Epithna: Main Page

YA Adult SF Novels We are all Missing

2008-05-02 00:00:00

Very interesting discussion on writer John Scalzi's Blog site Whatever. As a SciFI/Fantasy fan I have been noticing that there seems to be alot of interesting things going on in that section of the store that are getting missed out on by the traditional SF/Fantasy fan.

Welcome to the World Mara

2007-11-03 00:00:00

The Date 10/27/2007 at 11:44am

Its a GIRL!

Mara Jaina Dunn the newest additon to the Dunn Clan came into the world after a fairly short, but intense labor. Her loving parents Heather-Rae(Heatrae) and Bill (Haplo) could not be happier. We have been resting at home and spending time with our little one getting to know each other.

A picture gallery area has been added to the site where pictures of our little one are available.

http://www.epithna.com/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=19

Rude Freaking People

2007-10-15 00:00:00

The Day Saturday 10/13/2007

The day started out great, slept in for the most part...got out of bed had a shower, Heather-Rae unexpectedly made pancakes for breakfast, I got the water started draining off the pool cover. Ummm mouth started siphon..Yummy...but the pancakes afterwards more than made up for that.

So Great morning! Now its time to walk the dogs. Its beautiful out, not the unseasonable warm for the early part of the month, but still pretty good. Sunny out, not a could in the sky! Great! We are having a nice walk with the dogs.

There is a small hill 3 houses down from us, we are on the bottom part of the hill. We hear a car coming up from the other side of the hill, we move to the side of the road. The car comes over the hill and blasts the horn. We turn maybe its a neighbor just saying HI! They do that...Nope not a neighbor. Whatever could be the matter.

The Car pulls up along side us passenger window down. Humm, don't know this person, don't really care to at this point. Keep walking.

"Your gonna get youselves killed one of these days walking down the street like that." Exclaims the driver of the car.

Yeah OK whatever, maybe you should drive a little more carefully lady, I don't care I'm having a good day, I'm going to ignore you now, please move along now. I think to myself..I say nothing.

Heather-Rae replies to her that we will not walk in the road when said driver pays for a side walk, until then were else can we walk our dogs.

This would have been all well and fine, she had her say, I gnored her, Heather-Rae gave her answer in the same spirt as her original comment. Let's just keep walking let it drop I think.

Nope the driver lady has to make another comment, she just couldn't let it go, I don't even remember what it was I was just very rude and totally uncalled for, my good day is now officially ruined. The Car starts to drive off. Since my day is now runined anyway, I yell something very rude of my own as she drives away. I didn't want to do it, esspecially since the passenger in the car appeared to be her teenage daughter. However she had to go and ruin my day, I'm tired, I've been working hard, I take people's crap at work all week, its been over a year since I've had any real time off, I've been on pins and needles for various reasons all year. I just didn't need her crap! I delight in the fact that she almost backed up, I think I offended her good and proper! Still I wish I had not been pushed to that point.

Moral of the story if there is one: If all you have to crap to say, just keep driving, keep your thoughts to yourself, I don't need your pissy advice. Thanks very much!

Our best guesses, she was having a bad day, and just wanted to share the misery...Mission accomplished lady! or she wasn't driving particularly well, wasn't paying attention, and decided to blame her potentialy almost killing us, on us for simple just existing and being in her way, forcing her to slow down, drive better and god forbid think about what a crappy driver she is, or perhaps some combination of the two guesses.

I admit I've been guilty of coming around a corner or over a hill, and being in the same oops there is someone walking there situation. However I've never blamed my potentially bad driving on them. I usually just think to myself, oops that was supid, glad I missed them, hope it wasn't someone I know, I hope I didn't piss them off/scare them half to death...I hope they don't call a cop.

Happy Thanksgiving!

2006-11-23 00:00:00

Happy Thanksgiving 2006.

Site Finally Updated

2006-11-03 00:00:00

Once upon a time, about a year ago I started to redesign my this site. I got off I thought anyway to a pretty good start. I had tried several templates and mean while developed the beginnings of a content management system. i finally settled on a template I found on the Open Web Design website. It actually lined up very nice with my goals for the site and fit nicely with the content management system I was envisioning.

