Fixing my addiction

My New Year's resolution is to stop playing the Forge of Empires game. This free-to-play online game is taking up too much of my spare time and is becoming a real 'click fest' addiction. I've been playing it for over 15 months now and have five cities of which three are nearing completion. I love the building and quest elements of this game but the 4 and 8 hour production cycles that I have to adhere to, combined with the fear of being plundered is a real bind. And really at the higher levels it just takes too long to achieve any progress.

So, I'm quitting and replacing my time with the three games that I have as Christmas presents; Far Cry 4 the latest edition of my favourite 'first person shooter', Simcity the city builder and management game that I have played since its original version, and Hearthstone the free-to-play card collectors game. These should keep me occupied.

I'll be popping back to Forge of Empires to show my two year old granddaughter the little people walking along the abandoned streets and trying to guess which abandoned building they are going into. She loves that!

Graphics gone

My graphics card gave up the ghost! The XFX Radeon HD6870 decided that it didn't want to display any high resolution images any more and it was only three years old.


I tried analogue and digital outputs but it wouldn't go past the boot-up splash screen in any system that I installed it.

I'd never over-clocked it but it always ran warm at idle and very warm after a lengthy, intense gaming session. The ATX case was well vented and cooled with additional fans front and back. It failed at idle after the the system was sleeping so I don't think heat was directly a contributing factor. Not good reliability from a rather expensive card. And it has put me off XFX cards and AMD Radeon graphics.

I've replaced it with a considerably cheaper (£82), quieter and cooler card. The MSi Twin Frozr GeForce GTX 750OC Edition which feels about the same performance level. Let's hope that this lasts a bit longer.

Affordable gaming

Over the years I've built a few affordable gaming systems for clients and it is always a useful exercise in component selection and building to a budget. It is not always getting the cheapest, fastest bits and throwing them together in trying to achieve the best 'bang for the buck'.

As I've said before balance and quality are also factors that should be taken into account. As well as functional bling with extra buttons, LEDs, fans, windows all playing their part to make the system look more expensive than it is. With this in mind, the case I chose was the Zalman Z3 plus with four fans and a fan controller included. An easy case to work with costing just £30. The PSU was a Cooler master G500 a modern, quality unit with 80 Plus Bronze certified and fully compatible with Intel Haswell processors. Nothing modular, but cable routing in this case is not a problem.

The MSi H81-P32 motherboard and Intel Pentium G3258 CPU choice has been detailed in the previous post. The memory was a Kingston HyperX 1600MHz kit. Again not the cheapest but quality and reliable. Following my passion for SSD hard disks the Crucial MX100 256Gb is my model of choice at the moment coming in at just under £75. An additional traditional hard drive can easily be added at a later date. The AMD Radeon HD7770 2GB is an average graphics card at a reasonable price. An nVidia GTX 750 Ti is a more modern alternative.

All in all, a very nice performance system that will play most games well.

Intel's performance Pentium

I managed to get hold of one of the Intel Pentium G3258 20th Anniversary processors. This was released recently as the first over-clocklable Pentium CPU in a long while. It has been mentioned a lot online and in various publications as the good start to an entry-level gaming system. At a price of just £47 it is a real bargain.

Also instead of having to purchase an expensive motherboard with exotic overclock capabilities and settings, some of the manufacturers were releasing BIOS upgrades that would offer a basic overclock function. So the one I went for was the MSi H81-P32 board for just £37. This is a really neat micro-ATX board with a USB3 internal header making it suitable for modern cases. However I see now that this motherboard has been discontinued. Pity.

I was able to upgrade the BIOS to 1.8 version by putting a spare Haswell CPU into the Socket 1150 and running MSi's Live Update program from within Windows. I then swapped the Pentium G3258 processor in and rebooted without any problems. Next, I went into the UEFI BIOS and changed the CPU ratio from 32 to 42. I then had a Pentium processor overclocked to 4.2GHz. This was using the Intel stock air cooler which I noted is copper-cored and better than the usual Pentium coolers. People have managed to overclock this chip to 4.8GHz using better air or water coolers but I considered the extra 1GHz speed without any additional costs or risks is good enough. Under load the CPU temperature was 65C which is very acceptable.

