| The Joys of Auto-Defragmenting | | John Gatt's Babblings
| By John Gatt onMonday, May 12, 2008 10:01 AM | |
| So, you get up on Monday morning and the first thing you want to do is get stuck into work, complete the benchmarking you started on Friday and move on. It doesn’t quite work that way with Windows Vista. As I loaded up the Crysis benchmark, I noticed a whole heap of hard drive activity and then I remember that Vista likes to automatically defragment hard drives. You watch the RAM usage go through the roof and benchmarks end up no where near where they were when Vista wasn’t trying to fragment your hard drive at the same time. Little features like this are great for the average user. And I know there is a way to disable it but you’d think it would be a standard option, with easy access to turn on and off. On the other hand, ensuring that a hard drive I properly defragmented before benchmarking, is always a good idea. So rather than continuing on with the last tests I need to do with this particular video card, I’m defragmenting hard drives and typing out this bl ... |  | | Comments (0) | More... |
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| Cheap Graphics Cards | | John Gatt's Babblings
| By John Gatt onFriday, May 09, 2008 3:43 PM | |
| I got into an conversation earlier on in the week with some guys I was gaming with about the hardware they are using. I am really surprised how many were using sub-$100 graphics cards in their gaming systems. One particular guild member was quite proud of her new $60 graphics card and how much it had dramatically improved her gaming experience in WoW. I really suppose that, being in the industry, I have been spoilt by having access to the latest and greatest graphics cards. The reality really kind of struck me this week, as I am testing budget graphics cards that are priced between $50-80. It surprised me how much these cards are actually capable of and how good games can look at low settings. Developers use tricks and techniques and they are improving them all the time. This has mainly happened due to them having no choice if t ... | | | Comments (0) | More... |
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| Life of a Server Admin | | Fiona's Ramblings
| By fiona on5/8/2008 5:53 AM | |
| I just had to wake up our webmaster. The site had been down for fifty minutes and that was enough downtime. He had said to call, what ever time of day it is, if the site was ever down, so even though I felt bad for waking him in the wee hours of the morning, I made the call. Sorry to anyone who tried to visit when it was down. I don’t know what Stuart has done but just minutes after speaking to him, it’s back up and working again. :/ The life of a server admin must be a drag at times. It is a 24 hour job. Huge hosting companies must have several employees on 24 hour call. Maybe they even have people who work a night shift in case of hardware failure? It probably doesn’t have quite the allure of a surgeon – no hot doctors or nurses, and it’s not exactly life or death - but someone’s got to do it. I probably watch too much Grey’s ... | | |
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| Virus Logic | | Fiona's Ramblings
| By fiona on5/7/2008 6:33 AM | |
| A friend of mine was using USB flash drives to cart her homework to and from college. One day there was a problem. She wasn’t sure what was going on but she did the smart thing and stopped what she was doing to run her virus protection software, in her case, AVG. When it completed the scan she found that sure enough, it had found something – delete, quarantine or ignore it asked? She did what would seem to be the most logical thing to do – she chose delete. Problem is that it was a worm virus that attached itself to a dll file for Windows Explorer, so by choosing delete, she could no longer navigate through her files. Opening My Computer and then double clicking on one of her hard drives now just ... | | |
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| Grand Theft Auto 4 | | John Gatt's Babblings
| By John Gatt onTuesday, April 29, 2008 4:05 PM | |
| 
Grand Theft Auto 4 hits the shop shelves today (locally). I can’t say that I was surprised to see lines going outside the local EB shop. What did surprise me though, was the amount of mothers that had been convinced to g down and pick up a copy of the latest game for their kids, while their kids were at school. I heard the attendant behind the counter ask several of the mothers what their kids ages are. One that I overhead said she had an eight and a nine year old and not to worry because they’ve been dying to have this game for ages and all their friends will have it. Even though this latest episode in the series is rated MA, the pure hype behind it is almost making it a requirement for any cool console lovin’ kid at school to have it. The hype is not being gene ... | | | Comments (0) | More... |
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| Moving Day | | John Gatt's Babblings
| By John Gatt onThursday, April 24, 2008 11:57 AM | |
| You all might have wondered why blogs and content have been a bit slow over the last several weeks. To be honest, what I’ve been doing hasn’t been really interesting on the IT side of things. It’s been productive for the future of the site, but do you all really want to hear about me getting acid burns on my feet while cleaning the concrete floor of our new studio? Didn’t think so. 
