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Kartworld – Better than last time!
Last time I went to Kartworld was about 4 years ago and it was the first time I had ever been Karting. As such I think I came last. This was my second time ever going karting and out of 20 or so people I came 2nd. Not bad at all in my books! I even got a trophy for my trouble! 
EPIC Firefly tribute on tv show Castle
As most of my friends and viewer (yes there is 1 out there Im sure 
) of this blog know Im a huge fan of the short lived Firefly series. Last night I was watching another TV show, with the main character from Firefly in it, called Castle and it was a Halloween episode. To my surprise and joy the opening was a hilarious tribute to Firefly….
Desperate Housewives meets Lost
Laffed out loud at this one!
Window 7: Moving system folders
Before installing Windows 7 on my home Pc I created two RAID arrays, the first was a 30GB RAID1 mirror for the OS and the 2nd was a RAID0 Stripe for (non sensitive) Data such as games, vids and the like. Little did I know that Windows 7 was a hard disk space eating machine and that after a clean install with your bog standard apps I had used up over 25GBs. Yesterday I noticed I had 1GB left on my mirror so I decided to move my Program Files (x86) folder to another partition with more space. This would have been difficult in XP and previous as registry entries would have gotten messed up and you prob you have gotten a BSOD on boot up. Not so in Windows 7 (and Vista but I dont like mentioning Vista) as it finally introduced symlinks similar to what we have seen in the *nix world for years.
The easiest and most trouble free way of doing this was
1) to use the mini Windows XP in the latest Hiren Boot CD to move the original folder to the new partition (Cut & Paste)
2) boot into safe mode and create the symlink to the new location i.e. mklink /d “C:\Program Files (x86)” “D:\Program Files (x86)”
Below is an example of how you would use it to move the C:\Users (formerly Documents and Settings) folder
![mlink-520x270[1]](http://blog.brimur.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/mlink-520x2701.png "mlink-520x270[1]")
Wifi: A 5GHz vs G 2.4GHz
Here is a test I ran in work copying a file over the wireless network. I have an Intel 5100 AGN wireless card in my lappie and our wireless network supports both the A, the 5 GHz frequency band, and G, the 2.4 GHz frequency band. I had always been connecting using the G band but no longer. After my test below Im switching to the A band….
As you can see the A-band is almost completely stable I was getting about 3 MBytes/s but when I switched to the G-band my speeds varied greatly from 1MBytes/s to 3MBytes/s. The AP I was connecting to was the same AP for both bands so no difference in distance or objects blocking the signal.
Builtin free bandwidth monitor in Windows
Someone asked me today for a bandwidth monitor for Windows. A few years back I would have used Netlimiter, FreeMeter or some other bandwidth monitor but since Windows XP and perhaps before, the Task Manager can be used to monitor download and upload speeds but not by default. To view download/upload speeds you need to open Task Manager, select the Networking tab, then click View -> Select Columns and tick the boxes titled Bytes Sent Per Interval and Bytes Received Per Interval. This will add the two extra columns and show download and upload speed for each network connection. Two things that it will not show you is download/upload speed per process/program and the download/upload speed of the UPNP Internet Connection that sometimes shows up in Windows to show you your Intenet Connection speed.
Moment of weakness – computer upgrades
I have been using the same PC for gaming since 2006. In computer gaming terms I consider that to be a hell of a lot of value for money. I spent about 1200 euros back in 2006 building the computer and it was money well spent. In the last few months I have been noticing the strain on the system and have been forced to play games at lower resolutions and with reduced detail. To battle this I over clocked my Intel E6600 CPU from the stock 2.4Ghz to 2.88GHz. I also upgraded the memory from 2GBs of PC2-4200 RAM which ran at 533Mhz to 4GBs PC2-8500 RAM which runs at 1066Mhz. The icing on the cake was upgrading my WD Raptors to WD Velociraptors. This entire setup currently gives me a boot time of 26 seconds from start to opening gmail in Firefox on Windows 7 RC1 64bit.
The only problem with my overclocking was my MSI 975x Powerup Ed motherboard. For a start it didn’t like the 1066Mhz RAM (even though it has a setting for it) so I had to reduce the speed to 800Mhz. This wasnt too bad since I wanted to overclock the CPU. I could only push the FSB as far as 320 before the machine refused to boot up. This in itself is shockingly bad in terms of OC ability. Most other boards can be pushed up to 450 – 500Mhz with a good cooling system. So this is the reason for the 2.88Ghz CPU limit, it did mean the RAM was running at about 960 – 980MHz so that wasnt too bad. Another limitation on my mobo is that is will not work with any CPU that operates over 1066MHz. This, as I discovered recently when researching a newer CPU, was the biggest setback as all the latest socket 775 CPUs run at 1333MHz!!! 
The GFX card I bought back in 2006 was a NVIDIA 7900 GTX 512MB which has done the business up until now. I managed to slightly overclock it but nothing noteworthy because I didnt want to kill it. I play a lot of Left 4 Dead these days and noticed I had to reduce the resolution to 1280 down from 1680 x 1050 (monitor max) to get any kind of an enjoyable FPS.
So the other day I was surfing the interweb and came across the Intel E7600 which is the fastest Core 2 Duo CPU that I could find that is compatible with my motherboard. I was looking for a Q6600 which is a quad-core cpu but could not find one locally. The E7600 is what I would consider a legacy chip at this stage, running at 1066Mhz, but was fairly cheap and from my research can get up to 4.7GHz on air cooling. Of course my crappy motherboard will mean I will only get about 3.7Ghz from it. Still thats better than what I have. I decided to team it up with a Sapphire Toxic HD4870 1GB DDR5 card which I also picked up fairly cheap. This is an overclocked ATI Radeon HD 4870 which is perfect for the resolution I game at as my monitor is limited to 1680 x 1050. Not full HD gaming or movie watching but fine for me. Think I spent about 250 quid altogether which should keep me going for another year…
Update 1: 2009/09/24 at 10:35am
HD4870 arrived yesterday. All is great in the gaming world again. Everything detail maxed out in Left 4 Dead and get ~95 FPS! Sweet!
Update 2: 2009/09/25 at 2:14pm
Just tried installing E7600 and system will not POST. EPIC failure! Seems “newer” 45nm cpus are not compatible!
Reason: during testing 45nm processors on this board, it was found that stable operation cannot be guaranteed (voltage regulators are not up to the task maybe, or some other reasonds that have to do with the way the board was designed) therefore, the proper microcode to ensure 45nm support was never implemented into the BIOS in the first place
Never again, MSI Mobo’s are shit!
Kanye the dick
I went to a Kanye West gig once before and must admit it was the worst gig I have ever been to but this takes the cake!
Apparently he did apologise afterwards but that shit is whack! Reminded me of this….
Judging my week!
Judging Brimur's week!