These i3′s can really be made to scream…. or so I’d heard.
After doing a little preliminary research on this chip (and the Intel chipsets it runs on), I decided to give it a go. From what I’d gathered, overclocking these things should be pretty simple. Unfortunately, the integrated memory controller gave me huge issues where I’d fail Prime95 even at sub-4.0Ghz settings.
Eventually I got to 4.18Ghz stable. Settings that varied from default were as follows: continue reading…
I recently came across my old Kill-A-Watt device, and decided to see how much juice a few items in the house pulled either when on (and not in use), or when completely shut off (but plugged in).
The VCR pulls a stunningly high 7 WATTS just by being plugged in. Combined, the other 3 totaled 1 watt of power consumption on the meter. The VCR alone uses 61.32kwh per year. Granted, this is an old model. I’d hope that newer models would be more efficient.
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I wasn’t really fair to the iMac here, because the screen was on. You’d be looking at considerably less power consumption when the display turns off after inactivity, and it’s the reading I should have taken.
What you can take from this though is that continue reading…
In the event that you’re unfortunate enough to trigger the message in your mail client (either due to invalid password attempts or spamming the Get Mail button), the fix is fairly simple.
Head to:
https://www.google.com/a/yourwebsite.com/UnlockCaptcha
…and replace yourwebsite.com with your actual website name. Regular GMail customers who trigger that issue can head to https://www.google.com/accounts/DisplayUnlockCaptcha instead.
Either way, you’ll have to enter your correct password and answer a Captcha. Credit for this tip goes to mydigitallife.info.
…well at least in Canada.
Looking around the web, everything I read seemed to indicate that the Apple Time Capsules used the Hitachi DeskStar drives (presumably the 7K1000 drives), and I couldn’t find anything to indicate that this had changed.
It just might have though.
The WD Drive that came in my Time Capsule
I snapped a photo of the drive I pulled during replacement (upgrading to a 1.5TB drive). If you take a look at the picture above, you’ll notice the Apple logo. The drive used is the 1.0TB WD10EADS Western Digital Caviar Green.
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This is a good continue reading…
The Dynex DX-PCIGB in a computer running Mac OS X Snow Leopard.
I’ll jabber on for a bit, and then get to the Dynex PCIGB network card pictured above. If you want to jump right to the card, scroll down a bunch!
Also called “Wake for Ethernet network access” (and another name for the wireless variant), this is the wake-on-lan equivalent for the Mac OS. When combined with Time Capsule (or Airport Extreme), the way things work in the ideal scenario is essentially as follows:
Where this excels is in the way that Time Capsule / Airport Express utilize what’s known as a Sleep Proxy Service (“Bonjour Sleep Proxy” is the fancy Apple-name). When a machine goes to sleep, it’s still advertised as being alive on the network (the TC / AE advertises and responds on the sleeping machine’s behalf and wakes it if/when needed). This is considerably more convenient than the standard WOL style networks where once the machine’s asleep, it’s basically missing from the network until specifically woken.
There are however a few potential downsides: continue reading…
If you hate 27″ screens and wanted to get the strongest video card Apple offers in the 21.5″ model, this is probably the machine you went for (or… the machine you’re thinking of getting).
In any case, the Radeon HD 5670 offered in the iMac is actually an ATI Mobility 5730m. Higher model number, but mobile chips are clocked a little lower, so you’ve got roughly the power of a desktop 5670. If you’re wondering why Apple goes with mobility GPU’s, they’ve got pretty good reasons:
Moving on, because this is a mid-range card and I’m used to high-end cards, I was curious to see how this would fare in games. I ran it through World of Warcraft (on the Mac side), and through Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect 2 in Windows through BootCamp.
Here are the results:
You’ll notice 2 resolutions were used, adjusting the Quality Slider in WoW for different test points. This was done in Dalaran in the wee hours of the morning (few people on) in a location where the frame rates were typically low. Framerates differ massively throughout Dalaran, and I wanted consistent numbers that weren’t very optimistic.