Anyway, we’ve totally converted what was a two car garage into a studio which will allow us to do regular videos for the site. Also, I’m thinking about podcasts, if we can get the context right. While I’ve been scrubbing floors and walls I’ve taken the opportun ... | | | Comments (0) | More... |
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| Tired | | Fiona's Ramblings
| By fiona on4/23/2008 7:31 AM | |
| Wow am I tired! I think the anti-biotics I’m taking for the ear infection are messing with me. The ear is almost clear but I feel like a slug – a tired slug, without the gooey coating. Could also be the long hours at the moment? The new tkArena office renovations are finished so we’re starting to move all of our kit into it. Mayhem rules in the current and future work spaces as we sort it all out. But we plan on shooting a vlog in front of the new blue wall tomorrow, or actually a bit of a pan and scan of the new workspace might be in order. The desks aren’t out there yet. It’s hard to know how to approach the move. If we unplug PCs to move then we don’t have them to work on but they’ve got to mo ... | | |
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| Boy did I stuff up! | | Fiona's Ramblings
| By fiona on4/22/2008 6:44 AM | |
| I started using gmail in January and ever since I’ve told anyone who will listen how superior it is to using a regular email application like Outlook. I have four email addresses routing to gmail, as well as my actual gmail account. Over the past week I have noticed that I wasn’t receiving as many emails as I usually do. And all of the email notifications I get from other sites about their new content seemed to be a little thin on the ground. Must be a slow week, I thought. It was just as well, I was battling a bad head cold last week that turned into an ear infection. I couldn’t really hold an intelligent thought long enough in my head last week to actually act on it, otherwise I might have realized there was a problem with my email sooner. This morning as I surveyed my inbox and looked over the items that were starred and waiting for responses, I surmised that I wasn’t receiving all my mail. It wasn’t just a slow week, there was a bloackage in the pipeline so ... | | |
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| Blog Hate | | Fiona's Ramblings
| By fiona on4/8/2008 11:31 PM | |
| OK, I haven’t blogged for a few weeks. Actually I think blogging is highly over-rated to be honest. That’s right, the truth finally comes out. Who the hell wants to read about my lame computing experiences, Jo Smith’s reading habits or Felicia Tries-a-lot’s diet?! Maybe journal style blogs should have stayed down the side of the bed in notebooks with cheap locks – private, and more importantly, not cluttering the Internet with precocious drivel driven by miss-diagnosed self importance! Or am I on the wrong track – maybe that’s not what blogs really are? Blogging was originally a web log, an online journal that, due to its technical nature, was easy for others to link to. These were all IT geeks. There evolved a community of bloggers who made each other’s blogs more widely read by their collection of reciprocal links. Now, bloggi ... | | |
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| The Joys of Vista Service Pack 1 | | John Gatt's Babblings
| By John Gatt onThursday, March 20, 2008 9:24 AM | |
| I woke up this morning and I thought the first thing I’ll do is update both my work PCs to Windows Vista Service pack 1 (SP1). For those of you who missed it, Windows Vista SP1 was released on March 18th. I have been a beta tester for Microsoft for many years now and I have been impressed with Vista SP1 on my notebook. I must say I was surprised when they released SP1 to manufacturers and didn’t allow the people who have been beta testing it and providing feedback to update properly at that time. Actually that’s not quite true, they allowed premium paying beta testers to upgrade. Any other beta testers were made to wait until SP 1 was made available to the public. So anyway, the first PC I thought I’d install it on was the gaming P ... | | | Comments (0) | More... |
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