In a pretty short time I had a good bit of at least the basics in place. Unfortunately then life (mostly work) intruded, and all the work stopped. I needed to find an editor (or write one) that would allow me to easily format summissions to the site with out getting to bogged down in the details of writing the HTML. I had one that seemed nice but it had some cross browser functionality issues. Since this didn't work out immediately, didn't have time to write one, and wasn't finding one that I liked searching for one it became a block to continuing the work given the limited time I had.

Last week I finally found an online editor I liked that was LGPL code, perfect, and it does exactly what I needed without being a pain to use or setup. basically include into the page and it wraps the <textarea> elements making them WYSIWYG editor windows. I have this implimented now.

Now that I have the editor in place it drove me to finish a few other elements so that articles could be submitted, and display properly. This means that I now also have the front page capable of doing what it was ment to do displaying the last few submitted articles.

Guarin's Story: Chapter 1

2006-11-02 00:00:00

"In ya go" Grunted the Guard, as he shoved Guarin into the Prison cell

You will let me out, you don't want to lock me in here. Locking someone in a prison cell is an Evil thing to do, you don't want to do evil, you want to take me to the front gate and let me go. Guarin projected his thought at the guard.

"Oh please, you really think they would have a normal, doing prison guard duty in a prison for telepaths. That's not gonna work on me! Filtered out before it even hit my mental shields. And calling locking you up evil, is a bit of an exaggeration after what you did."

A mental scream was Guarin's only response.

"Oh and you probably want to be learning to speak, instead of project, because about right..." the guard flipped a switch on the wall outside the cell. "...Now! You'll find using your abilities to be rather painful."

Guarin instantly doubled over in pain, and fell to the floor clutching his head between his hands. His head had exploded in pain like a thousand hot needles had been plunged to into his brain. The Guard had obviously activated a behavior suppression field.

"...Yep stuck me in there once turned the switch on.." the guard continued oblivious to Guarin's predicament in the cell. "...oh fuck did it hurt, when they told me to try to project a thought at them..."

"You fool..." Guarin began screaming in pain in the cell. "...I'm a radiant Telepath...I can't turn it on and off like you..."

"huh, oh" The guard noticed Guarin's situation in the cell. The Guard reached in a pocket of his vest, and pulled out a small bottle.
"Yeah they told me that, said I should give you these." He tossed the bottle in the cell, it bounced once and rolled in front of Guarin. Then he reached up on the wall under the switch for the behavior field and turned down the intensity just enough so that the pain in Guarin's head was now just a dull roar.

Now that the pain was lessened Guarin could move and pick up the bottle. He suspected what was inside, and confirmed it quickly. He opened the bottle cap and dumped out the contents into his hand. Out came 3 small Kmilac pills 10mg a piece, it was a psychic suppression drug, designed to dampen psychic ability. In a normal telepath, who could choose when and how to use the ability, one of the 10mg pills was enough to suppress the ability for an entire day. In a radiant telepath, like himself, the ability was always turned on and didn't need conscious effort to use. The three pills might be enough to give him relief from the pain of the behavior field for an hour or two if he worked very hard at containing the ability. Unfortunately containing the ability came with problems of its own.

"Well hope that helps I gotta go now, things to do, things to do" The guard turned and walked away, Guarin could hear the booted footsteps as the guard retreated down the hall.

Guarin turned his attention back to the pills, even with the lessened intensity of the behavior field the pain was starting to grow again. He used what mental capacity he had to think out the best strategy for using the pills as long as he could. Who knew when there might be more. He swallowed one of the pills immediately, it would take 10-20 minutes to have any effect; however at least he would get the edge off the roar in his head for maybe a half hour after that. The other pills he returned to the bottle which he placed on the small metal shelf welded to the wall of the cell. He figured if he saved the other two, they might allow him to sleep for a while later, with minimal pain, since generally his ability was less active when he slept.

