Opinion – Page 15 – Windy Weather

SSD Migration Nightmare

The Problem

You may have noticed that prices for SSDs have come down quite a bit in the last year or so. And the sizes are now quite reasonable. A 250GB SSD will set you back about $200 and a 500GB SSD is about $350. So, I’ve decided that it’s time to begin migrating my computers to SSD system drives.

Casper 6.0 is among the tools I’ve had for sometime to migrate disks, so I gave that a try.

The test machine is an Alienware Aurora R2, circa 2008, with 8GB memory and a 1TB HD, running, Win7 x64. Only 180GB of the 1TB HD is used. As a test target before the SSD arrives, the migration target is a 320GB SATA Laptop drive.

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Corel Video Studio Pro X5 – Great Inexpensive Video Editing

Corel Video Studio Pro X5 is a great and inexpensive video editing suite for editing and burning both DVDs and BluRay disks.

I’ve been capturing game play footage from video games and wanted to make BluRay disks of that footage to remember and share what it’s like to play some of these games. I captured the game footage with Fraps as full screen on my 1600×900 monitor with sound. Fraps allows you to define a hot key to start and end your video capture, so at anytime while you are playing the game, you can start recording video. Corel VS made it easy to edit the videos, adjust clips, make short video backgrounds for the menus, and then burn the BluRay disks.

While I am making BluRay disks from video game footage, you can use any HD footage from your vacation, kids or whatever. The process is the same.

There are a ton of options, transitions, effects and other things in Corel Video Studio. I don’t use any of those, although I have used the titles. They are easy to apply if you want to use them, and there are tutorials on the Corel site and YouTube to give you more help. Continue reading “Corel Video Studio Pro X5 – Great Inexpensive Video Editing”

New TV – Sanyo 55 inch LCD

The Old TV

For about 10 years I’ve had a Fujitsu 42″ Plasma TV and it has been great. I understand that Fujitsu invented plasma technology and back when I bought this TV it was very expensive. The Best. $6000 plus $1400 for a three year extended warranty. The warranty was well spent since the TV died in about 6 months and again at 3 years when it was replaced by a refurbished unit.The plasma TV finally died. On the morning of 31 August the TV would no longer boot. It had worked fine the night before. When it last worked the plasma screen was still bright, showing none of the darkening that plasmas were rumored to show after 10 years. But oh how TVs have changed. Continue reading “New TV – Sanyo 55 inch LCD”

Zotac ZBox ID80

After getting the Alienware machine, I found myself with an extra 20″ monitor and noticed that the Blue Diamond box was getting a little long in the tooth. It has been running Ubuntu 10 and while it works, it’s very slow. Time for an upgrade.

The Zotac Zbox ID80 plus was about $300 from newegg, and while they have versions that are with and without HDD and memory, the one I got had 2GB of ram and a 320GB HD. I didn’t really need the HD since I had one of that size, but the price really tossed that in for almost free. I did get 4GB of RAM for it for an additional $21. Continue reading “Zotac ZBox ID80”

Wow Mercenaries?

The Problem
Wow classes are not balanced for PVE soloing. I’m not suggesting that they aren’t balanced for other efforts or that they should be changed, but as we all know, some classes have a real problem soloing in PVE.

Some Background
I’m not a whiner, and I’ve been playing MMOs for over 5 years, so I have some experience beyond Wow. Here in Wow, in the past few months, I have played all the classes and studied the wiki guides.
Let’s look at the biggest example you are all familiar with: The Priest. The priest is the squishiest of the classes. I’m sure it’s possible to solo the priest in PVE. I’ve gotten a priest up to level 20, but it’s no fun. It’s a lot of work to solo a priest. The mental and input “load” is very high. Many different skills are required and everything needs to go just right to take down mobs, even if you are a few levels higher than they are. And if two mobs run you at the same time, forget it. You are in for a long walk from the graveyard. Continue reading “Wow Mercenaries?”

Wow – Death Knight Class – Early Experience

Wowz_2011_08_000499x — Death Knight Night Elf at 61

Once you level at least one character in your account to level 55, you can create Death Knight class characters of any Race on any Realm. Death Knights start at level 55, so all the drudgery of getting to level 55 is eliminated, but there are other problems to deal with. There are many notable experiences and problems for a Death Knight:

While you start at level 55, you have only 20 silver in your bank.
The starting quest chain is a tight story line, which is exciting and engaging. While it is not as rich with cinematics and dialog as the Undead quest chain in the Silverpine forest, it leads you through a story that places you in the world and fills in your back story.
You will find yourself at level 58 with an updated weapon and some new armor pieces when the quest chain ends.
The story ends differently for Horde and Alliance based on your race. But I’ll not spoil your experience by telling you the end.
Your only starting profession is First Aid and it is leveled for you to about level 200, so you can built quite nice bandages should you need them. Continue reading “Wow – Death Knight Class – Early Experience”

Wow – Realm Design Has Problems

I have recently been playing World of Warcraft. While the game has much to recommend it, especially since they have a trial or starter edition that is free-to-play [up to level 20], it has a serious problem with its design of “realms” or “shards” as some games call it.

“Shards” or “Realms” of course is the name used for the “instances” of the server that are required to support very large numbers of players. These games are MMO – Massively Multi-Player – and “Persistent” which means that they do not place players in private “instances” of the game as they play. But it is not possible to have hundreds of thousands of players all playing in the same server at the time. How is the game going to solve the problem when thousands of players show up in the same town at the same time for a party or just to hang out on a Saturday night?

Well the point is that World of Warcraft solves this problem very badly. There are better solutions out there. Let’s look at the Wow solution and then look at some other games and see much better solutions. Continue reading “Wow – Realm Design Has Problems”

CyberWar – The War is On

As I write this we are seeing daily reports of hacking and break-ins to commercial and defense enterprises world wide:

Sony network down for over three weeks with customer passwords, emails and credit card information information stolen.
Anti-bank Trojans stealing millions of dollars from customers’ bank accounts in Brazil.
Oakridge National Laboratory was the target of a spear-phishing attack that only compromised a few megabytes of data before it was stopped.
Millions of dollars being stolen from cell phone users in China by viruses infecting smart cell phones.
The Stuxnet worm infects Iran’s nuclear program.

But it seems we are not doing a set of straight forward things that we can do to prepare for and mitigate the impact that cyber war is having on this country. We can start with some simple and comparatively inexpensive steps.

Continue reading “CyberWar – The War is On”

Whither Apps?

What’s the big deal with apps over webpages?

Short History Lesson

In the day of the web, starting 20 years ago, say 1990, web pages were all the rage. By 2000 we had the (dot)com boom. Nobody was talking Apps then. We weren’t writing hundreds of thousands of apps for our PCs then. The concept of having a single program on the PC that could display hundreds of thousands of websites was the way things went. We could have had a PC app boom then. Continue reading “Whither Apps?”

AION Private Server

I have been watching the AION game for some time, and since it was released in this country by NCSoft, I had hoped that they would use the same model as they do with Guild Wars, which is purchase followed by FTP [no subscription]. Well they apparently are greedy, and have gone with the WoW model, which is Pay for the game and then pay $15 / month. Sorry, but I’m not interested in this model.

However, I have found a FTP Private server. Oddly enough. GameZ AION is a private server with enhanced EXP, Currency and Drop rates.

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