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Jun 30 2009

Creative X-fi Xtreme Audio card and EAX

Category: Software, gaming, hardware — jason @ 1:59 pm

I have been playing around with EAX settings with my X-fi wannabe card and the results are not good.
Lets take quake 4 for example, with hardware openal and eax etc on there is what seems to be to much sound, if a guy is talking to you and then you turn around you can’t hear him at all, the ambient sounds are all over the place especially if you are moving around lots which is what you do in an FPS game.
The sound is also very quiet in places and the voices can barely be heard and the music is over powering and cant be turned down

Now with the hardware items and the EAX turned off and the software settings re-enabled the sound is great, character voices are perfect, if a person is talking to then you turn around his voice will go quieter but you can still hear him, the music is a normal level and the ambient sounds don’t go a little overboard.

I am yet to test the audio in other games like BF2 but I suspect it will be the same as this sound card is very cheap and nasty and not an X-fi card at all but some cheap crap wannabe

If any one knows a great sound card with:

Good volume
Small drivers
Works great for music
Has correct EAX and hardware support in games
Front panel audio pins for the adio connectors on the front of my case

then let me know, other wise I might just have to go back to using the on board sound built into the motherboard

Tags: creative, eax, fps, games, gaming, openal, quake 4

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Jun 28 2009

X-fi Xtreme Audio card Round 2

Category: Software, gaming, hardware — jason @ 10:38 am

Well I have been looking into the Creative sound card’s that I have in order to find one that I can use to replace my X-fi xtreme audio card.

The main reasons I use this card is for:

The Front audio panel connector on the card – link here
Has more volume than the motherboards on-board audio

Only 2 reasons, I could add a third option stating it’s price of only around the $50AU mark.

Let me just say that this card is not for gaming, it misses audio all the time, the driver for this card is over a year old.

x-fi-extreme-audio-outdated

As you can see in the image above, the driver is over a year old as stated above (2nd of April 2008)

x-fi-xtreme-beta-driver-doesnt-work

If you select the beta driver for this card it is alot newer but it isn’t in the supported list of products, the xtreme music card is there but not the xtreme audio version, so why is this driver listed on this product page then?

x-fi-xtreme-gamer-newer-driver

The xtreme gamer driver is a lot newer.

I also have an audigy 2 value card which has much better game support, newer drivers, but has no front panel audio headout on the card, but works perfectly in games like BF2 with full EAX, UT2004 with full hardware and EAX

audigy-value-has-newer-drivers

As you can see the audigy 2 value has newer drivers (23rd of March 2009)

Now what I don’t get is if the X-fi extreme audio card is surpose to be a rebadged (so to speak) audigy 2 card then why are the drivers so different (date and version wise) the version of the Audigy card is almost the same as the latest real x-fi card drivers.

Link here for the latest version of the openal driver/app just released in the last week or so.

Click here for information on the xtreme audio card and here for the audugy value card

On the audigy 2 page it clearly states 64 audio channels but I can’t find anything about the audio channels for the x-fi xtreme audio card, when I put the sound channels from 32 to 64 in UT3 it really plays up so to speak.

I am so tempted to use the Audigy 2 value card that I have but it has no front audio panel headout connector which is something I really need as my amplifier is plugged into the audio out on the back of the sound card.

Do you remember the day when sound cards had an amplified and non amplified output, one for the headphones and the other for an external amp and speakers, nowadays sound cards have all these surround outputs etc.

Okay that is enought of my rants about the Creative cards.

Tags: creative, driver, vista, x-fi, xtreme audio, xtreme gamer

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Jun 24 2009

Strange Registry Scan

Category: General, Software — jason @ 2:07 pm

I done a quick system clean up yesterday (don’t know why because it never does any thing to performance etc) and I was in ccleaner and it found these unused file extensions.

strange-unused-file-extensions

I would love to have known what program created those.

They are gone now, just goes to show how useless todays sotfware is if it has to create pointless entries like those.

Tags: clean, file extensions, registry, system

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Jun 21 2009

Happy 10 years together

Category: General, media — jason @ 10:31 am

Well My little woman and I have been together for 10 years now, we have had our ups and downs but have pulled through with almost flying colours.

We went to see Star Trek 11 on Saturday, wasn’t quiet what I was expecting but still not to bad non the less.

I wont go in to detail but lets just say there is a few twists and they have left it open for more movies, the special affects where great as usual.

Have a good weekend all and stay tunned for my next post which is another Vista bitch post (bloody OS)

Tags: 10 years, anniversery, star trek 11

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Jun 17 2009

ATI Catalyst 9.6 Drivers Out

Category: Software, gaming, hardware — jason @ 6:41 pm

ATI Catalyst 9.6 drivers for Vista and XP have been released with many updates, changes and improvements etc.

Change log on this page

Download ATI Catalyst Drivers Vista from FileHippo.com

Download ATI Catalyst Drivers Vista 64 from FileHippo.com

Download ATI Catalyst Drivers XP from FileHippo.com

Download ATI Catalyst Drivers XP 64 from FileHippo.com

Seems like I only just installed the Catalyst 9.5 drivers on my Vista x64 system.

Looking at the changelog it seems that the ATI driver team like Crysis

Tags: 32bit, 64bit, catalyst, driver, vista, x64, x86, xp

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Jun 16 2009

Google Redesigned Firefox Plugin

Category: Software — jason @ 6:53 am

I found this little Firefox plug in called Google Redesigned which changes the look of Google items like Gmail, Google reader and a few others.