Guarin moved over to the bed, sat down, pulled his legs up to his chest, and wrapped his arms around his legs. He sat for a long time and contemplated, he really didn't know what he was going to do he couldn't live like this for the rest of his life. That was going to be a long time, he was only 30, the rest of his life could easily be 70 years or longer. With his ability partly suppressed he would be inconstant pain from the behavior field, no matter how low it was set. He suspected at the moment it was already set as low as it went anyway. If they ever gave him enough of the drug to completely suppress his ability he wouldn't feel alive anymore. For a radiant telepath the psychic ability was as much of them as breathing, or seeing was for a Normal. For a standard telepath this sort of punishment was less sever. They could at least live out a normal life since the ability in them was under their control, to be used or not used at will.

When the pain began to lessen due to the drug Guarin got off the bed and attempted to move around the little space the cell provided to him. It was a pretty standard cell... bed, single shelf, toilet, sink and a small area to roll out an exercise mat stored under the bed. He walked to the bars at the font of the cell and looked out. There was not much to see there. Just the blank cinder block wall across the hall . He couldn't crane his neck sufficiently to see to either side next to his cell. He made the mistake of trying to employ his ability to stretch his senses, and was rewarded with another hot flash of pain that left him crumpled unconscious, on the floor. That's where his first visitor found him.

Guarin woke up to see a tall bearded man dressed all in grey standing in front of him.
"Tried to see around the corner...?" the man sighed "...everyone tries that, always the first mistake, knocks 'em on their ass."
Guarin just nodded, and grunted an "Uh. Huh" between clenched teeth. The pain in his head upon waking was almost as bad as it had been when the field was first turned on.
"OK, so lets have ourselves a little chat, lemme turn this off so we can actually talk." The man in gray flipped the switch for the behavior field. The pain in Guarin's head disappeared, and he was able to grab his bearings in the world again as his ability was able to reorient.

"Now do your best to keep that in check." said the man in grey as he felt the
tendrils of Guarin's ability reach out and touch his mental shields.
"I'll see what I can do, but as I'm sure you know being a radiant it's a little hard to stop." Guarin had sensed as his ability reached out this man was also a radiant telepath, and a very powerful one.

"OK, so first off I'm John Kessler, I'm your assigned rehabilitation officer during your stay here. I'll be assisting in trying to teach you to control and perhaps use you ability in more positive ways while you're here and perhaps after you leave us. Let me see here..." John started as he opened a black leather binder in front of him and turned to the first page of notes "..ah it appears your going to be here for quite awhile, give us a good long time to get to know each other...huh...aggravated mind rip...mental tampering...suicide suggestion...mental rape suggestion...um you were a bad one on the outside."

"yeah, I suppose" said Guarin under his breath. He was still trying to fine tune his ability to see past John's shields and through the drug it was taking effort that wouldn't usually be needed to do so.

John turned back to the folder he was holding and continued to read a moment longer. He then began to talk with Guarin in a serious tone.

"Guarin, is that your first name or last name by the way?"

"What's the difference?"

"Just Curiosity really, although it does seem strange the system would only have a single name for you."

"Well, when that's all you give 'em, that's all they are going to have now isn't it?"

"Yeah, well I suppose that's true...However I am curious just for the sake of knowing"

John actually already knew the answer he was just wanted to see if he could coax it out of Guarin, set the expectation for what kind of foot their relationship was going to start on. If he could get a full name this early on it would prove the assumptions of Guarin having been locked up wrong.

"Guarin is my family name, I prefer it since there were a bunch of men named Angus in my family, too confusing..." Guarin pause momentarily realizing he had just let his name slip without intending too.

"Well that's a good start, I actually already knew that, and I know that your not the person that your record makes you out to be either." John spoke in an encouraged manner.

"yeah, how can you be sure, maybe this is what I really am and everything 'til my life turned was the lie"

"Humm, well I don't get a sense of that, and remember I am a radiant telepath like yourself, somethings I just know without having to be told."

"Then you know what I'm thinking right now..." Guarin sneered, the rather traditional cliche challenge to a psychic's abilities.

"With your shields down, due to the drug at the moment I do know exactly what your thinking, all the things your thinking all at once. Both that image of me getting butt fucked by some fat hairy prison gay named "Bulldozer"...and how your thinking how great it would be to get your cock in some warm pussy, but how that's never gonna happen again because your locked up in here till you die..."

