I'm moving my blog to Wordpress, due to Blogger not working with Hootsuite currently. Find it here:

http://techonnapkins.wordpress.com/

Gaming Antiviruses

Last year, some antiviruses really started advertising some gamer-friendly features. So, realizing that, hey, I'm a gamer, I might find this useful... and so my journey began.

I'll be brief:

Norton Antivirus Gaming Edition is crap. The much ballyhooed pulse updates rarely (never?) worked, and, irony of all ironies, my online games stopped functioning after a few months. Like all issues involving Norton and networking, the quickest way to solve your networking issues is to remove Norton (and make sure you use their removal tool to make sure it's REALLY gone)

AntiVir did a number on my ping, and had the least intuitive interface. The gaming feature didn't seem to help.

Kaspersky's didn't mess up my ping like AntiVir, but it's interface wasn't much better, and the default settings were the least user friendly. It would find a virus, but then you would have to fish through the menus to choose what to do with the previously found "threats". I say "threats" with quotations, as it seemed to be worse for false positives than what AV-comparatives would indicate (it was even tagging all Google Ads as threats early on). If Norton Internet Security's incessant messages never drove you bonkers, well, you'll feel right at home here.

NOD32 has been an ongoing recommendation as a resources-lite AV for many gamers. I was fairly impressed with it's performance day-to-day... once it was installed and activated that is. ESET have a weird system where you have two different sets of credentials, and it can get confusing which it is asking for when it's time to renew, or anything involving you contacting or doing business with the company. And while it was easier than Kaspersky overall, often it wasn't clear why it didn't just delete a malware object it found, despite setting the program to delete by default.

Shaw Secure may not be directly relevant to many of you, but apparently it's just a skin on F-secure, a decent contestant on AV-comparatives. Since I have Shaw as my ISP, it's free, so I gave it a go. It's crap for games. I had to turn off pretty much every active feature in the suite to stop it from making my games a lag fest. Not acceptable. NEXT!

Bitdefender earlier this year mucked up a number of Windows x64 machines, rendering them unbootable. Luckily I was playing with Kaspersky at the time. Also, it seems to crash for me once every week or two, but then recovers itself immediately. Annoying, but not a deal breaker for me. What seals me on Bitdefender is that (a) it stays out of the way of my gaming, and (b) everything else is just intuitive. I first had just the antivirus, but decided to check out Internet Security, as software firewalls are the ultimate test of intuitiveness. To my pleasant surprise, many apps are profiled already, and the program gives a brief, non-alarming message that a profile has been added automatically. Some programs need to be manually allowed, as expected, such as when I was waiting for Battlefield 2 to load for the first time after I installed Bitdefender... it stayed at the black screen for a bit before I realized it much be the firewall, and sure enough, when I Alt-Tabbed, there was the permission window. So it's not perfect, but of them all, Bitfender I found the most intuitive, and thus, was the most happy with. It's also one of the best on AV-comparatives, so, bonus.

As for free AV, I would suggest Microsoft's Security Essentials, as long as you have a secure platform (ie, 64 bit Windows, not 32-bit XP) and/or have clean/secure browsing habits (the seedy areas of the internet will get you infected really quickly on a XP 32-bit machine that isn't really well locked down). AVG, Avast, AntiVir, etc... free versions of software that have paid versions, seem to be getting more and more in your face for registering and paying, and don't seem to seriously outperform Microsoft's free solution (at least according to AV-comparatives), so I don't even bother with them anymore.

How to (and how NOT to) format a web article

Why words, when pictures say so much? First, how NOT to format a web article:

http://www.tweaknews.net/reviews/samsung_xl2370_led_monitor_review/

Now, a beautiful example all should glean from:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/athlon-ii-x2-250u.html

What you'll notice in the first link is the lack of any sense of where you are in the article and how much farther you have to trudge through pages. Want to just get to the conclusion? Next page, next page, next page. As a writer, you may find it depressing that few people are interested in reading the body of your article, but think about it in their shoes: they are reading multiple articles, and if you've already established credibility (which is why the body is still important), they just want your brief summary and conclusion of the matter.

Now take a look at Xbit: a very brief intro, followed by a well-labeled table of contents. This table of contents is also available in a drop-down box at the end of each page, in addition to linked page numbers at the top and bottom of each page. If you can't navigate an xbit article... well... there's no hope for you.