A really good start to an affordable gaming system (£47 + £37) which I will detail in my next post.

New value graphics card champion

For the last couple of years or so, I've been installing AMD Radeon HD5450 graphics cards in family desktops so that basic games such as World of Warcraft, The Sims or Flight Simulator can be played. These cards also improve video playback, have a low power rating without additional connections, are silent (without noisy, little fans), can be adjusted to low profile cases and are fairly cheap to purchase, though the average price is increasing from £20 to £30 in that time.

I've occasionally purchased and tested similar cards such as Radeon HD6450 with DDR3 and DDR5, nVidia GT610, etc. The performance increase was generally not worth the extra cost. This week I saw an nVidia GT730 with 1GB DDR3 going for just £34 so I decided to try that. It is a short, PCIe 8-lanes card with a basic dual slot width heat-sink. Testing it shows that it doubles the PCmark7 score and trebles the 3Dmark06 figure. Yes, I know these benchmarks are old but it saves me re-benchmarking old cards and systems. And the games are old too. An impressive result and I'm sure that I will be purchasing more of these little video wonders.

Also, for a bit more money at about £60 I can get an nVidia GT640 with DDR5 and 128-bit memory bandwidth, so I will probably get one of these to see if the performance improvement is worth the extra cost. It should be.

Outlook 2010 the best

After many years of using Office 2003, I had an opportunity to upgrade the Outlook component to the 2010 version. This is on my main PC, a DELL Vostro 430 with Intel i5 750 Quad core, 4Gb RAM and a 320GB hard drive. Generally I don't change the software or hardware on this system much and it is well protected and regularly backed up. It has all my emails, bookeeping, documents and photos on it.

I must admit that I'm impressed with this Outlook 2010 version. It upgraded easily from the older version and I'm now used to the 'new' ribbon interface and been able to customise it and added my useful buttons to it. I also like the small conversation view at the bottom of the window. I've installed the latest Outlook 2013 version many times now on customer's systems and it seems to be not as good as its predecessor.

It has taken me a while to upgrade but I'm glad that I did so.

Fantastic value DELL Inspiron 15 laptop

Having written about a really cheap desktop from Acer recently, this time it is a laptop. DELL are offering an Inspiron 15 for just £179 including VAT, shipping, and a years warranty. With a discount code this can be further reduced to £166.
It is a fairly bare configuration of course:
- Intel Celeron Dual Core N2830 CPU 2.17GHz (turbo up to 2.4GHz)
- 4GB Single Channel DDR3 1600MHz (4GBx1)
- 500GB 5,400rpm SATA Hard Drive
- 4-in-1 Media Card (SD/SDHC/MS/MS Pro)
- Intel HD Graphics
- 15.6 inch LED Backlit Display (1366 x 768)
- Microsoft Windows 8.1 with Bing

So, no CD or DVD optical drive, Bluetooth or Ethernet. Still great for the price.

I ordered one yesterday and it was delivered this morning. The laptop seems well built, after setting it up and removing a lot of software c**p, is fine and reasonably responsive. As I repair PCs for a living, I see a LOT of slow laptops and this doesn't seem to be one of them. It processes most web surfing, emails, photo editing (with free Paint.net), word processing, etc. applications just fine. I ran a couple of Internet games on it as well (such as Forge of Empires) and these worked well too.

For £166, I'm really impressed. Fine for home use, students, old folks, etc. I'll probably keep it myself as a spare. Might fit a small 128Gb SSD to make it even better.

Chieftec Purple Dragon died

After many years of faithful service my huge, heavy, mega-tower Chieftec Purple Dragon case has gone. It blew up in spectacular fashion when the old PSU expired with a loud bang. As I sit quite near it, I had massive fright. Luckily, further examination and testing revealed that the MSi motherboard, overclocked AMD Phenom II X3 720, memory and hard drives had survived.

As I thought that it would be difficult to replace the PSU with the extra long leads to reach to the bottom of the case and I could hardly lift it any more, it was better being rehoused and scrap the power-hungry nVidia 9600GSO graphics, the IDE RAID hard disk drive array and multiple optical drives. So the remains were re-housed in a modern, light case with a fast, SATA hard drive and a new nVidia GT610 graphics card. Amazingly Windows Vista re-activated and we are back on the road again.