Guarin recoiled in shock, the drug had not completely taken his shields down, he thought he at least was keeping others out. He mentally reviewed his state of mind, he knew his mental shields were up there was no way this guy could be reading past them. Guarin had met a lot of powerful psychics in his life, radiant psychics were the most powerful of all, so powerful even the strongest mental control couldn't contain the ability. He was the strongest of the radiant psychics he had ever met. He was sure if there was anyone stronger than him he would know about them at least.

John noted the look on Guarin's face, and though to himself. Wait until he finds out how I did that!

John continued. "So anyway as I said its going to be my job to attempt to rehabilitate you. I've got plans on how we are going to do that, its going to be interesting. However at the moment you seem a little surely to be getting started so, just one more thing and I will go."

John fished around in the pocket of his blazer for a moment, and withdrew a rolled up package, and slipped it through the bars of the cell. Guarin quickly retrieved in from the floor infront of him. He unrolled it, and saw that it was a bubble pack of pills. The pills proved to be 100mg dosages of Kmilac.

"That should be useful to you I imagine, they will never give you enough to stop the pain of the field completely even set on the lowest setting with an ability as strong as yours. Its flat so you can hide it in the bedding and they are not likely to find it. Dose yourself however you see fit, turn off your ability completely and live as a normal or just keep the edge off when you need too, your choice."

"I'm going to go now, I will see you soon, and hopefully in a better mood, so we can get down to brass tacks, and talk about your future."

John turned and walked away. Guarin could hear his hard soled shoes clicking on the cement floor as he retreated down the hall, then a click and bang as the door at the end of the cell block opened and closed behind him.

Finally have an article Entry System

2006-10-31 00:00:00

Ok, it took way to long to get this step built, but now I have it done. I can now easily create new article entries for the site so I should be entering new stuff more often. it doesn't have all the functionality I want yet. There are some special tasks I want to be able to do data entry for, like URL only entries, special links within the site, etc. That functionality isn't done, but at least basic article entry like this is done. The rest is an easy modification after that.

The Key to the whole thing has been finding a small, clean WYSIWYG editor to help with the formating of articles and eventually comments without having to type the HTML code directly. I finally found something I like in a LGPL project called Tiny MCE.

I have it running in a fairly basic mode right now, but hope to have the more advanced setup running soon.

Build a Stable System

2006-02-06 00:00:00

How to build a Stable NF4 System, and verify that your Video Card is really the problem

If you follow all the steps below and in the end come out with a system that still crashes when playing 3D games, the problem is definitely your video card. This information is built from months of testing all tracked in the following thread:

http://www.xfxforce.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=1677&start=0&tstart=0

The information is based mostly on NF4 AMD Athlon systems, but in testing has been found to apply equally to Pentium 4, 4EE, M and D systems as well. No Information is yet available for Core Solo or Duo systems, if this information becomes available I will update the article. See below, how to get in touch with me to report your own testing results, and help me keep the information in this up to date and relevant, as well as how to always find the most current version.

This article assumes an intermediate to advanced knowledge of and comfort in working with PC systems.

System Construction:

1. When choosing a power supply for the system (or if upgrading system) use a PSU which is SLI approved even if you are only building a single card system.

2. Mount all basic hardware, enough to make an initial system boot, Mainboard, CPU/Heatsink, One Stick of Ram (or two if your system requires at least two), CD/DVD drive, Hard Drive, and Video Card.

3. Acquire memtest86+ from: http://www.memtest86.com/ and create the Boot CD. Boot up the system and run the Memtest86 tests looping at least overnight. If this happens with no failures then the ram and the system are stable. Add additional ram one stick (or set of sticks as required by your system) at a time, testing for 2-3 hours after each addition. After the system ram is fully installed run again overnight. If any of the tests fail you have suspect ram or potentially mainboard. Swap ram around until you have runs with no failures. Note which sticks were installed when failures occured, this is likely bad ram RMA it.

Note: It is assumed here that you have properly configured the ram settings in the PC Bios. For NF4 systems, make sure the timings match the MFG listed ram timings, the Command rate is usually "1T" for two sticks, and "2T" for four sticks. This article also assumes NO Over-clocking. (Other than MFG stock over-clocking often used in many geforce cards) Feel free to use it as a guide to test an over clocked system but your results are strictly YMMV.

