Though I did just notice a little issue with WordPress. For the last few months when logged in to your blog a toolbar is displayed at the top of the page, which shows your icon, display name and a few other options like create a new entry or page, stuff like that. Well, when viewing the comments for my last entry there was a little pic of Kelvin as my icon. WTF MON!

I spent quite a bit of my Christmas Day tidying up my PC. Two of the five partitions over three drives fell into the red over the last week and needed to be freed up. My gaming drive dropped to 910mb free thanks to the recent Steam sale and my primary partition was in its final gigabyte. In all honesty that drive was getting that way for quite a while due to the large number of FRAPS videos that were stored under the program folder.

To balance things out I moved some of the FRAPS videos to my files partition and deleted the rest, I then proceeded to make a backup of all my Steam games and place them on my backup partition. I then uninstalled all games that I haven’t played in the last few months, it’s not too much of a pain because they can easily be restored from the backup. As you can see from the screenshot at the top of this entry, the clean up went pretty well!

Aside from dicking around with my PC, eating Christmas dinner, lots of sweets and drinking a bit, I also watched my shiny new copy of The Expendables. Around about half an hour into the movie I thought to myself that the picture wasn’t very clear. It wasn’t until I looked at the discs in the case that I realised I was watching the DVD instead of the Blu Ray. It’s pretty stupid to put the DVD at the top of what is sold and marketed as a Blu Ray release. Regardless, the movie was as awesome as I remembered it at the cinema and the big fight at the end made me grin like a Cheshire Cat.

I also played Donkey Kong Country Returns and Mass Effect for the first time, both are pretty damned good games so far. Especially Donkey Kong Country Returns, it’s like the original game but with a lot of nice extra touches. I will write a few impressions about these later (if I remember).

My wallet sighed with relief today as the Steam sale didn’t throw up any games that I wanted. Even though I already own the game I don’t really class £19.99 to be a good sale price for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. You can buy the game a lot cheaper than that if you know where to go, and besides, it’s a year old game now. It should be closer to the tenner mark when included in sales!

I rounded off the day laying in bed with my laptop watching the ultimate Christmas movie: Die Hard. Yup, it’s been a good day!

Ever since I got my copy of F1 2010 on Steam back in late September I have experienced a strange issue with my keyboard where it would disconnect and re-connect mid-race causing a lock up of upwards of around ten seconds. Sometimes depending on how it was feeling it wouldn’t re-connect therefore giving me the inconvenience of an unwanted reboot. Needless to say after putting up with this issue for a week or two it put me off the single player, and I never bothered with multiplayer. How could I possibly be competitive with random ten second lapses in play occurring?

Well I finally found out what the issue was, it turns out that a lot of motherboards have the option EHCI Handoff ENABLED. After disabling this I am now able to play F1 2010 uninterrupted, so as you can understand I’m playing online a lot more these days.

Brace yourself for a number of rants over the coming weeks about the number of laps I invalidate before setting a lap time in the time trial mode!

I finally decided to start looking into this over the last few weeks and tried various different things with the hope of stopping the bloody thing from having a mind of its own. Here’s what I tried:

Firmware update
Turned off indexing
Put an exception in my Antivirus Software.

I even checked the forum for my Motherboard and found nothing!

In the end what was the problem? BLOODY AUTOPLAY! You can turn off this option in the Control Panel of Windows 7 or alternatively you can do the following.

1. Type gpedit.msc into the search box under your start menu.
2. Navigate to the following Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > AutoPlay Policies > Turn off Autoplay
3. Select enabled.

Sorted.

Generally when I say “I fixed it” for this problem, it works fine for the rest of the night and then the drive spins up like a mofo the next day. I’ve been using this for two days now with no problems! This entry is here mainly as a reminder for myself when I next rebuild, but hopefully it’ll help others who are seeking help with the same problem.

Earlier on this week I experienced a seemingly unresolvable issue with Left 4 Dead 2 where the game would lock up just after the map had loaded. I tried pretty much everything I could find on the Internet to resolve this, but eventually had to give up and resort to a rebuild.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind rebuilding my PC, with some of the backups I keep it’s a pretty quick process – not to mention using a clean Windows install is always very nice. Unfortunately there is always ONE thing about rebuilds that bugs me and that’s the reinstall of Games for Windows Live.

