EasyLinuxGuide Blog

OK, this post will be short for a couple of reasons – I don’t really know that much about the subject and it doesn’t interest me very much, but I thought it deserved to be said. I was considering purchasing the ever popular ‘duvet’ a while ago and finally ended up getting one. There are tons from which to choose – goose, duck, cotton, polyester filled etc. I am one of those people that is always hot, so I didn’t want to get a fill that would keep me up all night trying to breathe. I opted for a cotton fill, it cost around $100 plus the cover was $40. Was it worth it? Sure. It’s very comfortable and I do think I sleep better now. For those of you who don’t know, when you move it around, it sounds like a baby’s diaper (I haven’t determined whether it’s a filled diaper sound or not – I don’t really have enough experience in that matter). Anyway, it’s worth it overall – sleep is such an important aspect of life so get one!

It took me a while to pick up this title as I refused to pay the hefty price tag for it when it was new. I managed to grab it for around $20 which is decent. The game is just as fun as other Medieval offerings. Everything that made the other ones successful come out in Resurrection. The graphics and environments are stunning and colorful on the high quality psp widescreen. The voices and sounds are extremely clear and the gameplay has been great including an array of the same characters in its predecessors as well as some new beasts. For anyone who liked any of the previous Medieval games for other consoles and has a psp, this one is worth picking up especially at a discounted price. I also purchased Virtua Tennis – maybe I will actually play it on the psp as I haven’t played it much on the Xbox.

I really can’t say I was surprised at all at the result of UFC 65’s fight between Matt Hughes and George St. Pierre. There was a time when I thought Rich Franklin and Matt Hughes were virtually unbeatable but after seeing Franklin get dominated by Silva, I realized that Franklin was not as dominant as he had once seemed. Why this sort of thing happens to fighters is debatable. Maybe they get complacent, maybe other fighters study their style and because of the success the champion has had, they don’t make enough changes to their game so they eventually get picked apart. Silva brought something to the fight against Franklin that was unexpected — a strong game in the clinch. In the Hughes fight, it appeared that Hughes was totally unprepared. St. Pierre looked dominant for the entire fight. St. Pierre looked very focused and had obviously trained on numerous aspects of his game, most notably – his standup. I was shocked that Hughes did not try to take St. Pierre down more often, but perhaps he was discouraged by St. Pierre’s sprawls and also because it has always been a wish of Hughes to be able to have that knock out threat that other fighters boast. For Hughes, it appeared to be a matter of pride and by the time his corner would have chosen strategy over pride, it was all but too late. St. Pierre used a stunning combination of jabs setting up low and high kicks that Hughes could not manage to block. After Hughes was stunned, it was over. St. Pierre knocked Hughes down in the first round with seconds to go and the only thing that saved Hughes was the end of the round. Hughes came out in the second round even more lifeless than his tentative onset in the first round. Within a matter of a few minutes, it was all over with St. Pierre catching Hughes with a high kick to the side of Hughes head, bringing him down to the canvas. Hughes followed with some mounted punches but it was the elbows that came shortly after that caused McCarthy to stop the fight. And there we have it, both champions dethroned — next up is Liddell.

And we are back. The last couple of months we were working on two games: Bloodrayne 2 and Half Life 2. My thoughts were that although Bloodrayne 2 was fun at first, it eventually became a button masher and Half Life 2 was poorly designed in that I was physically ’stuck’ on at least 2 different occasions due to the way the game was designed. So, we are moving to a new game for December.

The game of the month for December is Tim Burton’s the Nightmare Before Christmas. I really liked the movie and actually purchased the dvd. I have yet to play the game so I am not sure what to expect. I did however recently purchase Medieval – Resurrection for my psp which has been tons of fun to play and resembles the macabre atmosphere and setting of Nightmare. Those playing may start at any time! Enjoy!