If the failures (either a failure listed in memtest86 or system locks/crashes/freezes) occur with all Ram sticks then:

a. First try changing USB support from 2.0+1.1 to just 1.1

b. If that didn't work try turning off USB entirely. c. if it still doesn't work then the mainboard is suspect, RMA it.

Note: On some NF4 boards problems with the USB 2.0 support have been noted, steps a,b,c help to figure out if yours is one of those boards. (Abit, Gigabyte, and MSI models have been noted to have this issue). It should also be noted that often the problem does not manifest until an OS is installed so testing at this stage is not conclusive of the problem.

4. Now that we have a known stable base system set make sure the USB support in the BIOS is set to 1.1 only. See note above for mode information on why we are doing this. Later in the build/test process we will set it back. Install an OS, XP Pro or Home most likely. There is nothing special of note during the main OS install it should hopefully proceed smoothly.

5. Now that the OS is installed, proceed with installing additional drivers.

a. Start with the Nvidia Platform drivers. Install only those required for your hardware. (Current recommended version 6.85, its labeled as x16 drivers, but that�s a mislabel as what it really represents is that the driver set has special support for the newer Dual x16 SLI boards. However it IS the current driver set for ALL NF4 based boards.)

- Yes install the IDE driver, it no longer causes any problems and SHOULD be installed as your PATA and SATA drives will work better with the NVIDIA IDE driver installed.

- No don't install the Network Access Manager. Sorry we still cannot recommend it, it still has issues in the testing that has been done.

b. Install the AMD CPU (Cool 'n Quiet) drivers. They support more than just the Cool and Quiet functionality and are required for the proper functioning of an AMD CPU based machine. If you have an Intel based machine the same goes for any additional Intel Platform/CPU drivers.

c. Install any other drivers for installed equipment; do not install the Video Card Drivers Yet!

d. Leave the system powered on and let it sit idle for at least 12 hours, see if anything goes wrong. -If so go directly to step 6.

e. Change the USB support to 2.0+1.1, again let the system sit 12 hours or so see if anything goes wrong. -If so go directly to step 6.

Note on Driver changes during testing:

When and/or if you change driver versions during testing it is vital that you completely remove the old drivers before installing new ones.

Recommended driver changing procedure

- Use Add/Remove programs to access the Nvidia Drivers Add/change/Remove functionality

- If you are changing the platform drivers uninstall everything including the Video Driver if you have reached that testing stage.

- If you are only changing the video driver uninstall only the video driver.

- After doing the driver uninstalls do not reboot yet. Run a driver cleaner program (Drivercleaner pro is recommended and was used for all testing in this article) and set it to clean up whatever drivers you have removed (Driver cleaner pro has separate filters for the Platform drivers and the Video drivers use either or both which ever is proper, for whatever drivers you have removed)

- After the system reboots install new drivers, if you are installing platform drivers it is recommended you do the platform drivers install, reboot and then install the Video drivers.

- When installing the video drivers, install the drivers, reboot, then enable SLI if you are setting up an SLI system, reboot.

6. What to do if anything goes wrong. Problems might have started occuring at this point, here are listed some things to try to re-stabilize the system. Hopefully they will do the trick; this section should also be referred back to later in the build test process if anything goes wrong. If you have not had anything go wrong yet, freezes, crashes, lockups, glitches, strange error messages, etc, this step can probably be skipped for now. After making any of the changes/fixes detailed here repeat all testing steps that have previously been applied until you are past the point the error occurred, 3 times. It has been observed that often on the first retest the error appears solved, and it sometimes takes 2-3 reruns of the testing before it re-occurs.

a. Make sure that your mainboard BIOS is up to date if it is not download and install the latest bios from the MFG's web site.

b. Download and install the Microsoft dual core hotfix if you have a dual core cpu.

Information on the Hotfix:

Info:

http://support.microsoft.com/Default.aspx?id=896256

The Hotfix itself:

http://www.sendmefile.com/00157879

* Make sure to add the /usepmtimer switch to boot.ini the instructions are not fully clear on adding this switch, it does appear to be required for proper functionality.

