Posts by ZZZ

  • What are you playing now?

    Just replayed F.E.A.R. It's a combination of Max Payne with an asian horror movie. There are just two minor bad points: the horror factor is non interactive, meaning that the player doesn't interact in any way with Alma, the little girl who is killing everyone; the second complain is that there is too much repetition, the same environments were overused in very long levels.

    After finishing F.E.A.R. I played Project Origin for the first time. Too bad that they changed the whole direction of the game. The whole atmosphere that made F.E.A.R. 1 terrific is gone, The graphics are better in terms of resolution, colors, bloom, HDR, but they sacrificed the realtime shadows everywhere. The environments are larger, with a greater cinematic feel, but they had to compromise the shadows and the flickering lights, which dumbed down the thriller atmosphere of the first game. I tend to agree with all the criticism about F.E.A.R. 2 being "consolized". Smashing button in QTE, lack of voicemails and the interface seems to be gamepad oriented.

    Overall I think that the main flaw of F.E.A.R. is that it wasn't designed with a series in mind, there isn't much room for expanding it after the first game.

  • Site color styling

    Darkened the body's background and decided to use boxes to separate contente. So if a page contains multiple examples or exercises, rather than using bullet points and blank lines to identify each one, I'm using divs to create blue boxes.

    Header has a thicker white border. I wish I could make the header with the same style as the main content, with white background, inner blue box with dotted borders, but to do that I need a pro account.

  • What have you purchased recently?

    Asus laptop with i5 5200U, 930M, 8GB of RAM, 1366 x 768 glossy display. I known, 768p sucks after you see how much sharper 1080p is, but unfortunately the difference in price was quite large and I didn't have much of a choice. At least it's much more powerful than the older i3 sandybridge with no GPU.

  • Want Help Building / Upgrading a PC?

    replying here. It is an old acer laptop, I bought it before ivy bridge was released. I dont know what's broken, I'm assuming that the motherboard has to be replaced. Either the bios has to be replaced or something else fried, chipset?

    Unfortunately, quad core i5 doesnt exist for laptops and skylake is only available in i7 variant. I don't know the price in USD, but judging by amazon prices I'd say that my budget, with proper currency conversion and taxes, is 500 to 550 USD.

    CPU: 5200U

    GPU: 930M

    RAM: Samsung expert x30 comes with 8GB, Asus X555 comes with 6GB or 8GB

    HDD: 5400rpm. Like all models have it.

    Samsung offers matte screen, while Asus is glossy.

    TFT: unfortunately, IPS full HD is way above my budget

    Games are second priority.

  • buying a new computer

    I bricked my Acer i3 2nd gen don't know how. I removed the cmos battery to clear the bios but somehow that procedure bricked it. I didnt took it to a place to see if repairing it is worth of it, I'm assuming that it isn't since it's a sandybridge gen model.

    I was looking for i5 5200U, 8GB or 6GB, 930M GPU. I know that 930M is low end and that 768p is low res, but the price gap between low end and 1080p and a decent 950M or 960M is quite large. Where I live there are basically two options: Samsung or Asus. Acer, dell and lenovo have similar specs, but the gpu is either the 920m or m265, which are too much close in performance to intel hd.

  • Windows 10 upgrade

    It took me over 5 hours to upgrade from windows 7. I don't know when W10 was downloaded, but when it was done it warned me that it was ready to install whenever I wanted.

    The installation process took 2 hours, but when it was about to finish I saw a BSOD and it rolled back to W7. After waiting for windows 10 to be redownloaded and the installation process to start again, I tried again. Second time it took 1 1/2 hour without BSOD, the only error being that in the first time all windows were black and impossible to read any button. With a bit of luck I was able to change the theme and reset the settings so that all windows were readable again.

    I had to reinstall Intel HD drivers and the audio drivers, only to find that Intel dropped support for 2nd and 3rd gen core i lines. Realtek also seems to not have certified windows 10 drivers.

    Had a second BSOD some hours ago, the same error message from the first time I tried and failed to upgrade windows 7. But this time I had coincidentally left my scanner turned on, which I turned off to see if somehow it was the reason for windows 10 reboot lop. Fortunately it was and that allows me to give you all a tip: Kernel auto boost lock acquisition with raised irql seems to be related to some hardware or driver that is incompatible with windows 10.

    I'll delete windows 7 later, so far I have no plans to go back.

  • What's going on with your life?

    Passed Physics I. In here there was physics 0 in the first semester, then physics I in the following semester. Physics 0 being a pre requisite for Physics I. It was made this way to forcibly slow down physics so that students would catch up with vector algebra and calculus. After many many years, they decided to drop physics 0 and go back to the old way, physics I without having a pre requisite of physics 0. I did try physics 0 three times but failed all times.

    In addition to dropping physics 0 from the curriculum there was a change in the way teachers teach, they've adopted some american method which replaces traditional lectures with a more modern approach. This and the fact that the exams were weigthed 50% of the final grade, the other 50% being homework, attendance and other activities, helped me pass.