Here’s how the process goes (GFWL in bold):

Hi there, it appears that you’re not logged in, if you’re not logged in you will not be able to save your game or play online. *evil laugh*
I enter my log in details and make sure all the ‘remember me’ boxes are ticked.
Please give me a few minutes, I’m downloading your profile…
Whoops! There appears to be an update, you do understand you’ll need to download this or you’ll be thrown out of the game, right?
I download the update, the game restarts.
LOL! Sorry chump, I couldn’t be bothered to save your details, log in again please!
I enter my credentials AGAIN!
Waaaait juuust a moment, downloading your profile. HERPA DERP!
Meanwhile I’m just a lifeless skeleton sat at my desk, I expired ten years ago BECAUSE THE GODDAMN PROFILE DOWNLOAD IS TAKING TEN TIMES LONGER THAN THE FIRST TIME!

People in the non-GFWL countries moan about not having this service, to be honest I think they’ve got it good.

Anyway, after rebuilding my PC I did what you normally do: grab the latest updates and the graphics card drivers. This went according to plan, but after rebooting I was presented with a black screen, yup, nothing but black. The monitor was definitely on because I got no signal errors, Windows had loaded because I could hear the startup chime. WTF was going on? I loaded the thing into Safe Mode and checked out Google only to be presented with thousands of results of the black screen of death, all of which related to a Windows update issue that popped up in November 2009.

I tried several different things, I uninstalled the video drivers, tried the previous version, nope. Uninstalled the updates, nope. And then it suddenly hit me – disconnect the HDMI connection from my graphics card. I rebooted the machine, did it work? YES!

… the bloody thing had only gone and selected my TV as the default monitor…

And to think I was throwing my TV controller up in the air and catching it while thinking about the potential driver issue. It’s official, this user is a tool.

I will not be messing around making sure this site displays correctly in Internet Explorer, web standards have changed quite a bit in the last decade and it’s about time Microsoft caught up. If you’re viewing this site in Internet Explorer, I would suggest you switch to one of the following browsers:

Mozilla Firefox
Google Chrome
Opera
Safari

See, what happened was at around 7pm this evening I thought I’d try and watch the Inglourious Basterds Bluray I bought at Tesco today but PowerDVD had other ideas. After three quarters of an hour try to mess with the bastard thing (and trying alternatives) I admitted defeat and retired to bed while watching Robot Chicken on DVD. The only problem with this was I was out cold for the next 6-7 hours and now I’m wide awake.

I’ve already been looking into this but I am definitely in the market for a dedicated Bluray player now. I can’t put up with PowerDVD’s crap.

If you encounter similar problems the checker can be downloaded from here.

Over the last few days when using itunes there will be some severe crackling occurring in the audio whenever I load a webpage. At first I thought it was an issue with the soundcard driver so I uninstalled the drivers and re-installed them to see how it went. At first it seemed ok, but the crackle eventually made it’s way back.

I did a search on various sound card issues relating to crackle and other audio problems and came across the possibility that my DPC latency is going through the roof. I downloaded a handy piece of software called DPC Latency Checker. You run this in the background and see what the performance is like when doing various tasks.

Above I have included a screenshot of my reading at the time. Green is perfectly normal, yellow is acceptable and red is Bzzzt… crack… hiss land. It’s worth noting that loading applications will produce a red bar of a third of the size of the bars shown in the screenshot, this is not enough to affect audio performance though.

I went into Device Manager and tried disabling a few bits here and there and found out that it’s the onboard NIC that’s causing problems. All the time it was disabled my readings showed small green bars with one or two slightly larger yellow bars. At this point I’m not entirely sure what the problem is but I’m assuming it’s one of the following:

* The Realtek driver for my NIC has gone bad.
* I’ve recently switched out my normal router for a BT Home Hub due to some internet issues over the weekend.

I’ll try both of the above and keep you posted.