The empty Purple Dragon case was thrown in the iron and steel skip at the local dump. It served me well for many years.

Neat NAS

Those of you that have follow my blog know that I'm a big supporter of Windows Home Server. Unfortunately this brilliant software is doomed and the Windows Server 2003 which is the basis for WHS version 1 is now out of support. I still run WHS v1 on a full tower DELL server as the centre of my home network. However I only turn it on when needed as it is too expensive with three hard disk drives, a dual core CPU and lots of fans to run 24/7. The shared folders are safely split across the three drives and when one failed it was easy to replace and recover without any important data loss.


So I was looking for a small, energy efficient NAS to run all the time and provide:
- my music library for the Sonos wireless music system
- recent photos to show on my Nexus tablet
- backup storage for client's computers before I start working on them
- shared marketing documents that can be accessed remotely.

Data protection, resilience and performance were lower priorities than availability. So a single disk NAS seemed to fit the requirements. The WD MyCloud 2Tb for £110 seemed a good price being not that much more expensive than a USB external hard drive. Interestingly, the dual bay/drive version was over twice the price.

Setup wasn't easy as to start with the NAS not discoverable on my LAN. A firmware upgrade and some extra help from the excellent WD support line fixed any problems. The NAS is now mapped as an extra drive on all my systems. Remote access is not easy as it relies on Java which I've removed from all systems, and also recommend that my clients do this too. Another problem was that Windows 7 Home will not allow backup to a network drive. The Professional and Ultimate versions do however. Microsoft shoots itself in the foot yet again as home users will not buy backup software.

This certainly is a neat bit of kit providing almost exactly what I wanted. I haven't tried the 'snapshot' backup service yet as this is isn't a priority.

Cheapest hardware ever

I've just bought my cheapest complete PC hardware ever for just under £130. Ebuyer are offering the Acer Aspire XC-603 without operating system for just £129.99 including free postage. This neat small form factor PC has an Intel latest technology, low-power Quad core Celeron J1900 running at 2GHz nominally and 2.4GHz in turbo mode. Plus 4Gb DDR3 memory, 500Gb hard disk drive, DVD writer, card reader, and four USB 2 and one USB 3 port. All assembled in one very nice looking case with a brushed aluminium effect front panel. It runs very quietly and come with a years warranty too.

Follow the instructions to re-flash the BIOS and then simply load Windows 7 Home Premium for a neat PC that costs less than £200. Or load Windows 8.1 directly if you are feeling adventurous. Either way you end up with a responsive computer which can easily handle Internet web surfing and emails, word processing and digital photo editing for home or office use. The quad core Celeron if fine for these tasks and clicking on a desktop icon always opens a new window quickly. You can expand the memory for the future to 8Gb if needed. Substituting or adding a SSD would also increase performance.

Well done Acer! In these days of smartphones and tablets it is good to see the desktop computer hitting back.

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS replacement for Windows XP?

Every couple of years I download the latest version of Ubuntu Linux and try it out. Generally I'm disappointed in its installation, operation, user interface and software applications.

So what has changed?


Firstly a new LTS (Long Term Support) version called Trusty Tahr with a generally liked new user interface and the end of support for good, old Windows XP. I downloaded the Desktop version ISO and installed it on a DELL Optiplex GX520 compact tower the a 3GHz Intel Pentium D and 2Gb memory; i.e. a typical ten year old computer. Firstly the installation went extremely smoothly and for once I didn't have to use the command line/terminal window at all. It even came pre-loaded with the latest versions of useful applications like LibreOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird and a neat photo management application called Shotwell.

What I was left with a modern looking desktop interface that appears to be better and less scary than Windows 8 Metro and is easier to use. I was easily able to add my preferred Google Chrome browser. I even played Forge of Empires on it.

I'm getting a lot of concerned customers calling me about the expiration of Windows XP. After going through the usual options of a new Windows 8 PC, not worth upgrading a five year old computer, buying a reconditioned one, etc. this seems a great value solution to just load this onto their old hardware. It is another option that can be considered. A lot of my customers just want to surf the web, read emails, load digital photos, etc. Ubuntu 14.04 is a really good way of doing just this.

