A Worthwhile Xperiance

Alas, I've bailed out from trying to repair this phone of mine. You see, problems started to occur on the X1 a few months ago, mostly regarding the hardware keys. At first, it was just little key repetitions, but then it became overwhelming until very recently it started registering ghost key and button clickings. That was when I began to tinker with the hardware, to no avail apparently.

Cleaning up the keys and reflashing new ROM and radio didn't help at all. Today, when the phone finally lost its reception due to my fickle hands screwing up something, I thought I might as well give up. And here's to looking for its replacement.

There goes my budget for a Gingerbread.

Ada Budak Nangis Kat Sekolah!

We took an extra week of leave to see to Alyya's first few days of her new school. Well, her first few hours weren't so assuring.

Bienvenue, 2011!

A year without a blog post -- at least that is one resolution I managed to fulfill, albeit a nonsense one. Others, like learning Mandarin, all went to the drain. Oh well, 'guess I have to carry those into this year then.

Anyway, to recap a rather uneventful 2010: the Missus managed to get herself on TV, we got a Canon S90, went prawn fishing, went to Bagan Lalang twice, got into (minor) automobile accident twice, got Unifi and finally to top it all, got to setup an HTPC to complement the 40 inch (and the materials I got via the 20mbps). The winner is me!

2010 wasn't the best year for gaming, at least for me as a PC Gamer. A lot of disappointments altogether. Notable games for me would be Fallout: New Vegas and Call Of Duty: Black Ops.

As for movies, I got nothing to say other than to present to you Quorra from the biggest movie disappointment of 2010.

Au Revoir, 2009

With just a few minutes to 2010, I'm proud to proclaim that I had managed to achieved 1 out of 2 resolutions I had for 2009. 50% success is not so bad after all, considering past years' accomplishments (or lack thereof).

So what did I achieved?

1) I didn't get to boost my computer's resolution to 3840x1080, but there's always next year, with price reduction (or better monitors) to boot.

2) I acquired a new skill! I just wish I could accomplish more in 5 months, but learning piano/keyboard late in the game is such an arduous task due to priorities, lack of focus and such. However, I'm glad I'm somewhere now. I first planned to record myself playing Apologize (Timbaland) and put it on Facebook, but with only one part of the song and still fumbling here and there, I thought better of saving myself from shame.

2010 resolution would be myself completing #1, and to continue my own tradition I would strive to acquire a new skill for next year. That would be learning Chinese (probably Cantonese).

PCI Expression

I mentioned before that my PC is problematic. Well, that was all behind now. Turns out, it was never Windows 7's or Nvidia's fault. It was in fact Gigabyte's. All along, I was affected by PCI Express x1 Bug. This bug, as it happens, makes the system reports the PCI Express express slot as x1 instead of the full x16. When this happens, the graphics card will not function up to its intended speed. For comparison, in my case, my 3D Mark Vantage score was 4416. But when I managed to fix it, the score went to a staggering 9690. So what does this means in real world? For one, there's no more stuttering of audio in Windows 7, especially in full screen Youtube. Most importantly, I'm now able to play all my games at the maximum settings! w00t indeed!

Now I am to apologize to Windows 7 and Nvidia for all the curses I gave them all those times (yeah Microsoft have had enough curses from me throughout all the Windows iterations).

So what happened? Somehow I decided to download GPU-Z and check my system, and from there did I see the Bus Interface as PCI-E x16 @ x1. Further digging brought me to an article at Tech ARP, but unfortunately none of the solutions fix the problem. Much digging later brought me wading through forums, and I decided to follow a few suggestions to reseat the card and all. I'm not entirely sure what happened, but these were in my last ditch effort:

• Uninstalled and cleaned the system from any remnants of Nvidia drivers (using Driver Sweeper)
• Reinstalled a beta driver that I was sure was giving me performance (195.39)
• Reseated the GTX260
• Reset the BIOS config to fail-safe default
  

For the record, my motherboard is Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3. I was sure I was going to kiss it goodbye, but well, I guess I can get to keep my money after all.

Now, even the nvlddmkm.sys-induced BSOD was gone. I can safely say that my system is fault-free! I just hope that the problem will stay fixed, lest that Core i5-Nvidia Fermi-6GB DDR3 system I was dreaming about would seem inevitable...