* The article on the hotfix mentions a registry change. Unfortunately this is an issue that seems to go either way. Some systems have needed it, others have not. Most HAVE. Its going to be a judgment call, and it might have to be made further along in the process of testing. If after you start testing, with 3DMark and/or various games problems with stuttering of the video or sound start occurring you might need to make the registry change, just be aware of it.

* The Article on the Hotfix has a linked article about sound problems, on XP systems it�s unlikely you will have to do anything based on this article, but you should familiarize yourself with it in just incase.

7. If you have reached this point then do one final test before installing the video drivers. Download and install the Prime95 program from: http://www.mersenne.org/freesoft.htm

Prime95's real world purpose is in the interest of science, read through the page if you are of that bent in life it might be interesting. However our interest is in system testing. Prime95 has a torture test mode which makes an excellent system burn in test. Start up a torture test and walk away for 12 hours or more. The longer you wait the better the burn in.

Any failures, diagnose (repeat step 5,6 instructions), Fix or RMA as needed. Hopefully (and usually 90% or the time) nothing unusual pops up at this point and you can move on.

8. Finally, we know you have been waiting for this, for maybe 2 to 3 days during all this testing and waiting. Install the Nforce Video Drivers.

If all has gone well to this point if you have even reached this point any problems which occur are 99.99% chance of being an actual video card problem. Current release version at the time of writing this is: 81.98 and recommended beta version is 83.40. Neither of these has an serious observed problems in the testing process documented. A lockup/crash/glitch during testing after following any problem correction steps points to a Video card hardware issue.

Please note at this stage that this process is known to work for the programs detailed, other programs might have configurations and settings of their own, which might need to be set correctly before doing any testing with them. Testing with versions of the software detailed other than the listed version may give different or incomplete results. Testing with different configurations than those listed (All testing done with Program defaults actually, so if you modify the defaults....) might give you different and/or incomplete results.

Test Software suite at this stage.

3DMark03 Registered Pro Edition
3DMark05 Registered Pro Edition
3DMark06 Registered Pro Edition
Doom 3
HalfLife 2

If you don't have one or the other of these programs either skip that step or substitute a similar program. In so far as the 3Dmarks are concerned the demo versions will sometimes trip the problems, however it has been observed that the registered pro editions are far more likely to trip the problems on a consistent reliable basis. The Pro editions enable extra tests so the loops last longer and are more intense to the hardware. The 3Dmark tests usually find problems in 10-15 minutes that can take hours to occur in actual games in some cases.

a. Install the Video Card Drivers, 81.98 and 83.40 are recommended versions that are known good for these tests. For the sake of completeness 77.71, 77.77, 78.01, 81.95, 82.12, 82.65, 82.94, 83.08, 83.10, 83.20, and 83.60 were also used in a rather extensive testing sweep within the last two days. All of these versions also tested fine; however these versions are either non-current or had secondary issues (...don't support SLI, or do not have setup.exe installers).

If you are building and testing an SLI system:

- At this time only have one card installed. Complete all tests on one card. - Uninstall the first card install the other card complete all tests again. - Install both cards, make the BIOS changes and/or flip the hardware SLI key/switch, configure the driver for SLI support, enable the show GPU load balancing option to make sure SLI is actually working. It was discovered during testing that some beta drivers mainly the 82.* series were giving false OK results during SLI testing due to the fact they were not actually using SLI and the tests were only happening on one card/GPU. Complete all tests again. If the first two tests proceeded OK you probably have good hardware individually, however a failure at this stage more than likely indicates a problem outside of the actual video hardware. This is likely a driver issue, sometimes using a different driver version can cure this, sometimes not. 82.* drivers are not recommended for curing SLI issues as all tested drivers did not actually support SLI even though they showed support and configuration options/messages for it.

b. Your probably starting to hate hearing it, but let the system sit a while at idle.

c. Reboot.

d. Run 1 loop each of 3Dmark03,05,06. Reboot between each run. This will likely go off with no problems. Note the Benchmark scores at this stage.

e. Run 3 loops each of 3Dmark03,05,06. Reboot between each run. 50% chance of problems at this stage if you have bad hardware. The benchmark scores should be nearly the same, perhaps 2-3% lower than the single loop runs. Significant drops in the scores MIGHT indicate a problem.