So the Linux desktop has finally found a reason to exist. A great piece of software and an opportunity. I used to program Unix System V for a living so the command line interface is no stranger to me but I just hate using it to do simple things like install applications.  My only concern is why did they have to put the windows close button on the left like a Mac?  95% of the world's users expect to see it on the right.

Going to sleep

I've never been a great fan of sleeping or hibernating computers. Traditionally it took awhile to happen, then a longer while to come back on again, then a wait to restore the Internet connection and then the applications would often crash. Hardly worth the hassle and the power savings made were dubious.

Things have changed though, I've started to use it more often both on demand when I've finished using the computer and after quarter-of-an-hour when I just walk away. The difference is modern hardware and software has improved the response times. On systems with SSD hard drives the response time is down to a couple of seconds and that includes the Internet re-connection and Windows and applications seem more resilient to hibernate and sleep actions. Also modern CPU and associated hardware take much less power drain these days and power supply units are more power efficient.

In these green, energy saving times when your energy bill rises in jumps it makes more sense now to use sleep and hibernate.

Intel Pentium G3420 improvement

A couple of posts ago, I complained that the Intel Pentium G2020 CPU was a poor performer and I preferred the Core i3. Well I gave the Pentium another chance in a low-cost build that I configured with the latest 'Haswell' Pentium G3420 processor in an MSi Socket 1150 motherboard. The processor was still cheap at £47 and the motherboard as well at just £32. The result was a considerable improvement over the previous version.

The system seemed responsive enough even without an SSD. It used 1600MHz DDR memory instead of 1300Mhz and that appeared to help the graphics performance as well as the additional 300MHz CPU clock speed increase. Benchmarks typically showed a 25% or greater performance improvement. Not bad for just £9 more. The only problem was finding the correct graphics drivers as after loading the one from the MSi CD, I couldn't update it giving an 'unrecognised device' error. Removing the original driver and installing the Windows Update version solved the problem.

So this new processor is worthy of the Pentium name and gives good bang-for-the-buck in a value engineered system.

UPDATE: Computer Shopper has confirmed my findings with the Pentium G2020 getting a benchmark score of 43 for £38 compared to the Pentium G3420 getting 52 for £47.

Bioshock Infinite and Forge of Empires

I've just finished playing Bioshock Infinite and thoroughly enjoyed it. The latest game in the Bioshock saga was different to the others but captured the strangeness of the flying city Columbia with some great weapons and magic effects. The star was Elizabeth, the young girl that you have to find and then release from capture. Her animation and voice effects were sublime and her usefulness in supplying you extra ammunition and health packs when required a real benefit.

I started the game at my son's house last year and then bought my own copy just before Christmas. So it has taken me a while to finish it. At the same time, I've been playing Forge of Empires which is very addictive and takes up far too much of my game playing time. It is a typical build a city by working resources, trading goods and some battles. The recent Guild versus Guild wars are not to my liking though so I might be ceasing to play shortly, giving me more time to play the other games that I received at Christmas. Worth a picture though:

Intel Pentium G2020 disappointment

I had a spare Socket 1155 motherboard which I had bought for a customer's Intel Core i5 processor only to find that the CPU seemed to be broken. He decided to go for a completely new system to house his newly bought graphics card. I decided to purchase a cheap (£38) Intel Pentium G2020 CPU to make use of the excellent MSI B75MA-E33 Micro-ATX (£40) motherboard.

I assembled the system with 6GB of 1300MHz DDR3 memory and an OCZ Vertex 2 120Gb SSD. The system seemed responsive enough, but when I started benchmarking it the difference in CPU grunt compared to a modern Intel 'Haswell' Core-i3 4130 was obvious. Typically the older Pentium scored less that half that of the Core processor. This is also reflected in the prices of the two.

Also, if you buy this CPU and consequently Socket 1155 motherboard, you lock yourself into the older technology and the upgrade path is limited to the expensive, remnants of the 'Sandy and Ivy Bridge' Intel processors. The new Intel 'Haswell' chips use the Socket 1150 allowing a greater choice and any future developments in CPU technology.

Overall this was a disappointing build and I doubt if I will use a Pentium brand CPU again. The higher speed, Hyper-threading (adding an extra two logical cores) and larger cache of the Intel Core i3 CPU and hence overall performance is well worth the difference in price.