Now, Anandtech and Tomshardware also do pretty well for navigation, but they each could learn an important lesson from Xbit. For Anandtech, I loved the way they were going with some articles, placing the summary/conclusion on the first page. The problem in consistency. They only do it sometimes. Compare that to Xbit's format, which is VERY consistent. As for Tomshardware... their drop-down navigation makes me pull my hair out sometimes. If you don't keep the mouse pointer in the box, the box collapses.

If anyone can find a way to improve on Xbit's formula, please do, and let me know... but for any site navigation, always keep two things in mind:

1) Ease

2) Consistency

AMD's hope...

Last post I basically lamented my lost hope for AMD's platform. Well, there still may be hope, if this past week's news is to be believed. First, is the news that AMD is getting good results internally with their SATA 6G controller, so if that can be translated to this external world of ours, that gives them a competitive edge finally. Second, X-bit's update on the status of the new CPU's implies we should see them any day now. It's not the Thubans that are so interesting, though, it's the Zosma. It has more L3 than the current quad-core Phenoms, so assuming latency hasn't been shot way up, performance/clock should improve a little. Combine that with 400Mhz turbo boost, and a (hopefully) low price, and we may actually have a competitor to the i5-750. Especially considering Intel hasn't moved their quads to 32nm yet.

Both of these hopes need to be realized together. Please AMD, for the sake of yourself, don't miss this opportunity.

Why does Intel need an ICH11 if others can't beat their ICH10?

I was hopeful for Nvidia’s Ion 2. Perhaps it was going to re-align itself with the price drops on low-voltage Core 2 CPUs, making Macbook-like Windows laptops available with awesome battery life and performance for under $600. Perhaps it was going to have a graphics upgrade, to 32 shader cores, and thus making a desktop platform where the integrated video could be re-purposed for dedicated Physx. But nay, it’s merely an attempt to toe in some Nvidia product into an otherwise standalone platform.

Intel has been on a rampage privatizing their platforms lately, and all that’s left, sadly, it the Core 2. Since the Clarksdale’s “chipset” is just on package and not on die, Intel could easily make a Clarkdale for socket 775, but I wouldn’t hold my breath for that, as that would kill sales for much of the existing midrange Core 2 inventory, as well as giving room for Nvidia to compete again.

But within Intel’s drive to bring the entire platform under their wings, lies an opportunity… unfortunately, I think both AMD and Nvidia missed that opportunity. Intel is still sitting on their ICH10 “southbridge”. The power management technologies of SATA 6G and the sheer performance increase of USB 3.0 are not inherent in Intel’s platforms. These are both features that need to be added separately, at additional cost and power consumption. Intel has yet to release a low voltage Arrandale: imagine if the already impressive Macbook Pro got another hour of battery life and had USB3 support… that’s what Nvidia could have done with ION 2, but instead it’s merely a graphics upgrade to a platform that really isn’t meant for it. And AMD? They just released their new desktop platform, and while it has SATA 6G, benchmarks show it still falling behind Intel’s controller with contemporary drives, especially the fastest SSDs. At this point, for a desktop, USB 3.0 is the more important upgrade, whereas the power management upgrades of SATA 6G would be more beneficial for laptops. It’s like AMD got it backwards.

I really wanted to see the latest platform updates from Nvidia and AMD give some sort of competitive advantage in some area: if you have a CPU disadvantage, then you should strive like mad to create an advantage in the rest of the platform. If the new SATA and (the hoped for) USB aspects performed well , I would have seriously considered building my next system based on a Phenom II, simply because a overclocked quadcore Phenom II is not going to be bottlenecking the apps I use. But right now, outside of reaching as low as price as possible, I see absolutely no advantage in AMD’s platform whatsoever… and it’s saddening because it didn’t have to be that way. So, it looks like the two biggest aftermarket GPU manufacturers only have GPUs to talk about for the near future.

Asus RT-N16

I haven't had much luck with routers since I "upgraded" from my uber Dlink gaming router a couple years ago. I wanted an N router that reached to every corner of the house. The Belkin N+ was supposedly one of the best. It seemed to be a good router for awhile, until I noticed it was dropping my internet connection to all connected clients every so often (less than an hour between dropouts, on average) for a few seconds. Even if there was only one computer connected via ethernet, and it was in the DMZ... same problem. Tried different firmware, and even exchanged for a newer revision (from v1000 to v2000): same problem. Apparently a v3000 is out now, so might try exchanging it again, but my new router for now is the Asus RT-N16. It initially seemed fine, albeit less throughput than the Belkin, but there seems to be some QOS issues in Asus's firmware. After a week of use, it would assign all resources to just one download, regardless of how I configured the QOS settings: if I was downloading anything, I couldn't open a page or start another download. Since Asus was still sitting on their release firmware, I tried DD-WRT. It works. Wonderfully. The RT-N16 still doesn't have the raw throughput of the Belkin, but the QOS works beautifully: torrents and gaming can exist side-by-side now!