So I’ve been asked lately a lot why every time someone asks what I am up to, I say “working on the laptop”. This Emachine laptop has wrangled so much time away from me lately because of numerous issues. I was over at a co-worker’s place and happened to mention that I had considered getting a newer laptop to replace my aging but very stable Thinkpad and next thing I knew I was carrying out this emachine to see it could suit my needs and if so, there may be a sale.

The Diagnostic

I probably won’t recall all of the details but I will provide some information on what has preoccupied me for the last several days. One of the first things I did was a Google search on the issue that had apparently plagued this machine for about 2 years or more and caused frustration to its owner and others who had tried to fix it. My first Google search produced that originally there had been a class action suit against the makers of Emachines for rampant overheating issues. The end result was compensation offered on 3 tiers depending on how many times the unit had been unsuccessfully repaired or you could choose a repair. By the time I got the laptop it was about a week and a half past the due date to apply for this restitution. I advised the owner to call in anyway if desired to see if anything could be done.

The Repair

I did find a nice forum post on how to clean the internal fan which tended to alleviate the overheating issues for a lot of owners. It seemed fairly straightforward and since it was past its due date for the class action suit, I figured I might as well try it. The fan turned out to be quite dirty so once it was reassembled, it not only didn’t seem to get as hot, but also was quieter. The next day I was using the laptop while lying on my couch and I noticed the strangest thing. I was connected wired to my network and was talking to some friends on messenger and I noticed a very strange occurrence. When I pressed enter, my message would just stay where I typed it instead of going above to the body of the conversation. Then I instinctively picked up the laptop and was looking under it and such and when I returned to the screen I noticed my message had sent. I repeated this a few more times and noticed that the message would send almost immediately once I lifted it off my lap. So, something was still not right. I decided to do further testing. I ran the Maxtor Power Max Utility to test the drive which works on almost any manufacturer of hard drive. It came back with errors on several tests. Since I was given permission to erase the drive, I thought I would try a zero fill (low level format) which I have seen rescue several drives over the years – this failed also. I had never seen this test fail before. With the hard drive test not going well and the strange activity, I knew in order to eliminate some variables, the drive needed to be replaced. So off I went to my local computer store and managed to pick up a supposed 20Gb drive which actually turned out to be a 6Gb instead. I am keeping in mind while doing all of this work that I am trying to get this laptop into a condition to where I would be interested in buying it.

The Setup

Once I replaced the drive, things seemed much better. I used the laptop for quite a while with a nice trim Arch Linux install and it was working fine. I used it all day for probably about 14 hours off and on. At the end of the night, it mysteriously shut right now from out of nowhere. Was this due to overheating? Perhaps – the underside of the laptop was extremely hot. I knew the hard drive was not the issue. It could be in much better condition but still struggling to stay cool. More testing is needed. I did manage to get a moral victory tonight though – I got wireless working. It comes with a broadcom internal wireless card and used bcm4306 chipset which I loaded through ndiswrapper. I had tried ndiswrapper v. 1.26 the previous night and it would not pick up my access point. It was suggested to try the latest 1.28 version (thanks Brad!) and it went ahead and loaded up fine. It’s nice to have one less cord. It’s also nice to be able to have wireless working in the sense that it wasn’t a high priority due to all of the hardware issues which means that perhaps a lot of them have cleared up.

The (in)decision

All in all, it is a nice laptop with very decent specs. It was purchased about 3 years ago as a state of the art machine with a 15.4 widescreen (quite uncommon then), 20Gb hard drive, dvd rom and cd burner, internal wireless, 3 usb ports, modem, wired nic, firewire, 512mb ram (odd config – one 256 soldered on and a 256 added as there is only one ram slot and only upgradeable to a max of 768 – the upgrade would be worthwhile though) and the cpu is an AMD Athlon XP 2400 (1.8Ghz). It does run well, but I am still wavering on buying it. New laptops are very cheap these days and I don’t really need a new laptop by any means, I don’t need any computer related things to be honest, but if it is a decent deal and I get working, I may consider it.