Seen here:

http://cgi.ebay.com.au/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2288274647

“There waiting for you Gordon. In the test chamber…”

What PC Gamer wouldn’t recognise that quote from the original Half Life? So far my experiences have been.

“II’m waiting for you computer… To run the game I spent my hard earned money on… What? why aren’t you loading? Where has the process disappeared to? Why is there no error message or log? Worst christmas ever.”

Yes, I had some trouble getting Half Life 2 running.
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So I bought some new computer parts a few weeks ago. Time for the bi yearly upgrade you could say. Read on for details about stuff bought and things broken.

Stuff bought:

• Pentium IV, 3GHz Hyper Threading CPU.
• 1024Mb RAM
• NVidia GeForce FX5700
• An Abit motherboard to plug these things into
• a DVD Burner
• And a new case to put them all in.

All up the price was about $1300 (Australian) – It suprises me these days how cheap computer equipment is getting. These days CD drives are $30 and CD Burners are $40. I remember the days (Dec 1996) when a single blank CD would cost over $80 AUD. Burners were $3000+ and took 80 minutes to create a CD. Hmm. I wonder if that $80 CD still even works. Putting it together went as well as usual for me. That means at atleast one point I had cut myself on some part of the case and was bleeding. (Tip of my thumb this time) I guess my it wouldn’t be putting a computer together for me without the blood loss. It has all been running smoothly for a couple of weeks until today…

No, none of the new parts have broken. It appears my 5 year old Sony Trinitron 19″ monitor is on the way out. (Also shows how much cheaper things are getting, the monitor cost about the price of all the components above 5 years ago) – I can see lines occasionaly on the screen like it is flickering and the screen gets lighter and darker. It has flicked off and on a few times for no reason during the day today with some clicking noises. I might try removing it from the switch box tomorrow to see if it improves the situation but failing that I will have to investigate how much it is to get it repaired.

I think Half Life 2 might just be trying to spite me still (but that is the subject of another post)

Contray to many news postings it looks like WinAmp is still alive. One things for sure it still is small. I came to this realisation when I installed iTunes on the PC the other day. The download weighed in at over 20Mb. Even the more bloated WinAmp version 3 and 5 was only 5Mb. However the bigger shock was when I started the application and loaded all my MP3’s into the play list. The RAM usage of iTunes topped out at 63Mb! Even in mini mode the RAM utilisation did not decrease. Taking a look at Dells consumer website the basic PC they sell only comes equiped with 256Mb of memory. iTunes would use just under 25% of available memory. Music playing software is software that is suppose to be running in the background accomping other applications you are working in. Does it really need to consume a quater of resources when it is more a secondary function then a primary one?

So why did I install iTunes? With the new PC I finally have FireWire ports so I can plug in the iPod and synchronise through there. (I never bought the USB adapter) I had to download install a seperate iPod application after iTunes to get it to work. That was another 30Mb download. I don’t know how much system resources it uses, I saw a couple of services running. Now the iBook really is a very large paper weight. (One day I’ll get around to finishing the OS X project)

And now the first review.

The Forgotten is a new movie out which I caught the other weekend in Gold Class. Yes, this was the best thing on at the time to go see when your gold class tickets are about to expire. IMDB has all the cast details. Read on for more details and spoilers.
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