f. Run 10 loops each of 3Dmark03,05,06. Reboot between each run. 78% chance of problems at this stage if you have bad hardware. The benchmark scores should be nearly the same, perhaps 2-5% lower than the single loop runs. Significant drops in the scores MIGHT indicate a problem.

g. If you made it this far your hardware is very likely good. If you want to confirm it for sure, Run 20 loops each of 3Dmark03,05,06. Reboot between each run. 95% chance of problems at this stage if you have bad hardware. The benchmark scores should be nearly the same, perhaps 2-7% lower than the single loop runs. Significant drops in the scores MIGHT indicate a problem. Additional runs beyond 20 loops (30,40,50) have not been found to be significantly more revealing of problems.

h. Now go have some fun play Doom 3 (or a game such as Quake 4 based on the same engine), or Halflife2, or any other 3D game. It is recommended that you play for at least 2 hours.

i. If you made it this far 99.99% chance you have good hardware.

j. At this point I will address what I consider to be a contentious issue in this matter. That is the UNDER-Clocking of the Video card as a fix for these issues. You can try it, however if you have tried everything else in this article and under-clocking is the ONLY thing that fixes your problems (other than the SLI issues, consider only single card configs here) there is something wrong with your card RMA it, do not live with an under-clocked card and lose value for the money you paid for that card.

What to do if something went wrong at this stage (At any point during the step 8 testing):

a. If you have more than one card to test, swap the cards and test the other one see if that one fails in the same or similar situations.

b. If you have the machine in USB 2.0+1.1 mode, change it to 1.1 or USB disabled. (If you have a USB Keyboard/Mouse than obviously turning it all the way off will require a USB PCI add on card)

c. Try the following excerpted/paraphrased from the NVIDIA Driver release notes for the 80.X series, and also found on many web forums.

It seems the root of the Stuck in thread error (which you may or may not see when the system crashes/locks/BSOD) may be a problem with dual cores and the nforce driver's internal threading model....

Therefore the following registry changes will modify the drivers internal threading model:

1. Go into Regedit and determine the current primary display card by looking in HKey_Local_Machine\Hardware/DeviceMap\Video and note the GUID (global unique indentifier assigned by Windows) for the entry "\device\video0" which is the long string at the end of the entry in brackets { }.

2. Edit HKey_Local_Machine\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Video\{guid}\0000, where {guid} is the number derived from the above step.

3. Open the "0000" directory and enter a new key called OGL_ThreadControl and give it a value of 2. This will disable multithreading in the driver for all OGL apps.

4. In the same "0000" directory, to disable driver multithreading for all D3D apps, you can enter WTD_EXECMODEL and give a value of 0.

What the release notes fail to make a point of is that in an SLI system this actually may need to be done twice once for each card. After you do the first card, go back to: HKey_Local_Machine/Hardware/DeviceMap/Video there will be another of these keys (there are probably actually 3-5 of these entries) that is going to look like and have a similar sub key structure as the first one. You'll note that the other keys have much more simple structures leave these alone. Find the entry for the second card and repeat the procedure.

d. If the single card tests came out ok, then your hardware is good and any SLI troubles can be attributed to a driver problem. More than likely you have an AMD or Intel Dual Core CPU.

There is a particularly nasty bug in the drivers which Nvidia has not yet worked out affecting SLI and Dual core CPU's. I have heard some limited reports of SLI problems with Hyperthreaded or single core CPUs from both AMD and Intel, but they are far fewer.

At this point your only options are: - To drop to single card/GPU operation, and like the author of this article wait for NVIDIA to fix the problem in newer drivers.

- To try dropping to the 77, or 78 series of the drivers which don't seem to have this bug, and in testing so far (admittedly more limited than the 8x.x series testing) have not had problems with the dual core CPU. However testing shows that support for some of the newer graphics capabilities in some games and benchmarks seems to be hampered by the 7x.xx drivers. In testing the drop back to 77 or 78 series drivers had little effect on performance in Halflife 2 (Original edition, it has a significant effect in Lost Coast), 3Dmark03, or 3dmark05. It did however cause a 3000 point drop in 3Dmark06 results. The main difference in 3Dmark06 is support for HDR (High Dynamic Range). There are not too many things using HDR yet, Halflife2:Lost Coast, and Farcry with a patch applied are the only ones that spring immediately to mind. Therefore at this stage the loss of full HDR support might be only a small problem. This will probably become more of a concern as 2006 progresses, so hopefully we will finally see some sort of a fix in the 8x.xx series of drivers for the Dual core issues soon.

