Anyway, after succesfully testing windows 7 and trying out the new computer the other day I spent another 5 hours figuring on how to utilize the suposedly awesome soundblaster audigy 2 ZS platnium pro that i bought a few years back. I have ad problems with it since i last remember with vista issues but now seemed like a good time to use it on the new machine i just built. To cut to the problem, the company that manufactered the card is just after your money and would not really want to help write new drivers for vista till someone like Daniel_K of brazil nearly destroy their reputation by writing drivers better than their own. This brazillian, probably as fed up with the lousy creative drivers like most of us, used his assembly experience to tweak some of the software installs of creative's drivers; it seems that creative intentionally shut off features if it detected the vista OS - so he just enabled them instead.
Well thanks to him looks like it saved a lot of grief for many others - but for me i just regret every purchasing this $100 pile of shit since it's made by such dumbass thiefs. This experience probably gave me another layer of "mistrust" with new products and technology. With the new drivers people enjoyed a bit more functionality with their vista (and probably windows 7) but, as i am now more fluent working with sound, i discovered that the sound card i got was notorious for not supporting full 5.1 digital signals even though it is very capable of. After the 5 hours of software bashing, I saw a small glimpse of hope with the 5.1 sound via a digital coax cable but as soon as i played a DVD, all i get is some crazy loud crackling sound constantly playing.... so this wasn't cool (on windows 7). I've read on forums that this problem goes away in vista so i'd probably try that next time. But for now I think i will go with the other solution which is this onboard SPD/IF pinout i see on my motherboard - which seems promising because that's similiar to what i use on my other desktop that has fantastic sound.
So yesturday i went to san francisco to visit my grandpa, who is leaving for taiwan this weekend, to help him setup his iRobot roomba that i "woot"ed for him during a long woot-off some weeks ago. The roomba is some small vacuum cleaner that moves by itself and supposedly clean entire rooms. I never really messed with one untill yesturday and it was quite predictable and pretty impressive at the same time. My grandpa, who is an engineer, wanted to reverse engineer this ultimately and have a look into it more to see if any innovations can be found and probably outsource it to china to be manufactered. It is always a dream for him to design something cool and i guess this was a first step for him even though he's really old and near his 90s - probably will give him a few more years to play around with.
Anyway, after charging for 16 hours, I had to stay overnight to see it in action the next day (today) but yesturday i looked around town for computer shops in search for that blasted SPDIF motherboard accessory which i found after visiting two shops. Coincidently, i have been to this shop many years ago to purchase my first performance sound card and here i am returning to get a "hard to find" sound card piece for a new system that i have high expectations for. The guy said the part will arrive the next day around afternoon and here I am waiting and it's near 5pm.... I hope these assholes know that i need to get out of town and i'm not really a local here.... I would expect some discounts or something because this isn't cool to make me wait like this.
Yesturday i kept myself busy taking apart the computer i left here, a athlon 2100+ that my friend gave me a few years back because he had no need for it. I cleaned up the case and got it ready for another project idea - modifying it and hopefully making it a better case for my new dual-core. Anyway this case will be pretty fun to work with - really heavy duty case made of steel by antec (not sure what model) i bought a few years ago. After disasebling the entire thing the case doesnt' look half bad from what i can see and has some potential with some ideas of mine. I'm probably going to ask for my friend's big fan that i disasembled from his powersupply and use that as the case fan on the sliding panel. I youtubed some videos on how to do this and it seems pretty simple - just need some patience. Other ideas would be to add more ventilation and airflow since most of these old cases weren't really engineered for the new overclocking crowd.
I met up with my uncle today and we had some korean food at brother's restaurant just outside of his aparment complex - which was exactly what me + my mom ate last night. The food was about the same as last night just a little economical during the lunch hour. Anyway he had a dremel rotory saw which is what i needed for my project and that would save me some money / time. So now i am still waiting for my stupid audio adapter from this store and already finished about 2 chapters of this book: "Twilight" that my sister left me before she went to africa. I am so glad there's wireless internet around here provided by my neighbor.
No comments:
Post a Comment