I didn't want to post any positive news until it had proved itself, but it's been around a month since the DD-WRT flash, so I feel I can safely say it's recommended now.

Asus U3S6 USB + SATA PCIe card

Asus has a list of boards that the card is compatible with, but users are reporting much wider compatibility. Well, I tried it on my Asus X48 board that had a spare 16x PCIe 2.0 slot open... and no dice on the USB 3.0 (the SATA controller seemed to install though).

I then tried it on an old P35 board with a "16x" slot that was electrically a 4x PCIe 1.1 slot, and it worked fine.

So, I can't say for sure it doesn't work in PCIe 2.0 slots... but something to keep in mind.

*Update* I looks like it was due to an overclocked PCIe bus. I ran into the same problem with the Gigabyte 3.0 card on the same board. I kept scaling the PCIe speed back until 103Mhz, at which point the NEC USB3.0 controller sprang to life. So, keep in mind, the NEC USB controller won't take higher than 103 MHz on the PCIe bus, at least from what I've seen.

Today's online shopping.

I did some shopping today online for some products that may be relevant for a lot of you:

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/643495-REG/Kodak_1402486_Pocket_Video_Remote_Control.html

I've been on the "let me know when you stinking have it" list for some time, and B&H finally have these in stock. If you have one of the highly recommended Kodak HD pocket camcorders, then this little remote may come in handy.

http://www.cheapees.com/Headsets-and-Microphones/Labtec-Elite-840-Headphone-p2686434.html

A Google product search only brings up two retailers with these instock. The Labtec Elite 840s are known for outstanding quality for the price. I've tried $200+ Sennheisers, and, despite being not as comfy, the Labtecs sound incredible. The swivel about the earcups is fragile, so this is my third pair... in the last 8 years. Going through a $16 (free shipping) pair of headphones every 2 years is going to take you awhile to reach $200. Highly recommended.

http://www.marbeck.com/air_cleaner_filters_universal.html

I just got a 3M air purifier (everyone should have an air purifier!) that didn't come with a carbon pre-filter, which sucks. (Without a cheap pre-filter, the expensive main filter gets used up WAY faster). I was looking for a big sheet of pre-filter I could cut up myself, and the above link is the only source I could find. For $14 + shipping, I can cut that sheet into 5 sheets for my air purifier... not a bad deal.

http://www.candccreations.com/catalog.asp?prodid=435163

Completely unrelated, but so awesome everyone should try it. David Rio's Tiger Spice Chai. Me and my buddy Steve are Chai connoisseurs, and this stuff is by far the best. Imagine the sweet endorphine la-la land creamy goodness of hot chocolate, with the buzz of coffee, and the flavour of tea... its the ultimate hot beverage... come to think of it... it IS relevant... THE NEW OFFICIAL GEEK BEVERAGE!

Best cheap paper for inkjets

There are 3 big grades of 8.5x11 paper: the document grade (20-24lb, 1-2 cents/page) that tend to sell in packs of 500, the presentation grade (28lb-??lb, 10-20 cents/page) that tend to sell in packs of 100, and then the photo grade, where the sky’s the limit for pricing. Laser printers seem to be just fine printing on the cheapest of paper, but you try an inkjet on that same paper, and you’ll get an ink-bleeding mess. I wanted to see if you could get a decent inkjet (in this case, an Epson Artisan 710) to print out documents approaching laser quality if you pay a little more for the paper. I took my generic “Eco” paper that costs less than 1 cent per page, and compared it against a number of papers costing twice as much. Let’s see who fared best (no, I did not do a test print on a napkin) …

Conclusion? Staples Inkjet (UPC 718103037518) was the best. It was consistently flaw-free, had a pleasantly cooler color temperature than the rest (it made it seem brighter, unsure if it actually is), and produced the sharpest text. The HP All-in-One (UPC 764025207003) paper deserves an honorable mention, as it was also flaw-free, had a good standard color temperature and brightness, and produced the second sharpest text. I expected similar results from the Hammermill, as it uses the same “ColorLok” technology as on the HP paper, indicating the same chemical treatment of the paper is used, and indeed, they look very similar. What drops the Hammermill down a notch is a higher incidence of flaws in the sheets. The flaws were small, and many sheets were pristine, but still, it’s a negative. As for the heavier stock advantage over the HP (24lb vs HP’s 22lb), both failed to really block details from the other side showing through, so it’s not much of an advantage.

