Fragfests and Imbas

…no not Ramen. It was, well, it’s hard to say since I whipped up the thing myself; the monster I created was made up of noodles, teriyaki, sesame oil, shellfish, a robust amount of mushrooms, bamboo shoots, and a more-than-healthy dash of freshly-cut chili. And no, this Frankenstein wasn’t interested in lightning and how it could activate the molecules of the noodles into some semblance of shambling unlife. This Dr. ate the whole thing, a whole bowlful. And this Dr. was pleased.

Noodles into unlife? What were you thinking? Mongolian noodle tentacle rape? 0_0 Eeeeuw man.

The thing was good. We ate at Green Haven, a place recommended by our Chaos God, Slaanesh (our boss). It’s an eat-all-you-can placed tucked neatly into Ketkai’s the Strip, as one of my friends called it. (Uh, is the Strip the whole thing or is there a place there called the "Strip"? 0_0) It was a whopping 220 bucks and I brought my girlfriend along but it was well worth it. Delicious, filling. I had it stir-fried and man, I never tasted anything like it. =)__)

Months ago, I was the Avatar of Khaine and my boss was Slaanesh. I was defending the eldar from her clutches, preventing them from being axed. Now the situation is reversed and she is the Avatar, defending those pointy-eared things with their annoying Fleet of Foot while I am Khorne, the Destroyer. But no, this afternoon, we won’t lock horns about the fate of mortals.

I’m going to thank her. Because last night my friends found a place where we could eat like Konohans. =)__) 

TwitchGuru.com has released an article detailing a preliminary comparison between DirectX9 and DirectX10 performance using the game "Lost Planet: Extreme Conditions". It can be found here. 

…. is to make a restore point of your system.

Or the title should be rephrased as "The First Order of Business for Sane PC Users…."

Wha—? What’s a restore point?!! (pauses for a bit) 0_0 GOODGODSOFALLTHECELESTIALPLANESOFTHEMULTIVERSEWHORAINDOWNCLEANSINGFIREONNON-TWEAKERSYOUDON’TKNOW
WHATARESTOREPOINTIS?

What if your younger brother or sister installs something and it messes up your PC?

What if you install something and you find out your PC now takes half of a queen termite’s lifespan to boot?

What if, if either of the above happened and you tried uninstalling the offending "something"s and find out it doesn’t fix the predicament you are in by even an iota?

No fallback point? You are screwed.  Or maybe not screwed but doomed to spend the rest of your PC-using life grumbling about the good ol’days when your PC wasn’t acting like C-3PO before he… oh wait. There’s always a reinstall — and C-3PO was screwed up to begin with. (Anakin wasn’t good at design actually; remember what happened when Darth Sidius made him commander of his armada? Good gods! Were you able to take even a small look at what happened to the control panels of the Star Destroyers? Piccard, if he watched that last SW film, would have thanked all his lucky stars for the Okudagram…)

Anyway.

Anyway, a restore point is a fallbackpoint. You make that point, do something, and then if all hell breaks loose, you can uninstall whatever it was you installed, load that restorepoint and *poof!* like nothing happened.

If you still don’t get it, click here.  

Lol! Of course you get it! But to get back on track, this is what I use for making those restore points:

ERUNT 

Windows XP comes with a tool that makes a backup but I hear from reliable sources from all over the ‘net that this is better. 

You see if you install something, it writes entries into your system’s registry. Oftentimes though, when you unistall a program, it leaves those entries in your registy, so part of your system’s configuration information remain the same even though the offending software no longer resides in your hard drive. Needless to say undesired PC behavior may still occur even after you uninstall that software.

So what to do? When you install a suspicious/unsupported software do:

1. this procedure.

2. Install the software, if you like it/doesn’t do anything amiss, fine. But if anything goes haywire, do:

3. Uninstall the software and load up the restore point by going to C:\WINDOWS\ERDNT\xxx [where xxx is the filename you set for the restore point (the default is the date you made it on)] and double-clicking on it. 

And VOILA! Instant time warp!

TAKE NOTE THAT IT WILL OF COURSE LOAD UP REGISTRY SETTINGS prior TO WHATEVER YOU INSTALLED after YOU MADE THE RESTORE POINT! So if you intalled two software packages and don’t like them, it’s fine but if you’d like to keep one and do away with the other, loading up that restore point BEFORE you installed those two won’t be such a good idea. I do not know what will happen as I have never done such idiocy before. =)) That is why I make a restore point before I install something suspicious/unsupported, test it, and then make ANOTHER restore point before I attempt to install another unsupported program.

Well, that’s it for this week, I hope you learned something new. And oh, don’t forget to delete very dated restore points; they take up about 30Mb each so  6 of those will consume more than 180mb of your hdd space. Again they will be stored in the C:\WINDOWS\ERDNT folder. I normally keep two of them at each time just to be safe, but this is a matter of personal preference.

Some of my friends have heard me yammering about this term and think I have completely lost it. “AA” for short, anti-aliasing is that setting ingame that enhances 3d images by smoothing out “jaggies” that you see commonly in games. They are frequently seen distorting diagonal objects like stair railings, wires, cables, curved surfaces — basically anything that isn’t perpendicular relative to the sides of your screens.

I won’t explain the intricacies of pixels, 3D rendering, etc as this part of the blog deals with "PC Tweaks/Tutorials from a NOOB’S Field of View”. So, suffice to say, computers have a hard time “drawing” smooth curves or lines that are not perpendicular to the sides of your screen. To clarify things:

Ha. Ha.

You can force it to, and this is where anti-aliasing comes in. The settings are available in multiples of two (2x, 4x, 8xs, 16x, etc) with higher numbers translating to better “smoothing out those danged jaggies”.

And danged they are.

They are not just there to ruin your suspension of disbelief, you run, and the diagonal sides of your gun move. Hell, it’s not just what you are holding; they are there hugging every last piece of diagonal line and curve in the game world you can see. It’s like an invasion of mini-Agent Smiths. They are everywhere. And they move when you move, stop when you stop; it’s like a horror movie too.

“Dang, hombre, I swore I saw something move in the corner of my eye!”

At their most prominent, they look like mini-escalators that are moving everywhere –  they TOTALLY ruin your immersive experience. Overhead phone lines with moving serrated edges anyone?

Here’s a real world application of my rant. Click on each image below to enlarge them and compare: (take notice of  the lines in the landing of the stairs)

 
Without anti-aliasing

 
With anti-aliasing

Hmm. “Real world application” — I think I just created an oxymoron.

Alright if you didn’t spot the difference, you are luckier than the rest of us; you can live out the rest of your life content with just a GeForce MX card and Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3 with 16X or more AA be hanged.

Really, it’s bliss; why live in torment? =)____)