Matt the Geek

Yep, song title for post title again.

Driving home from work tonight, I wondered if perchance we had moved to Alaska of the Arctic Circle of somesuch, because the snow was just blowing and drifting all over the place. The wind was trying pretty hard to blow my van off the snow covered roads over here. Not fun. At least it hasnt been quite as cold over here as it has been over near Lansing and Detroit, with lows in the negative teens i have seen. Brrrrr.

What have I done since last update?
Oh! I resurrected a presumed dead Dual Pentium II server motherboard! it was thought dead since it wouldnt boot or even POST at work, but I think now that its bcuz the Power Supplies at work dont have the Auxilary power connector to feed it extra juice. Now, I dont mean the newer style ATX12V aux power connect that newer Power Supplies have for recent P4 / Athlon server boards. Its more like an old AT style connector, except only 1, not the normal 2 on an AT PSU. Anyhow. I hooked it up, plopped in 2 Pentium II 266 MHz Processors (blazing fast, I know) seated 2 64M RAM chips, hooked up Hard Drive an CD, and powered it up. And it booted! With both processors churning away, at 133 MHz. What the...? A qucik trip to Intel's website showed my how to set processor speed. Had to switch a jumper to activate Maintainance mode in the BIOS so I could set the speeds, this IS, after all, a server board, no jumpers / switches on the MoBo itself for easy / unauthorized changing...
Now the 266's run at.... 300 MHz. And ya know what, its supprisingly not too slow.

Then there was last night....
I almost killed my current, high performance computers motherboard. I wanted to update the BIOS, which for those who dont know, requires that you 'flash' it. no, not *that* kind of flashing. a BIOS chip is of the EEPROM type. In English, that means Electronically Eraseable / Programable Read-Only Memory. Its a nail biting process bcuz after the chip has been erased, if the power goes out, you are hosed. Motherboard no longer usable. But that didnt happen. Everything went fine. except that when i reboot, it tells me "system fail memory test". Ok, now thats not good... After about 2 hours of tinkering I finally got my 2000 MHz computer to boot at, get this 833 Mhz. But its a start. I could get online with it. to get the other BIOS update. I had originall downloaded the 1006 update, since one site I saw said to stay away from 1007. SO this time I dl'd 1007. More futzing around to the tune of an hour or so. I eventually came to a forum thread that outlined BIOS flash proceedure. and that doing it the ASUS Update (i have and ASUS MoBo) way in Windows was a very BAD idea. even tho ive had it work for years. Even on this board. o well, so I did it thier way and it worked just fine. Im still OverClocking it, tho. Stock for my Athlon XP 2400+ is 133 MHz FSB x the 15X multiplier for 2000 MHz. Now I am running 166 MHz FSB x 13X multiplier resulting in 2172 MHz.
An Oddity to note tho, when i was trying to get my processor up to speed under that damned 1006 BIOS, no FSB/Multi settings added up right. I mean 133x15 does not equal 833, and 166x13 not equal 1002. However, 200x10 did =2000, 200x11 did =2200. but I didnt want to take my chance with running a 133 MHz part at 200MHz. Im not in the mood to melt it.
Anyhow, all is well now and gaming can commence.

Sorry about that getting a little technical, but hey, I'm a Geek.

Well, I had wanted to update this here page more regularly. But for the most part, I have nothing all that interesting to put up here.

For the Title for this post i am so creative that I just pulled whatever was on WinAMp at the time. Happened to be "Plan B" by Five Iron Frenzy.
Since I updated last I beat another Computer Game, this time it was Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy. If I was more talented I would make a page to chronicle the games I have beat such as This one or This other one.

With the impending tax season, I am comtemplating computer upgrades. What *needs* to be upgraded? #1 is the monitor. my current Viewsonic A75f has been blanking out and then zapping back on every now and then. Besides, I want a 19". Well, I *really* want a 21", but those are kinna pricey...
Id like to go up to 1 Gig RAM, but since I run a nForce 2 motherboard and wish to use its "dual channel" memory mode, i need to have 2 identical pieces of memory in there. So Id have to take out the 2 256MB sticks and put in 2 512MB sticks. cant just put in 1 512 stick to go with the 2x256 sticks in there... o well.
would like to upgrade processor, but with an Athlon XP 2400+, im not hurting for performance. i know there are the xp 3200+ chips out there, but they are still kinna XPensive. And they dont actually run very much faster in actual clock speed. the 2400+ actually runs at 2.00 GHz, and the 3200+ is 2.20 GHz. but the main differences are that the 3200 runs on the 400MHz FSB speed, vs the 333 FSB w my 2400 ( ok so the 2400 is *supposed to * ride the 266 FSB, but Im overclocking..) and the 3200+ has 512KB of L2 cache memory, vs my 2400+'s 256KB L2 cache. so combined with those features, the 3200+'s 200 extra actual MHz make it perform 800 MHz faster than mine.

everyone got that? good.

Also need larger Hard drive(s), my 60 Gig is near capacity.
A set of 500 Watt Klipsch or Logitech speakers would be cool. or the Yamaha 500W reciever i saw at Sears and the Bo$e speakers that were attached to it. oh they were nice. but O MY $$$$$!

Things that I am not gonna upgrade:
Vid card- have GeForce FX 5700 Ultra. not top of the line, but still pretty dang fast!
DVD-ROM- 16x Toshiba works great!
CD-RW- Lite-on 48x burner is awesome! 52x is the only thing faster. and only by a few seconds. a DVD burner however...
Sound card- actually using built in sound off my ASUS A7N8X Deluxe motherboard. Nvidia certified Sound Storm device. sounds better than the SB Live 5.1 i have..

Ok, Im done rambling for now. take care my friends. play nice.

Hope everyone had a fun and safe New Years eve. I did as I thought I would and just did basically nothing. Watched the Dick Clark thing, then at 11:35 I flipped to the Tonight Show, cuz I like Leno. Watched the ball drop, turned the TV off.... I am the life of the party, ya know.

Finally got to watch Terminator 3. I'm behind the times, I know, but Movie Gallery had a Buy 2 get 2 free DVD sale. So I got T3, X2, Shanghai Nights, and K-19. so far I watched T3. Different than I expected. For some strange reason I did not expect to see Skynet function in something other than a memory. I like how this time they left the ending open for T4, 5, 6, etc etc...
I was interested in seeing how they brought the Termintors back since in T2 they melted both down. Turns out that guy Dyson (sp?) from the last movie created Cyberdyne, the creators of the Terminator robots. He had nothing to do with Skynet if I remember right. Im gonna re-watch T2 soon to clarify this.

On the subject of movies, i had a startlingly clear image of the ending of Star Wars ep III. For some reason I see the last scene to be Obi-Wan dropping off Luke to "uncle Owen" and "Aunt Veru" then fading out to credits. Im writing this here mainly as a reminder to myself that I thought that. What I saw was Obi-Wan fly to Tattooine, walk from his ship into the Lars' house carrying a small child....
It was just as clear as if I was watching it.

I updated the Gallery a lillte. Added some more pics to the "My Computers" album.

Hope everyone who had a Christmas Break had a good one, and those of us who had to work didnt go too insane. Like anyones' gonna read this. Oh well.
Have fun, be good. whatever.