Okay so, no matter how appetizing this sounds, fritos and gummy worms at 3 o’clock does not constitute a healthy lunch.
I haven’t posted in a while, and I suppose I have some good excuses of being busy. But I do have some draft posts sitting around as well as some amusing pictures that can form the topic of some entries.
But basically, be wary of fritos and gummy worms. They might be delicious at the time, but they certainly are not nutritionally fulfilling.
So I was wandering around the hospital, looking for foods at night and asked if they had a cafeteria. Apparently, there is a cafeteria, but it’s basically only open for lunch. The other option… was McDonald’s.
Don’t you find that strange? How is the only option at the hospital a fast-food chain? They really worked their magic getting into the system like that. I mean, the juxtaposition of healthy and unhealthy is so striking; didn’t anyone think, “Hey wait a second. We’re supposed to promote healthiness at a hospital. Why is McDonald’s infiltrating our institution?”
That being said, I hadn’t had fries in a long time so I ate some fries. Hypocrite.
On a similar note, I had a craving for jelly beans the other day while in the store. But I couldn’t find the Jelly Belly’s, so I went for some other random brand. And then when I got home, I forgot about all the awkward flavors jelly beans have… like licorice.
Don’t get me wrong, licorice is good when the time is right. But not when mixed with a handful of jelly beans. Then you just get an awkward mix of sugar and licorice.
In other news, Google is furthering its ninja plans for world domination… Google+
…I want an invite…
Whoever came up with the word awkward is brilliant. Just look at it.
The word is representative of itself.
awkward
awkwa
wkw
wkw…
Yeah
Man, coming up with post titles for things that are of little importance is hard. And of course I find my self playing around when I have a ton of work to do. Figures.
Some minor changes to the visual look of posts. If there’s comments, it’ll show at the top posts as well now. I don’t know why, but I felt like doing that. Maybe for vanity’s sake. Added a light hr between posts. Also, text is justified. I’m not sure justification looks quite right with such a large font. Oh well. Something that is blaringly obvious though is my tendency to double space after periods. If a sentence starts on a new line, the second space will actually get displayed, resulting in awkwardness. Maybe I can fix that later with some code. Or maybe I just need to get rid of the habit.
Another logistics note: since I really like the rotating banners, I made an album in the gallery for them. Maybe if you see one you like, but don’t know what it is, the album will ‘splain it to you. Oh and I added one more to the rotation. Again, all of this probably for vanity’s sake.
…But really it’s probably for procrastination’s sake.
Storytime! with pictures!
[Disclaimer: Long and probably pointless post]
So a few months back, my PC started getting awful hiccups during gaming. It would be silky smooth for the first 30 minutes, then stutter for about 10 seconds, then smooth for a minute or two and then stutter. Just a vicious cycle. I only first noticed it when playing BFBC2. And then it just recently started happening in Witcher 2… and then it even creeped into Guild Wars.
In retrospect, the answer to the problem should’ve been somewhat obvious due to the progressive nature, but I’ll get back to that.
First step in troubleshooting, resource and error monitoring. Nothing out of the ordinary – GPU usage drops to close to nothing during the stutter phase, but nothing else seems different with respect to process resource usage.
Paranoia kicks in. A few errors flagged in the event viewer from the shadow copy service. It gets disabled. No luck. Search indexing gets disabled. No luck. Revert to a backup image created when I installed the OS? No luck.
How about GPU temperatures? Sweet holy mother of monkeys, I forgot how hot 8800s were. Idle temperatures at 60C, load temperatures at 90+C. Doesn’t help that I SLI’d them a while ago. So 2x the heat… Let’s crank them fans upppp.
No luck…. Well, finicky ol’ me decides it’s time for an upgrade.
You've served me well. /salute
And say goodbye to those slim beasts. It’s hard to believe that these babies were made in 2007. That’s 4 years they’ve managed to keep up with gaming (and 5y for the G80) – though it’s been getting rougher with the new games lately. Brothers from different mothers, but they had no issues being paired up in SLI. So then I managed to snag a deal on this baby:
Why hello there...
For the same price I paid for a single 8800GT four years ago, I managed to jump 2 hardware generations up. Halve the heat, more than halve power consumption, and definitely pump up my rig. (and as a side plus, it should help me with my thesis work)
Was this the issue? Old video cards dying?
MAX GRAPHICS. BEATUTIFUL!
…Noooooooo! Still stuttetters.
Okay… well… what is this? I haven’t cleaned my baby in a few months?
Maybe you can see where this is going...
Just look at that. That’s only like… 4 months worth of dust. I gotta love my case though – just image all that flyin’ around inside the case. Well… I guess it’s about time to clean her out. Hey while I’m at it, I might as well take a look at the insides too. I bet those internal fans could use a wipHOLY BALLS
Outline of fan.
Ok, well come to think of it. I don’t think I’ve ever cleaned the heatsink on the inner side of the fan. And as you can see, this is what 4 years of dust collected looks like. It’s like a 2mm layer of compressed dust. That’s actually pretty disgusting.
And to top it all off, it seems this was the source of my issues. It was not GPU overheating, but CPU overheating. To be honest, I never checked the CPU temps. But I probably should have. It runs fine now though, no stuttering (so far). I probably killed off a year of CPU lifetime by not keeping it clean.
Moral of the story: Dust out the entire setup when you decide to clean your case. Oh, and clean your case regularly.
That's only half of it.
So the tell-tale signs: stuttering for no reason means something is getting throttled – the source could’ve been software, but in this case hardware. Made me think it was the GPU. But the fact that it creeped into a less intensive game (GW) should’ve tipped me off that the problem was elsewhere. Oh well. I’m running cooler and quieter now. All is well.