Another disappointing nVidia card

With nVidia releasing the mid- and low-end Fermi technology-based 400 series graphics cards, it is an opportunity to pick up the previous generation 200 series cards at a knockdown price. Or so I thought when I saw a Palit GT240 with 512Mb GDDR3 memory for just £45. These cards are retailing in PCworld for £90-100.

I wasn't expecting too much and I just hope that it would be a quiet, low power yet effective graphics card that I could use to upgrade one of my test systems with. It is quiet, you don't need an extra PCI-E power connector for it, but it only seems to run 5,324 3Dmark06 benchmark. And that is DirectX 9 and not 10.1 which is what that card is supposed to be capable of.

So I've decided to keep the nVidia 8500GT in the test system and rebox the GT240 to sell with a DELL 230 mini-tower for about £70.

Damned McAfee

A customer had a fairly new Compaq computer infected with over 700 bits of spyware, scams and viruses. I was able to quickly clean those away with the use of Malwarebytes and the resident McAfee Security Center but it left the network and Internet access disconnected.

Further investigation showed that the integrated network adapter had a 169.254.x.x IP address and that the hosts file had been replaced by a scam one that would have just allowed access to the payment websites. I overwrote the hosts file with the default one but after two hours of endeavours I still couldn't get DHCP to give the adapter a valid IP address.

I tried resting the PCP/IP network stack, clearing DNS caches, etc. I inserted a new PCI Ethernet adapter card, but it still wouldn't work. I then thought about the firewall and noticed that McAfee had its Firewall Lockdown activated. Just press the button and Internet access was immediately restored.

So why do McAfee Firewall Lockdown cause a 169.254.x.x IP address on the network adapter and not tell you when you try to reconnect, reboot or even look at it's status page? Rubbish software and I will continue to not recommend it or install it.

Bad RAM to good RAM

I have a self-built little admin system that I use to check out new system software like the Internet Explorer 9 Beta version that is out at the moment. It is based on an Intel dual-core Celeron E3200 CPU at 2.4GHz and 2x1Gb of PC2-5300 generic memory.

I've always thought that the system could do better if I overclocked it a bit but it wouldn't and I figured that it was the RAM that was the problem. The Asus K5QPL-ASM motherboard I'd used a few times before and it gives easy over clocking profiles in steps up to 20% which is generally sufficient.

So I decided to replace the generic memory (Rendition?) with some standard Crucial PC2-6400 dual stick kit and see what would happen. A significant and noticeable difference in performance was obtained, not just getting the CPU to 2.77Ghz but also the RAM speed started faster at 800MHz and then went up to 928MHz. This meant a much more responsive system.

Worth doing and I'm sure that I'll be able to sell the generic RAM as well. After all ther is basically nothing wrong with it and it'll work fine in an old DELL system. Now I wonder if I'd paid a bit extra for Crucial's Ballistix memory if I'd been able to squeeze a bit more out of this budget system!