To give a playability perspective, I hopped into a battleground (Alterac Valley), so that I could see if things felt smooth with 40 players.
The “Good” quality setting in AV was absolutely perfect. “High” was very strong too, although there were a couple moments where it wasn’t 100% smooth (but only for a moment). I’d recommend starting off at “Good” quality, and going to High/Ultra if you really feel you’re missing out. You can always back down again if you find things get spiky at inopportunte times.
In terms of Windowed mode, the game isn’t handled quite as well (even though the FPS dictates it’s about the same). Spinning in circles, it’s not 100% smooth all the time. It’s still perfectly playable, and many people probably won’t even notice the minor spikes (which look like a single dropped frame).
Regardless, in the case of WoW, I’d recommend playing at full screen, full resolution, and medium to high settings. It looks great. Use VSync though, or you will get tearing during the times/locations when the framerate skyrockets above 100fps.
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Next up is Dragon Age: Origins (bootcamp/windows 7). You’ll notice a couple things: continue reading…
If you’ve bought one of the recent iMacs, you’ve probably noticed that they now come with a bluetooth wireless keyboard and mouse. As convenient as this may be in the Mac OS, it causes huge headaches when installing Windows.
For starters, when you’re trying the Windows install, don’t be surprised if the keyboard/mouse aren’t working during the install. This is a bit of a problem because you’ve generally got to partition the drive during the install (amongst other things). I suggest you find a USB keyboard/mouse and use them for the install.
The issue that I had after the install and booted into Windows (and after I ran the BootCamp installer on the OSX install DVD through the USB stuff) was that the keyboard was detected, and the mouse wasn’t.
Great…
Turns out you can eventually get the mouse detected, but it’s a huge pain (especially if you’re relying on the keyboard to navigate). I got it working, but it took the following:
-Restart the computer.
-In “devices and printers” (start menu), select and remove the Apple Wireless Mouse.
-You can try adding the mouse with the “Add a device” option (power it off and on if it doesn’t show up), although it’ll probably hang.
-Restart the computer again.
-You can try adding the mouse again (Devices and Printers / Add a device). Again it with probably just hang, so cancel it.
-Navigate to the OS X install DVD again and have it run the BootCamp installer. Choose “Repair”.
-Let it restart once finished.
-Try adding the mouse again. Start/Devices_and_Printers/Add_a_device. Remember that if it doesn’t show, reset the mouse’s power again.
Your Apple Magic Mouse should hopefully be detected this time and work.
Update: This Magic Mouse continues to be a nightmare. Be prepared to remove & re-add the device upon each startup.
Paying PST online in Manitoba (for retail sales for example) is now possible. However, unless you scroll down the page on the Manitoba Finance website (it’s not currently among the links where you’d expect to find it – there’s a banner below all the information), you may not see it.
It’s called TAXcess, and can be found at:
https://taxcess.gov.mb.ca/
I recommend reading through all the information on the site, however here are a few basics that may be helpful to know:
Again, I recommend thoroughly reading through the information on the website. There may be a few other quirks, but hopefully the above captures the gist of things. Naturally, this is all subject to change.
In my first playthrough of Leliana’s Song (a DLC to Dragon Age Origins), I found what I initially thought to be a bug… I’d looted a Mages Collective Cache for the Find the Mages Cache quest, and died. Upon loading my save, the cache didn’t seem to be clickable anymore.
As it turns out, it wasn’t a bug (although there was zero information about this out there). The locations for the Mages Collective Cache’s have extremely small clickable areas. If you’re doing the quest, go to the location marked with the X and *slowly* move your mouse around all over the area (whether it’s the pile of wood, the bags, etc).
Eventually you should end up mousing over the tiny area and will get the clickable popup. Don’t forget to hit up all the caches – fortunately they’re all marked on your minimap with an X. Once you’ve done them all, the “Find the Mages’ Cache” quest should be complete.
I really need a rant section…
Few steps if you want me to bite my tongue to keep from lashing out at you. I won’t mention the site/business because I don’t want to give them any traffic whatsoever. continue reading…
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