Friday 7 August 2015

TESTING THE BROKEN PIECES PART 2

Oh dear!

Well you can see from the screenshots I have provided below that as I predicted, despite being totally confused because it should NOT have happened, the missing driver message appears once again!

On checking device manager, see second screenshot, the exclamation mark has returned once again.

This was one of those fancy HP Pavilions, or so it looked, with the aluminium casing. So much so that many thought it was an Apple laptop.

Unfortunately that is where the quality for these Pavilions both starts and finishes.

Also bizarrely both this HP Pavilion and my last HP Pavilion both lost the lettering on the keys. Only the last Pavilion lost them after about two years or so and this one had lost a couple within two months!!

This leads me onto something else about laptops which along with other problems I have with manufacturers to these mobile devices and charge so effing much for them.

They fail to understand the concept of being mobile!

OK so a few years ago a waterproof laptop would have been expecting too much ... but today I read about some motherboards that had a coating on them that stopped water being able to short anything out. But let us forget this while I momentarily point out that all mobile phones, for the stupid over the top prices they charge now, should be able to withstand one of the most common things you encounter when you get outside your door. RAIN!

The other issues I have with laptops is the lack of illuminated keys unless you spend upwards of £750 minimum. This does not guarantee you illuminated keys ... just that the ones that are are upwards of this price.

If your knowledgeable in this stuff you will be surprised at how many times I have had people buy laptops for £300 to £500 that think they are getting top of the range and the fastest processors and largest hard drives for this money. No ... you are not.

Oddly enough I have been looking at laptops ... albeit smaller and bloody cooler than this one. I expect to be doing a lot of ... travelling. A lot more often that I previously did and to a great variety of places too. This will continue for several years.

The cheapest one I like was £750 and once again was a HP, only a much higher model than a Pavilion which I would not touch again with a barge pole. It also had an SSD drive which was good ... only it was only 128GB. As I purchased a Crucial MX100 256GB for £75 I find the capacity somewhat ... disappointing for a laptop of this price. Had it been able to have a second drive added it would not have been so bad but with its svelt and slim size I simply think this option impossible.

So buying laptops with illuminated keys then assures me that the letters do not rub off ... even after two years? Well, yes. but that is not all though.

So back to the mobile aspect once again. What is it that you can encounter while out of your house that is far more common than rain? Well ... most of the time. Something that becomes far more common at a certain time of the year too! Especially in winter and more so the closer you are to either the north or south pole?

Well that would be night then.

Yes ... they must all design and manufacture these things on the equator?

Further into the northern or southern hemisphere the earlier in the day it is when night time arrives. So much so that you can have darkness, or indeed daylight, for months at a time! So you had better not take your mobile computer out then? Yup, unless you take a bloody lantern with you or are going somewhere else where their is light.

I did see a couple of others and one was closer to £1000 and the other a little over £1,100.

It cost me £800 to build my main desktop to use for typing and gaming along with many other things and that cost me around £800 which included two 256GB SSD drives, 16GB of 2400MHz RAM, fast and dearer than average, 2TB Hard disk, 24 inch monitor, Corsair case and a Roccat Ryos professional keyboard wth illuminated and with Cherry black switches which was £150 when new. Also it had a built in graphics chip and I later spent £130 odd putting a Radeon R9-280 graphics card in it to speed up my games. These expensive laptops I mentioned do not have one of these dedicated graphics chips that are upwards of £100 retail.

So you see where I am going?

But then it is only because of Apple they get away with it. Nice as their laptops are they are even more ridiculous amounts of money for what you get. But then if the things last you several, not one or two but several, years and are still going strong then the price is not ... quite so bad.

So if your working on the move what do you do? My answer ...

Do not, I repeat do not decide upon a tablet.

Everyone thought that tablet sales would just keep getting higher and higher. I did not. They tailed off.

I tried a tablet and a powerful one at that. Except it is still more powerful than most tablets sold today but is somehow ... slower?! A lot slower!

Also as well as wondering whether Google takes money from manufacturers to force these effing updates on you that you have no clue that have done anything instead actually slow your device down? Well so you go and buy another one of course. A newer and faster version.

I would bet that something along these lines gets found out by someone at some stage and ends up all over the news? I will wager big on that! I mean to say that this is for these types of computers and so this includes phones too. Do not say i did not warn you, lol.

No, if you just have to have a mobile computer to work on, because phones are useless at many things, go laptop. But spend upwards of £700 if you want something that wont be failing or not doing its job anytime soon.

Windows can slow down ... but only if its overburdened with lots and lots of programs. especially if they are constantly running, which you can look at at the bottom right of your screen in the system tray. In Windows 10 its is the arrow, caret, that points up. Press that and you will see ... most of the programs constantly running and it is where your anti-virus will appear.

This slowing down also comes down to power too and of your CPU, be it Core i3 or Core i5 and i7. I will point out that these are multiple chips in one. What the numbers do not tell you is how many there are.

I chip today can have two, four, six or eight cores.

