The latest trick from nVidia to screw everyone over is an inability to playback video when using an nVidia graphics card on the new nForce 7 chipsets. From the FAQ on their site, they are now aware of the problem (only took a couple of months) and are "working hard" to fix it.

I figured that the nForce boards must have improved since the old nForce2 days but apparently they just cost more and crash more frequently. Not to mention the fiasco to do with wireless drivers and nForce chipsets that cause a system lockup.

Fuck nForce boards. Do yourselves a favour and buy an Intel board. For more links to what the video corruption problem looks like and a plethora of complaining customers (pretty sure nVidia is calling us 'suckers' by now) check out this post on the nvidia forums. Or search something like nForce video artifacts in Google to be swamped with reports of this occurring.

Here is my open letter to nVidia which you are more than welcome to support by leaving a comment...


Remember to shut down any virtual machines or videos while reading this site so your pc doesn't lock up. Unless of course you bought Intel, in which case.. Swap you?
Maz

Using 802.11n here with D-Link gear. Just thoguht I'd mention it for anyone else who is having the same problem, it only connects at 54mb/s unless you are using WPA or WPA2 as well as AES. It was driving me mad all week until I managed to stumble upon the solution. Nothing online seems to say this (not that I found anyway) so figured I'd put it up.
Hope this helps.
Maz

This weekend, for the first time ever, I bought myself some games to play online. I bought them online using steam and I'll have to admit that the whole process was relatively painless. The biggest issue is that I don't have media for the games now but you download them off the net. At this time I was up at KJ's and using his ADSL1 and downloaded Team Fortress 2 at about 550KB/s from the Internode mirror so didn't take too long. We played that online for a fair chunk of the evening until I went home.

Today, I decide I want to play Counter-Strike so I have to download the last 9% or whatever I hadn't got while I was KJ's. On my nice 'fast' ADSL2 service from Exetel I get 20KB/s. So it took a few hours. Here's the funny bit. It's not just a slow steam mirror. That's as fast as my internet is now apparently. Speed tests from an Exetel mirror get me some fancy godlike speeds of almost 33KB/s! As you could probably guess, popping online and simply playing the game is just too much for my dial-up, (oops. I mean.. really fast ADSL2+) service and I've had to give it away for the weekend.

It's not just rediculously SLOW data either. It's almost getting 50% packet loss too!

This has to be the worst internet connection I have used since living in rural Australia using Telstra dial-up. Ping times on game servers constantly jumps to over 800ms. For this amount of money each month, I could sticky-tape a few dial-up modems together and get better speeds. So I logged a fault with Exetel who email and then ring to tell me that, "A fault has been logged with our supplier for you, as soon as we receive an update we will contact you and inform you on what needs to be done."

No doubt I'll put an update on here as soon as I get fast enough net to download the images on my main page without killing MSN.
Maz