In praise of Chromecast

We recently upgraded our main living room TV to a Sony Bravia Smart TV. The old Toshiba Regza migrated upstairs to my computer workshop and replaced a really old fish-bowl CRT television which was mainly used for me to watch football. To take better advantage of the new HD widescreen, I added a Google Chromecast stick making it effectively a Smart TV controlled from computer, tablet or phone.

What a revelation. Anything that I watched on the PC monitor can now be cast, or streamed to the wall-mounted widescreen. It integrates really well with the Google Chrome browser and is relatively inexpensive (£30) for a brilliant gadget. It also included a neat mains USB charger for those older TVs that don't have a USB socket like mine. I can now catch-up on missed programs (in HD quality) for the BBC channels and will soon be able to do the same for ITV, Channel 4, etc.

Wonderful WiFi

I've just realised the impact that WiFi has had on a normal domestic environment. Just by listing the devices that are regularly connected to it and hence my 100mbps Virgin media cable broadband connection.

• Two laptops and three desktops
• One Smart TV and one Chromecast TV
• One Nexus 7 tablet
• One HTC smartphone
• One Sonos bridge and speakers
• And for completeness, via Gigabit Ethernet, one desktop, one Home Server and one NAS box

As yet, no wireless printers, photo cameras or CCTV cameras, etc.  Still not bad for one house.

Enjoying Far Cry 4

My son, Nicholas gave me the Far Cry 4 game for Christmas and I'm enjoying it immensely. As with the other Far Cry games, you wander about a huge area performing quests and discovering people, treasure and culture.

It is a wonderfully graphic game with plenty of attention to the details. The wildlife is amazing and frequently dangerous. The quests can mostly be done stealth-fully or aggressively. You can explore and conquer areas at will. The fast travel system and buzzers cut down on the boring bits, yet enemies trying to retake already captured outposts keeping you on your toes.

For example, I just managed to capture the very hard Varshakot fortress by first sniping the enemy snipers on top of the walls. Then finding a secret passage that takes you into the fortress and a quiet spot to hide up until the uproar dies down. Secondly, blowing the main gates with explosive and calling your support troops to help. This draws the enemy including the heavy infantry to move to the area under attack and then mortar it killing them all. This just leaves an enemy helicopter to deal with using an RPG and a lone soldier to dispatch quickly. Job done and fortress secured. A great game!

nVidia GT730 revisited

Following my recent post extolling the virtues of the nVidia GT730 graphics card as my new entry-level choice, I wanted to try the card with GDDR5 memory and a 128-bit memory bus. The 1Gb DDR3 version with 64-bit memory bandwidth cost at the time £34, but this has since risen to well over £40 and even £50 in some cases. The GT740 model with GDDR5 and the 128-bit memory bandwidth are £80 or so which is dangerously close to the GT750 with Maxwell architecture offering much better performance. So, when I saw a Gigabyte GT730 with 2Gb of GDDR5 memory albeit with a 64-bit bus for just over £50 it seemed worthwhile to test and see if the extra capacity and faster memory makes much difference.

The benchmarks show at least 36% improvement which for an extra £10 seems worthwhile. The Gigabyte model also comes with a relatively large (10cm) cooling fan which should aid any over-clocking that you might want to apply to gain even greater performance improvement. Also with 2Gb texture memory modern games will run better. So, my entry-level choice has moved slightly to the nVidia GT730 with 2Gb GDDR5.

Testing Windows 10

I'm testing Microsoft's latest Windows 10 version and getting really good impressions from it. It appears to be combining some of the best features of the highly successful Windows 7 version together with the total disaster of Windows 8 in a consistent and modern approach. Gone is the weird Start menu, (unless you want it) and the Charms side menu. It is much easier to find apps and files now.

I'm running Windows 10 Technical Preview via the Insider program on an old DELL Optiplex GX520 with Intel Pentium D dual core at 3GHz and just 2Gb of DDR2 memory. Even on this low-end specification it runs reasonably responsive. I've yet to try any really demanding applications or games.

There are many new features though Cortana the speaking personal assistant is not available in the UK yet. Quite a number of the new apps are just place-holders requiring further development but even these add an integrated vision of what is to come. It appears that Microsoft has learnt its lesson from Windows 8 and the really good news is that it will be free to upgrade to Windows 10 for a year when it is released later this year. With this generous offer in place and from what I have seen so far, I'm a firm supporter of Windows 10.

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.