Some of these can do two threads, though this is deliberately put across as having double the threads and so double the power and speed this is not true in many cases. In those that I names here.

Then there is the speed, or the frequency measured in GHz. Gigahertz.

So amount of cores and the speed they go.

So if you buy a laptop that has six or eight cores, I do not even know if they make one but I do see laptops with Core i7 CPUs, it os not going to have an issue with many programs running at once in the background. See? Simple when you now how.

Only ...

Every so often the chips and the pipes and transistors inside them go through a shrinkage, known as a die shrink with a die meaning chip. This has not happened in awhile but is about to in a big way. There is talk and rumours of more than ten cores. Processors, or CPUs (Central Processing Units), are likely to have 16 cores in them. I would wager 20 or 24 would likely appear. There is talk about 32 cores but I think that is pushing it somewhat on the sizes they will be manufactured. This sizing is known as lithography.

Sounds great? Yeah except it will not be until 2016 and no one, well everyone is doing their usual guessing, predicting and arguing but as I was about to say no one, really knows for sure.

Oh wait. We are talking about laptops here and working while being mobile? Well provided you do not run anything intensively 3D like games coming out next year or even right now you will be fine. Ooh ... I should also mention something most of you will not be working with. 3D animation programs like that they use for cinematic films like Jurassic Park and others. These could be demanding and slow down but only if your models are extensive, highly detailed and especially if animation is being worked on.

There are several of these programs and if your not familiar with them and now thinking of getting one for your shiny new laptop ... STOP! You may be in for a bit of a shock.

There are several programs and I worked with one years ago and knew of two others. there may be more today but ..

3D Studio Max I worked with and was £7,500 a pop at the time around 1999.

Ready for this next bit? That was the cheapest of the three!

Soft Image (latter pronounced 'im-arge')  was a lot more, could have been over three times the price?

Maya was another. You can, or could, buy magazines regarding these things and I have seen them in WHSmith in the past. Not looked in recent times. There was a rumour that one cost around £30,000?!

Remember this is 'per licence'. Got a group of buddies wanting to all work on animation with these things? You had better have very deep pockets.

Mind you this might have changed and maybe they are more affordable? If others came along with cheaper products it is possible a price war might have gone on?

Yoinks! I seem to have gone on a bit ...

Well if any of it helps then it is worth while. If I end up with a laptop and what type of laptop and why will of course appear on here when the time comes.

I can also tell you that it will be the start of a flurry of things to appear and many quite exciting. Not just for this blog either and each one will get many different ... subjects and endeavours appearing in quick succession and for a fair old while too.

All in good time. Not very long now, that I can assure you.

Ooh ...those screenshots ...



TESTING THE BROKEN PIECES

I finally got Windows 10 on the laptop!

In a few weeks time your going to find out some things and ask why in the world I bothered to do that and spend all that time doing it...

Well see what I did on my corruption blogs and everything I got against the biggest names in the land and you will realise I do not like being beaten?! Well in some instances. A few instances. Gaming for instance ... under some circumstances ... OH YOU BLOODY WELL GET MY POINT! LMAO!

It installed under Windows Update. After four failures via Microsoft's installation tool you can download which already worked and quickly on my main desktop computer. First time too.

I have not used the laptop in a long time. It sits around doing nothing. Partly because it gets too damned hot and I do not know why. Or at least I did not know why ... I think?

I will explain.

It threw up a dialogue box in Windows 7 about not having graphics drivers installed. I remembered it had been doing this previously. Now I am not sure how or why but I was surprised after I purchased this laptop from PC World, I got royally ripped off for, and discovered two graphics chips inside it.

A 4200 series and a 5000 series.

Before they placed graphics on the CPU die that is, so why I was confused.

Anyway the issue was that the graphics driver it was having issues with was the 5000 series and not the 4200 series.

Now I thought that the installation of Windows 10 might cure this. I had remembered that I had tried to correct the problem previously but gave up ... likely because the laptop kept overheating and shutting down. There is a genuine reason, well could be two, that it overheats. Due to bad design by HP combined with PC World's DON'TKNOWHOW team who claimed they fixed it and did not.

The screen hinge on the left had seized and when you forced the lid open it opened up the left hand side of the case, prising it apart in other words, right where the fan is and the exit port for air.

So what was happening is the channel for the air to blow out quickly was being opened up so the air was going all over the place and not being channelled out.

Now ask me if I would advise you to buy a laptop from PC World? Lol!

There was one other little thing too...

I tried Unity and Ubuntu on my laptop for a period.

The Linux was still crap...sorry any fanboys, cannot change that...crap is still crap. If it does what you want it to do then great ... I am all happy for yah. But it does not do many things I want it to do, did not like the graphics card and drivers ... yeah you can whine all you like but no one mentions this and nor did several magazines that said you can install it on anything without any issues....

Except maybe breaking your laptop?!

You see because one time I was out with the laptop showing others what Linux is and explaining it when the laptop shut down and gave a warning about heat.

