD / ATI and Nvidia would be able to write graphics drivers that worked. By worked I mean they allow for the standard operation of the computer, you can boot into windows and use standard functions, for example RDP or Remote Desktop.

When I rebuilt my computer after netgears drivers from an SC-101 nuked my Windows install, I ran into an interesting problem. I could not remote into my computer, something that I do all the time. At first I figured it was driver issue or networking issue so I double and triple checked all of my settings. All the port where forwarding fine and Windows XP firewall was disabled. Later on I even went as far as to remove the firewall entirely, but still I could not RDP to my computer. I could not even RDP to it a local machine which made me think ok screwed DLL or something.

Eventually I noticed an odd entry in the event viewer:

Event Type:   Information
Event Source: Application Popup
Event Category:      None
Event ID:     26
Date:         9/25/2007
Time:         12:13:57 PM
User:         N/A
Computer:     ServerX
Description:
Application popup: : \SystemRoot\System32\RDPDD.dll failed to load

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
Data:
0000: 00000000 006c0002 00000000 4000001a
0010: c0000017 c000009a 00000000 00000000
0020: 00000000 00000000

Unlike most event viewer entries this one was somewhat useful and I searched the error and found that the latest version of both ATI’s and Nvidia’s drivers are breaking RDP. So eventually I had to roll back my drivers to a year old driver.

I was really shocked that not one both of the main video card manufacturers is having similar if not the exact same issues. Maybe there is a great issue with the operating system I am not sure, but one thing is for certain both companies Q/A departments should get a smack in the head over this.

2008 07 13 Blogroll
Rants
Tech Comments (2) Permalink

Netgear software ruins windows Install

As I had mentioned in my previous posting I have started to have a lot of issues with my Netgear SC101 NAS. When I first purchased it and added it my network I was really happy with the device. But then I had partitions start to disappear and they where not easily restored and became a time sink.

I recently had to replace my motherboard, the hard drive controller stopped working on my old one. Anyway I picked up an ASUS P5K that has a raid controller for the IDE ports. Due to all of the issues I have been having with the Netgear SC101 I decided I was just going to remove the drives from unit and install them in my main system as a mirrored pair.

Everything worked fine, took about 20 minutes to mount the drives and setup the mirror. I like having a clean computer so I decided to remove the software that you have to install, Netgear Storage Control Manger (SCM) in order to use the SC101. I don’t like having extra software floating around that is not doing anything let along drivers. The uninstall requested a reboot which did not bother me. I was doing this remotely, connected to my computer using RDP, so I was not terrible concerned when I could not reconnect to my computer. I though maybe it just did a shut down rather then a reboot, annoying but not the end of the world.

Anyway when I got home I went to boot my computer and as soon as it go to the loading windows screen the computer would reboot. When I told the computer to boot into safe mode the computer would blue screen. I tried to recover the install by having windows do a repair on the install and still the computer would not boot. I finally had to reinstall windows.

So yup basically uninstalling Netgear’s crappy driver package destroyed my Windows XP install and required me to spend the next 6 hours over two days rebuilding my install. Needless to say I am now completely not impressed with Netgear, not only was the SC101 horrible but removing it force me to reinstall windows. Needless to say I will never be buying another Netgear product or recommending tit to people.

2008 06 15 Geek
Rants
Tech
Uncategorized Comments (3) Permalink

Ranting Canuck

Trip to Egypt - Pictures

ATI 4850 Graphics Card

Windows Vista Ultimate Edition 64 Bit

Netgear software ruins windows Install

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