Sunday, September 16, 2012

PC Updates

Hey folks,

I spent part of the weekend up in Lake Tahoe, so I'm just now getting a chance to turn my attention towards Chrontendo. Lake Tahoe is, of course, a beautiful place, but there are a few places along the drive that make me nervous. I've never been fond of those roads where your tires are only a few feet away from the edge of a road overlooking a precipitous drop, and accidentally moving the car a little bit to the right would equal 100% guaranteed death.  This does actually happen. Someone I know once told me a relative of theirs dropped into the ocean while driving too fast along Highway 1.

Also, last night, while browsing at a local record store, I saw they had a couple recent issues of Ugly Things, a magazine I once read religiously before the book store that used to carry it shut down. I haven't any copies on the shelves anywhere else since then. A new UT is a huge time sink, which each issue being the size of a short novel. They publish only around one issue a year, so a new one is a momentous occasion. Plowing through these things is, once again, going to take away Chrontendo time.

For those wanting to know how the computer situation is coming along: everything is more or less up and running. I had narrowed it down to either the SSD or the Windows installation.  I tried resintalling Windows on my SSD, and immediately began having the same problems. At this point, it seemed I might just have a bad SSD, though checking around on the Crucial forums, I noticed many other users were experiencing the exact same issue. It's definitely not related to the "sleep" mode issue, which I had turned off.  I installed the most recent firware for the SSD, and this did fix the freezing issue.

However, there is still a noticeable drop in performance since the reinstall. Windows takes longer to load and there are sometimes slight delays is accessing data from the SSD.  The odd thing is this: according to my BIOS, the drive is in AHCI mode. Yet when I check the device profile in Windows, it states the SSD is in IDE. I've gone into the registry, and the settings are correct for AHCI. So it's a mystery why it's stuck in IDE.

I've actually considered just getting a larger SSD. Prices have gone down considerably, and I hear the Vertex drives are really good. By the time you install Windows 7, a few programs, video editing software and a modern game or two, your SSD space is pretty much eaten up. I haven't yet done too much work on returning my drive to its original condition. Quite frankly, reinstalling an OS is a good opportunity to get your hard drives organized the way the originally wanted, but neglected to for some reason.

Also, it seems the UK is finally learning to love ninjas again!
http://www.slashfilm.com/wtf-london-theater-employing-volunteer-ninjas-to-confront-rude-moviegoers/

I'll be posting some Chronsega related updates soon.

4 comments:

Raffa said...

You might check your MB drivers. On one of my computers i need to install AHCI drivers for Windows, otherwise Windows just runs the drives as IDE. That one has a GA-MA78GM-S2H MB from Gigabyte, but i guess a lot of MB's from 3-4 years ago works like that. Come to think of it, I guess it's the same on my new MB, and that one is from this year. So check if you also need some drivers to speed things up.

Unknown said...

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/254373-32-ahci-mode-only. Here is how you can make sure your Windoes 7 uses AHCI. Go down to Elmo2006 answer.

Anonymous said...

Hey Dr S, considering your relatively wide range of hobbies and interests, I can't help but wonder- what is it you do for a living?

War Games said...

It's totally worth it, SSD rocks lol