Pain in my Asus!
I am finally done. After countless hours of toiling away at my ASUS P3V4X 1000MHZ 124FSB 640MB SDRAM 133/CL2 VCORE 1.80 it finally works; sort of. Apperently for reasons known only to the gods and perhaps some retired ASUS motherboard engieneer the Asus motherboard will not achieve full 133 FSB with a PIII 1000MHZ 256/133/1.70 CPU.
What you ask is the point. Well the CPU does in indeed boot into WinXP at full 133FSB but for some reason it chokes the memory bandwidth down to the mid 200’s. That is bad as I should be getting in the 800-1000 range. So after tweaking, manipulating and cursing the computer gods for thier vengeful retribution of my poor soul I finally gave up tring to clock the bastered at the correct speed.
My solution? Underclock! I set the FSB to 124 and like a rosy cheeked virgin on her weeding night she it was primed and ready! The bastered of a whore churned out memory bandwidth speeds in the mid 900’s! Good enought for me. I put the screws to the bitch and locked her down never to open that case again. Of course I say that but I think the freaking Linksys wireless PCI card is heading south… sigh.
Now my wife has a reliable machine for which to do bills, surfing, ebaying and other things that women due on the computer. Plus when she is not using it I’ve got it dual booted to Gentoo linux so I can waste more of my time figureing that out.
So what are the lessons? For the time I spent based on my hourly pay I’ve wasted a colossal amount of money. But at least I can hang with all my nerdy computer geek frineds…oh wait I don’t have any friends like that. Freaking hell! Bloody freaking hell!
Oh well. It was something to do while me and my family were sick.
If anybody out there has a clue as to why all this happened let me know!
5:35 PM | | | Permalink | Comments (1) | Trackbacks (0) | Computers and Internet |
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May 07 | |||
Google, MSN and Yahoo | |||
I tried MSN desktop search for about a month. I then switched over to Google desktop search because I realized some what sheepishly that I HATE MSN search. I really tried to make the big switch over to all things MSN (hotmail, search, spyware detection, and blog). I thought since I use Microsoft Office 2003 and MSN integrates with Outlook I’d be all set. Well it turns out that I never really give out my rchennau@msn.com email address; the anti-spyware software was horrible bug ridden joke; and MSN search never found anything I wanted or could use. So I took another look at my online habits and this is what I’ve found. I email with yahoo, I search with Google and I blog with MSN. I guess all the context switching is not productive and I really should settle on one of the three. I am thinking at this point it may just be google. I’ve got a gmail account, there blog stuff seems adequate and I am already sold on the search. I wonder if google blog has a spell check feature? So I guess Lance a.k.a Yahoo corporate schill will have to wait before I Yahoo… |
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Gentoo II | |||
So I’m sitting here typing on my Windows XP Fujitsu laptop wondering why I was so damned determined to dual boot that old ebay ASUS P3V4X machine. Gentoo read like it was a great thing. But holy crap it is taking me forever to get things installed on the box. It is not that installing (called emerge in Gentoo) is difficult, it is just time consuming. It has taken over 1 1/2 days for my PIII 1GHZ 640MB MB RAM to compile a striped down version of KDE (called iceWM). The supposed benefit off all this is that the applications compiled on your specific platform architecture (hardware) will enable the applications to run faster. I know this to be true but the freaking time invovled to compile every possible application you would want is ridiculous. I suppose that once you have most of the base system components compiled that a lot of application use then the compile time will shorten as you already have the dependency of the main application installed. I am looking forward to wasting many more weeks compiling stuff on the box (games, firefox, media burn/rip tools and wine). I can then repeat the whole scenario with some of my good buddies Lance computers that I told him I would rebuild for him. He wants an HTPC in his bedroom so I’ll being doing a Gentoo/MythTV box for him. Gentoo is a great alternative for older legacy computers. You don’t need a lot of horse power to play a DVD or stream mp3’s. Microsoft just loads lots of crap in their OS. Thus you need faster computer components to get their bloated OS running (yes everyone I just dissed Microsoft). BTW: I am getting CPU 0 Context Error when I have the ASUS P3V4X running at default 1000MHZ 133FSB VCORE 1.7 for the Intel PIII 1000/133/1.7 CPU. But when I underclock it to 930/124 VCORE 1.7 it works just fine. At first I thought it was the RAM but I am now suspecting the heat sink on the CPU. Anyone care to venture a guess? |
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May 05 |
Gentoo Linux |
Having finished my adventures in over clocking I decided to refamiliarize myself with the world of Linux. I had left the world after a disaterous hard drive crash in 2001 which left me without a website that I had started back in 1997! I guess you really should back up your data. There a multitude of linux distributions out these days. My first linux installation was the classic slakware. What I liked about slackware was that you had to comile everything before it would work. This was before the days of the pre-built binaries install packages. I later switched to Redhat because it was easy and I didn’t have much time left to be messing around with Linux build problems. Well back to the big crash; after that I went down the happy path of all Microsoft all the time. I have an MSDN account so I figure why not take advantage of it and test out the technologies. It related to my job so win/win. I fired up Sharepoint services and I have been very satisfied. Since I now have two old boxes after my overclocking ordeal I decided to give Linux a try again. I wanted to setup a proxy server to when I am surfing around at work all the traffic will be routing through my domain and so work won’t know what I’ve been looking at. Not that I spend my time surfing for non-related work items at work; I just don’t think my employer really needs to know that much information about me. I decided on the variant of Gentoo because it was like slackware where you had to compile everything BUT it checks to make sure you have all the dependent packages and if you don’t it downloads them and installs them for you! So after going through the gentoo install routine about a dozen times I finally got it to boot. Most of my problems were with adding support for things I didn’t have in my system or my system didn’t support. Well guess what? Overclocking struck again! Apparently when I tried to emerge X11 (emerge is the build process in gentoo) it would fail during compile. I turned rachted down the overclocking and the buiding is going fine. I’ll post my machine config later on and write up many blogetts about getting different parts to work. This will help those out there who are having troubles with similiar hardware. |