The cheapest “Eco” paper, 30% of which is recycled content, did alright for its price. Sure, it’s peppered with flaws, but it’s cheap. The Office Depot paper, also being 30% recycled content, was a bit of a disappointment, as its only advantage over the cheap paper was it being slightly thicker and slightly brighter. It had just as high of incidence of flaws.

The biggest disappointment, though, was the most expensive. The Epson Bright White Paper, which went over my 2 cents/page limit for this roundup (it cost 10.99 for a 500 pack), presented itself initially as a worthwhile upgrade. It comes in a box with loose plastic covering inside, rather than a tight plastic wrapper, and the paper is stacked pristinely, and it glides out easily. That’s it for the positive. The incidence of flaws was merely average. And that unique color you see in amongst all the test clippings? The scanner actually captured it rather well. It’s the grayest, dullest paper of them all. It’s also the worst for bleeding… as in, you don’t even need to look too closely to see just how badly the paper soaks up the ink.

Unfortunately, the Staples paper has a bitter-sweet victory. As can be clearly seen, none of the papers here today came close to laser quality on even the cheapest paper. I was able to get laser-like quality on the next rung up (10 - 25 cents per page) of papers, but that’s starting to get a bit ridiculous. Do note I did try fine tuning the print settings to try and get better quality out of the same papers, but was unable to get noticeably sharper results – it seems all paper in this bottom rung is doomed to some bleeding.

So, there’s a secondary conclusion here: inkjets are a poor value for day to day work (not that this is a surprise). In the long run, you’ll be spending more, and getting amateurish results while you’re at it.

What is gaming convenience worth to you?

I love Battlefield 2. I've logged more hours into that game than any other. I bought all the individual add-ons at full pop. But I've also logged more time troubleshooting that game's issues than any other. It's a pain to re-setup each time I upgrade. It's very temperamental, and the patch/addon sequence is, well, stupid. I'd love to have it all taken care of for me...

...like with Steam.

Steam sells the Battlefield 2 package for $29.99... not bad... but I already paid around $100 for this game. I really want to bite the bullet and just pay the money and make the whole game install shenanigans go that much easier... but it's the principle, dangit! Steam only has a handful of supported retail non-Steam games that they'll import the CD-Key for... for the rest, you just have to install the good ol' fashion way.

I was thinking $10. I would part with $10 for the convenience of Steam managing my Battlefield 2. What do you guys think? If you use Steam, and see a number of games that Steam sells that you have a retail copy for, but that they don't support that retail Key, what would you pay for the convenience of Steam? Or what kind of discount would you expect? (Other than the ideal of free, of course).

Comment below.

(P.S. Yes, I found out that I missed out on 75% off on the BF2 package over the holidays, and yes, I'm beating myself up over it - which leads to other idea: could Steam allow you to "tag" games in the shop that alerts you when they go on sale? Hmmm.)

Video card cooling ideas

If you read my post about getting rid of legacy ports on enthusiast motherboards, then you're on the same page as to my thoughts on single slot coolers on upper-midrange graphics cards (like the 8800GT/9800GT and the 4850). The problem is that there is no exhausting of the hot air outside the case. The reason is because the manufacturers insist on loading up that single back panel with outputs: almost always a 2xDVI + multi-analog out (on the upper-mid-range cards that is). Now, I understand the dual DVI jacks, and because those two take up so much room, there's no point that using that little extra for exhaust, so they throw on a useless multi-analog out to fill in the space. The reason I say useless is because they often neglect to include the adapter for component out. Even if the adapter is included, component is the "when-all-else-fails" of outputs to TV/Projectors from a computer (S-Video and composite are not even worth mentioning these days).

Again, like with the motherboards, I'm not saying ALL video cards should be legacy free, just some (and eventually, most). So, considering most users are still running a single monitor, replace at least one of the DVIs with a HDMI or Displayport, and drop the analog out, and voila, you have enough room for some exhaust.

Also, Taco Del Mar is yummy.

As for the dual-50mm fan idea, the Youtube video will give a better idea of what I mean, but in theory this design should make SLI/Crossfire setups more practical (for non-full-length cards), as every multi-card setup I've seen with dual-slot coolers leaves very little room for air between the cards (thus the first card runs hotter and louder).