Some resources that might be of help and are references for this article.

Support forum thread where most of the initial testing and process methodology development for this article took place

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http://www.xfxforce.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=1677&tstart=0

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MS Dual Core CPU Hot Fix

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Info:

http://support.microsoft.com/Default.aspx?id=896256

Patch itself: http://www.sendmefile.com/00157879

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Threads with Help -----------------

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=983781

http://forums.vr-zone.com.sg/showthread.php?t=46798

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MFG support web sites used in developing this article

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http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showforum=24

http://www.xfxforce.com/forums/index.jspa

http://forum.abit-usa.com/

http://www.dfi-street.com

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RMA site for XFX Video cards:

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http://www.xfxforce.com/web/support/showRma.jspa

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Other Sites with good information

---------------------------------

http://www.guru3d.com - Any utilities, drivers or software that I forgot to include a link to in the main article body can most likely be retrieved from the downloads section at guru3d.

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Contacting the Author to report your own results, and/or provide updated information:

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I can be contacted at haplopeart@gmail.com (You will likely get a response from a different address but I don't want to expose that address to anymore spam than it already gets). Please tell me all the relevant details about your system so I can keep my cross reference tables on problems and solutions up to date. After 2/6/2006 (Because the first version is just being made available now so its not there yet to be updated) the most current version of this article can always be accessed at: http://www.epithna.com/index.php?action=load_cat&ID=12

I promise the article found at that location will be better formatted as well, since I will have full XHTML/CSS markup capabilities at my disposal, web forums are somewhat limiting in that regard.

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Testing Services

----------------

In the development of this article I had several people email me and ask if I could test their card in my known stable system. Well once I had a known stable system anyway. At this point I am willing to do this on a limited basis; I do have a day job and a family after all. I can test at maximum 2 cards per day one during the day (setting off the test before I leave for work) and one at night (setting off the test at night before I go to bed). If you are interested in me doing this email me at the address above to see if I have the capacity to handle testing your card in a reasonable span of time, and for details on shipping, ETC.

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Revision History

------------------

.01 Posted to XFX forums in January 2006

.02 - .99 Posted to other web forums, and/or emailed to various requestors January 2006- Feb 5th 2006

1.0 2:49 PM 2/6/2006: First Official Version, Heavily revised and updated, Posted to XFX, NVIDIA, ABIT, DFI Forums and well as www.epithna.com.

TODO:

A few Minor formating, grammer and spelling cleanups.

Rush "R30" DVD/CD

2005-11-23 13:41:48

I picked up the Rush "R30" DVD/CD Yesterday. It was obvious that it was more popular than the stores expected given the place I finally found a copy was in the Music section in borders.
I watched the DVD portion while I was working from home this morning. The video quality is excellent, the Audio was so/so. Its not the complete show, but appearently the best cuts from the show it was recorded at in Frankfurt Germany.
The DVD includes all the video portions from the concert which is a great thing since that means that it has the great "That Darn Dragon" clip. I remember that from the concert and thinking they better do a video release with this on it. (I have since found out that this clip's orgins are with someone I know in a virtual sort of way "CheeseburgerBrown" of Kuro5hin, and Hulver fame.) The DVD also features the Jerry Stiller Openning of the concert with the Rush retrospective of the bands history.
Over all this release isn't quite as good in my opinion as the "Rush in Rio" release from the last tour. Its definately not as good as unreleased "Radio City Music Hall" concert recording that has been circulating on the net. That recording features more of the show and has far superior sound quality.
The Deluxe edition has two guitar picks, and a reproduction stage pass packed in as well as audio cds of the same stuff on the DVDs. Infact the only way to get the CDs is in the deluxe edition package.,
Overall a 7/10.

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Rush "R30" DVD/CD