Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

I’ve been looking through the conflicting reviews again on X-bit and Tom’s Hardware. Here’s my short list of displays to look at: * Acer AL1911 or Benq FP992. These are the same displays really. Decent quality. Now just $550 at Newegg. The Benq is slightly ahead as it has DVI and analog inputs. Unfortunately, it…

This must be one of the most hidden features in XP. Right now I’m on an incredibly slow laptop. But, there is a utility inside Windows called Remoted Desktop Connection, so I’m on a terminal session to my fast desktop in the other room. An amazing security hole, but also an incredibly cool feature. Another…

“Tom’s hardware”:http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20040201/. It’s here. February 2, brings the next salvo in the processor wars, the new 90nm Prescott from Intel. The amazing result is that it isn’t faster than the current Northwood Pentium IVs. That’s interesting given they have twice the cache (1MB) and also are 90nm vs. 130nm chips. They’ll be much cheaper to…

“Tom’s Hardware”:http://www.tomshardware.com/howto/20040127/index.html. Given that doing the label and then affixing it to a CD and DVD is a pain, maybe the better way is to print directly to the CD. The Epson R800 and a couple of other models do this. Could be the tipping point for me in buying one of these. Here’s what…

Interesting to see how two trends could make the PC quite different from what we know it. Beside Google, “Citeseer”:http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs is an incredibly useful way to find related academic documents. Give it a try. # “Knoppix”:http://www.knoppix.org/ . Now that modern BIOS let you boot from just about anything. Not just a floppy, but really anything,…

OK, based on a couple of reviews at popphoto.com and also photo-i.co.uk, here’s a list of printers to consider at the top end: * Epson 2200. $600 street. The grand daddy anmd most folks still love it. * Epson Stylus “R800”:http://www.photo-i.co.uk/Reviews/interactive/Epson%20R800/. $400 street. Brand new, has 8 inks. Can also print directly to DVDs/CDs. Some…

We have an old HP Deskjet 970Cse. Printer cartridges are amazingly expensive at $25 for large black (45A) and $50 for large color (78). “Omnipro”: http://store.omni-biz.com/. Trying a place that sells remanfactured cartridges for $10 and $15 respectively a pop. A little bit of a risk, but interested to see what the quality is like.…

a little ludwig goes a long way: Command Prompt Explorer Bar. Nice find from Ludwig, command promots on the explorer bar. I use command line stuff all the time.

Ghost Recon Jungle Storm. Got Ghost Recon as part of my video card bundle. Wow, how much these tactical first person games are using the machines. Amazing how graphics and so forth. Its an old game, but here are some links to folks modding it: * “Walkthroughs”:http://www.ghostrecon.net/html/recon.htm#wt. A detailed walkthrough of all the missions. Missions…

Tom’s Hardware Guide Motherboards & RAM: Ups and Downs: Memory Timings Put to the Test – How Memory Access Works. Another great piece over at Tom’s Hardware. A nice refresher for those of us with old computer science degrees. They explain how memory works and what timing means. There is a sequence to access memore…

How GIMPS works. A great machine torture test. Runs in the background doing calculations. Since it checks results, its a good test of stability particularly for the memory and cpu of an overclocked machine.

3ivx D4 4.5 – MPEG-4 Audio and Video Compression. Recently got a Mac encoded file in 3ivx format. It’s another MPEG4 encoder. You need to download a plug-in to have it work with Windows. Or use Quicktime. Amazing how many codecs I now have loaded on my machine. 3ivx, Divx, xvid, Windows formats, etc.

Seems like everyone is got something on this. Here are some links: CPU overclocking: * “Dev Hardware FAQ”:http://www.devhardware.com/c/Hardware/HowTo/Overclocking_Your_P4_800FSB/. A guide for Pentium 4 800MHz FSB machines. A great guide. Basically says, you can overclock a 2.4 or 2.6GHz to about the same as 3.2GHz one. Also that cooling is the firs timiting factor to get…

AquaMark ARC – Overview. Kind of a cool site. These use a Aquamark, a benchmark based on a real game. You submit your ratings up there and see how to tune. For instance, Alex’s new Athlon went from a score of 36693 (this is really 36.693 frames per second in the benchmark) to 40145 by…

nVHardpage. On to tweaking the new video card. Wow, these new ones are incredibly powerful. This seems like the best utility for nVidia. Basically, it turns on some pretty complex menus you find in the advanced display menu. Also has a mode where you can test your video memory to make it go faster. In…

Well, I finally got Alex’s new machine up and running. Thought I’d give overclocking a serious try to see how things are. Boy there are certainly some risks in it, but it is interesting to see how flexible folks have made these things. Here’s the machine today. The main gotcha is that it was incredibly…

Ultimate Boot CD. Wow, what a great idea, here is a CD image of a bootable CD with everything on it. I tried to use Bart’s Boot CD stuff, but the script fails mysteriously. This is a better idea since it has everything on it already. A 56MB image.