It then did this several times, I was disappointed at how slow my version of Linux was, wondered what had gone wrong from the days of RedHat ... errr ... 4 I think? I decided after three or four shutdowns to take Ubuntu off the damn laptop.

I was remembering this after Windows 10 installed and I got the same damned message about no graphics drivers being installed when something suddenly occurred to me ...

Ubuntu fried my Radeon 5000 series graphics chip?!

I suddenly thought that the warning message was a lie, even if unintentional. It was telling me I had no graphics driver installed and did this no matter what version I installed. The 4200 series was fine but in device manager I always had the exclamation mark against the 5000 series no matter what I did.

Maybe ... Windows was not able to contact the graphics chip because it had been fried? Yes, I thought, that must be it!

Except that I was reinstalling the Catalyst drivers for the umpteenth time, except this time under Windows 10, and suddenly right before my eyes the exclamation mark for the 5000 series Radeon chip vanished. Just vanished ... just like that. The first effing time in over a year!

"HUH?!?!"

That was my thought as I reached the conclusion about the fried chip when the bloody thing disappeared!!

WTF!

Anyway it was late ... I powered down the laptop and started to wonder what the odds were that when I booted up the laptop again that, that little exclamation mark and message about no graphics driver being installed would return?

So no, I cannot go ranting on that, that little session with Linux via Ubuntu I had actually did physical damage to my laptop. I just can't, lol.

However ... if ... IF .. things go awry again then I can say that in 35 years of computing I had my very first instance of software destroying hardware.

I will find out next time I boot up the laptop and I am hoping that the darn thing goes back to how it was without the extreme heat and roaring fan.

Kirk Out!

PROJECT CARS & FEELING THE NEED ONCE AGAIN

Right then ... been a fair bit of time since I posted on here ... or any of my other dozen blogs for that matter ...

I could explain why this is ... but I do not want to put any information on the Internet ... not right now and something tells me that every single visitor of every single blog I have would have found out why somewhere between September, this year of 2015, and October.

LOL, call it a hunch?!

Anyhoo I have been messing around installing Windows 10 and testing games but before I did that I managed to get onto a track without that graphical glitch! Now sometimes i can manage this by altering something in the settings. I then get onto a track without the green lines. Sometimes. Once on a track they never appear, so I can restart as much as I like! However ... exit the track and go back into a different track, same track or even change the car and the green meanies return!

Since I installed Windows 10 they have been banished! Even updating the Catalyst drivers back to 15.7, or whatever it was, and running the game and no green blindness going on straight ahead of me. I did a video of these green meanies.

Anyway ... here are a few videos of me trying to better my own times before finding out that with only 7 hours playing I had gotten into the top 100 and at one point was placed at 42 somewhere. 

Now really annoyingly, and I am sure you will agree, I then did an even faster lap, exited to see how much higher I had got and was placed at 56 ... or was it 58? I dunno but the point was I knocked something like 1.2 seconds, or a little more, off my time and dropped fourteen places?!

Hooow ... thhhhhe ... ffff******?!

Anyway I am pleased the game is working again and I am at about 10 hours into it now.










Windows 10 playing Project Cars


Wednesday 5 August 2015

WINDOWS 10 BREAKING THINGS

Oh dear.

This is not good!

I upgraded to Windows 10 on my main PC without a hitch and pretty quick too. I have since played several games on it and posted them to my YouTube channel, see bottom for links.

However I suddenly remembered that a HP Pavilion Laptop I use also has Windows 7 and so should be able to be upgraded to Windows 10. Might make me use it a bit more and maybe Windows 10 might manage the power better and prevent my laptop from getting hot enough to fry some eggs?!

I really, really do not like laptops! Badly made shite with no idea about design, power management nor what it truly means to be a mobile product. Mobile phone manufacturers all suffer the same blindness. Probably blinded by the dollar and pound signs in their eyeballs? LMAO!

Or to put it another way as well as getting hot and shutting down the labels rub off the shitty keys and they also are not illuminated!

Little tip to design morons ...

It gets both DARK and WET outside!

Anyhoo back to this.

Attempted to upgrade Windows 10 4 times and failed each time. Bloody infuriatingly it took fucking ages to download, fucking ages to install and then between the 7th and 11th hour, I got a bit further each time, it fails, attempts to revert back to Windows 7 while giving me a lame code, no idea of what went wrong and overheats the laptop so that each time it shuts down before Windows 7 gets booted right after reverting back to it!

Never used Microsoft's tech agents previously but have spoke to them three times ... ooh sorry twice ... several minutes ago I got one up live, I typed in the details and the guy ceases the chat?!

Oddly enough the two previous times were both women and extremely helpful.

It also seems I got lucky with my main desktop upgrading easily as there are rafts of upgrade faults, driver conflicts and breakages, devices not working like multi monitor setups, of digital equipment.

I really thought at one point that the upgrade had literally broken this laptop I am now using to type this out! Lol!

Some issues are listed in a Forbes report ...

http://www.forbe0.com/sites/gordonkelly/2015/06/17/windows-10-free-for-1-year-what-happens-next

Some of my gaming under Windows 10 ...