This is a nice theme and nothing else that would interfere with Google items, for example it doesn’t affect my igoogle page.

Here is a screen capture that I took of the gmail login screen.

google-redesigned

The above has been cropped of course as that comes up in the middle of the screen.

The addon can be installed from the folks at Globed Designs as a .XPI file all for Firefox.

Gets 2 thumbs up from me

Tags: firefox, globex design, gmail, google redesigned, theme

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Jun 14 2009

Windows Experience Index of 9.9

Category: Software, gaming — jason @ 5:28 pm

Well the highest score I can get in the WEI is 6.2 if I do some memory tweaking but normally I get 5.2 to 5.9 default as in the image below.

wei-score-default

Now I have gotten 9.9 in all of them and I will show you all how to achieve this.

Click start and type wordpad and right click on wordpad.exe and choose run as administrator

In wordpad click file then open and got to c:\windows\performance\winsat\datastore, in the file types drop down menu change it to All Documents

There will be a few files in there (providing you have run the WEI at least once before) open the one with the newest / latest date.

wei-data-store-image

As in the image above I will open the 11/06/2009 as that is the latest one.

wei-contents

I have circuled the items to change in the above image.

I will put in 9.9 for each one.

wei-contents-changed

Now all set to 9.9

And now if I open up the WEI it shows 9.9 for all of the entries.

wei-score-of-9.9

Now that is one hell of a powerfull e5200 system

Tags: 9.9, index, tweak, vista, wei, Windows Experience Index, wordpad

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Jun 13 2009

Vista System Restore

Category: Software, hardware — jason @ 10:23 am

I checked the free space on my hard disk drive the other day and it said I was using 190GB when if I go into the actual drive and right click on an empty area and choose properties it says that I am using 110GB of hard disk space so I done a little digging around and found that system restore is the problem.

system-restore

As you can see in the image above system restore is using about 70GB which is over kill.

So I have fixed that and given it 10GB as in the image below which is still over kill but better than 70GB which it was before.

system-restore-re size

You are probably wondering how I done that.

Click start and type cmd then press Ctrl+Shitf+Enter to run as administrator.

Type in vssadmin list shadowstorage and hit enter and it will display how much space it is using on your hard disk drive.

Type in vssadmin resize shadowstorage /for=c: /on=c: /maxsize=10gb and hit enter and it will say successfully resized (assuming C: is you operating system drive)

System restore normally sets aside around 15% of the total size of your hard disk drive for system restore which on todays drives is totally insane especially if you have a 1.0 terrabyte or larger hard disk drive (150GB or so hard disk space would be used for system restore)

Tags: hard disk, reserved, resize, system restore, vista, vssadmin

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Jun 06 2009

Microsoft Natal

Category: Software, gaming, hardware — jason @ 3:46 pm

Sounds like some kind of barbi project

Microsoft showed Project Natal at the E3 this year
Natal is the Xbox fluid motion controller system, Natal is more than a Motion Controller, it is controller free gaming.
The Natal sensor is the world’s first to combine an RGB camera, depth sensor, multi-array microphone and custom processor running proprietary software.
Natal tracks your full body movement in 3D, while responding to commands, directions and even a shift of emotion in your voice.
Unlike other devices Natal’s sensor is not light-dependent, it can recognize you just by looking at your face and it does not just react to key words but understands what you are saying.

Natel sounds amazing

There are videos and a lot more information on the Microsoft web site located here.

Watch this video to get an idea.

Video Games | Project Natal | E3 09: Project Natal Intro

XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

Now this is how gaming should be, not quiet sure how it would handle an FPS etc.

PC gaming is getting a little behind.

Tags: gaming, microsoft, natal, xbox 360

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Jun 04 2009

Firefox Issues

Category: General, Software — jason @ 2:46 pm

First of let me say that the last few weeks have been quiet bad with firefox and I have been forced to use alternative browsers which isn’t a problem because there is plenty of alternatives out there.

The below screen shot was taken about 20 minutes ago (before writing this post) and it shows firefox memory usage with 5 tabs open and firefox itself has only been open for about 15 minutes before it come to this high memory usage.

This isn’t the first time that Firefox has done this.

firefox-insane-memory-usage

This isn’t the only problem with Firefox, google reader doesn’t work at all any more where it works fine in chrome, IE8 etc.

Firefox takes at least 30 seconds to open where chrome for example takes about 1 second if that.

I don’t like slow browser (IE8 is one) and if I do anything to quick in Firefox it says not responding for like 5 minutes before I can use it again.

Scrolling in firefox is slow and jerky compared to every other browser out there.

Firefox also stops responding now and then for no reason, doesn’t like fancy web sites etc.

I seem to have to clear my cookies and browsing history at least every 3 days or so which is a pain in the bumb because I prefer my browser to keep a history of URL’s that I have typed into the address bar and I want it to keep my passwords and user names etc as it is a pain in the arse to have to keep re-entering these on a regular basis.

That is my Firefox winge for now.

If anyone has any suggestions or answers etc just let me know.

Here is my hijackthis log (in .txt format) if any one wants to view it – as suggested by a friend on facebook (right click and save link as)
There sure is some system tweaking to do, I have a few days off so there is now no excuse

Tags: firefox, issues, not responding, slow

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