Flops' Friday mini blog

[crazylegs]

Yep that TV looks good to me mate!

Go for it..

 

[captain zed]

Hi Flopp's,
Sorry to hear about your fall.....thats a right gash in yer noggin......it will leave an impressive scar though. How's the telly workin with yer xbox ?

 

[Taffycat]

You made an impressive job of cracking your bonce Flopps,... that's a doozie! But seeing it makes me boggle at that Chinese doctor's attitude. If he didn't choose to believe your explanation about how it happened, then I could understand if he, maybe, thought you'd been clobbered by someone - in a mugging or something like that. It wouldn't have immediately brought fighting to mind. Also, around these parts, a head injury usually results in the hospital insisting on admitting you for 24 hours.

But on the other hand...maybe the doctor was just naturally ham-fisted and completely lacking in the compassion department.

Hope it will heal well now Flopps.

 

[floppybootstomp]

Update... I've never known the forum so quiet, seems posting those '1970' pix was a waste of time, won't bother with that anymore.

I also can't remember when I've ever been so broke. I have some kind of infection, bad cough, coughing so much stomach & abdomen muscles hurt. I have so little money I can't even afford to go to pharmacist or get a train to GP, it's that bad.

Seriously considering retiring and signing on the dole but that goes so much against the grain. The big companies have, over the last ten years, eroded my customer base with dirty tricks. Such is private enterprise and commerce, I can't compete, all I have in my armoury is goodwill, no substitute for cash.

I am expecting a coupla cheques but they're both overdue. I haven't been in this position since I was about 19 years old.

I phone customers and they say 'We have work we want you to do Tony but our budget has been cut so much other things take precedence'.

Clegg & Cameron? You all thought they were going to be better than Blair/Brown? Ha! Suckers.

This cough is awful.

On gamez: really enjoying Witcher One Enhanced edition, didn't realise it was so old. Still playing CoD4 online, best CoD online game evah. Decided to have another try at the SP level I'm stuck on on Battlefield Bad Company 2 and loaded the disc. It then took almost an hour to update. After that amount of time I lost interest.

Alice Madness Returns is now only £20 I will get that when I get some money.

I bought Terraria on Steam recently, didn't cost much, a fiver I think, but I don't think I like it. Not sure just what the hell I'm supposed to do, despite watching Youtube walkthroughs.

Daughter Faye is away for 3 days babysitting a rabbit.

Last night somebody smashed my windscreen, not shattered just a huge crater and cracks. Insurance may cover it, I'm fully com, not sure. The joys of living in SE London eh?

I like to post upbeat but tonight, gotta admit, things are truly crap.

 

[floppybootstomp]

Well hello people, no replies to that last one eh? lol

What can I say? Things are still pretty crap, that's what I can say.

This virus/cold/infection. It's still here and it's awful. I honestly don't think I've ever suffered a non-serious illness as bad as this. I think I caught it from my daughter, she's almost recovered after four weeks and my symptoms are very similar. Mine is two weeks old today.

Worst thing of all is the cough, it's like a spasm, uncontrollable cough then worst of all, for a while I can't take in breath. Mouth and nose wide open, trying to suck in air, wheezing and worst of all - panic. Suffocation must be the worst panic-inducing feeling in the world.

Saw the doc again, he advised me to take the antibiotics, so I've started. I do hope it stops all that yellow gunge coming out me nose and mouth. And on top of that I had an attack of gout. This is the third attack I've had in my life and at it's peak it hurts like hell. It's almost over now, tomorrow I should be able to walk then, but I have only been able to walk very painfully for the last six days. Gout is caused by diet inefficiency, apparently, no surprise I've been eating mostly crap for a week or so.

You know you're broke when you look in cupboards to see what you haven't eaten for six months or so, lol. And then eat it.

Haven't phoned insurance company about smashed windscreen yet but will do on Monday as I actually had a job come in, fit an external horn loudspeaker at a school in Eltham, Yay! That'll be about £220 profit for about 2 hours work. Plus of course gathering tools, ladders etc and then re-storing them, that part never gets factored into the equation.

I sometimes think if I had the work that I do for just 30 hours a week I'd actually be quite well off. But I don't. One cheque (the smallest) came through, the other one hasn't yet and it may not ever. Damn.

Tomorrow my twin daughters are 23 years old. Tonight they went to a spa in Cardiff with their elder sister and their mother and got pampered. Hands up who knows why tomorrow's date is significant in world history? Yep, not good eh? Guess what topic dominated their 13th Birthday?

One up thing, I got my pension lump sum.

It's not a lot, I'm going to use the money to take care of a few things and buy a very few toys but the lion's share I'm putting into an ISA. All my life I've just spent what came in but the last six weeks or so has been an eye opener. I sometimes wonder whether spending £650 on a washing machine in May was a good idea, could've got one for half the price and had a few hundred quid spare. Nope, it was a good idea, lol, fabulous machine, works well and washes me duvets.

I'm going to buy a new pair of loudspeakers, custom, Alpair 7.3 4" full range drivers and Frugal 3 horn cabinets, custom made by some guy in Derbyshire. Plus a telephoto lens and adaptor for my Canon G9.

And that's it, really. I could upgrade computer but I don't like the i7 range as the CPU has built in graphics. Seems a waste of money to pay for grafix and then disable them. Intel should offer CPU's without grafix, I shall await developments. Choosing AMD, btw, compared to what I have now, does not seem a significant advantage for the money.

I am thinking about an Nvidia 560 as an upgrade to my 9800GTX for about £150.00 I get better specs and DX11 capability. Worth it?

I have a whole list of things I want to buy but finally, at last, at this age I'm getting sensible and am holding back.

The mornings are the worst, there's a build up of fluids on my lungs overnight and when I cough at dawn I just can't breathe and I seriously wonder whether I'll suffocate. Horrible and very scary.

Please, illness, bugger off, I wanna be well again.

And tommorow, high winds, enjoy, everybody

 

[bootneck02]

I am surprised that the site is so quiet I suppose it has been the summer and people are just finished the children's summer holidays and back to school, thus hogging the PC. Glad to hear you have got your pension lump sum, I got mine in 2009 and we went on a 3 week holiday to the US and spent one week at a place called Laughlin on the Nevada/Arizona border we did bits of Route 66 and two weeks at Las Vegas. We met a friend and his wife who live in LA and had a great time visiting the Grand Canyon, Death Valley, horse riding in the desert, and I had a little win on the slots $600. Not sure that we will ever afford to go again though but we had a fabulous time.

Like you I am having some trouble sleeping I am having some nasty headaches and feel tired all the time I think it is to do with the drugs I am taking (satins) so have got to go back to the doctor to see if he can give me some alternative drug. Yes today is the tenth anniversary of 9/11 rather close to me as having served in the fire service for over 20 years. I remember when we went out to Las Vegas in 2002 there was a shrine set up outside New York New York hotel made up from fire service T shirts from all over the world, there were hundreds and hundreds, it made tears come to my eyes, the fire service is a very close community you know.

Wish your Daughters a Happy Birthday from me, I know that daughters have a special place in a dads heart. I have a girl and a boy both are special to me but I think we are a bit more protective towards a daughter. Oh well I think I will go back to bed and try to get another couple hours shut eye, I hope you feel better and stop having leakage of nasty yellow liquid must be a bind. Also that work picks up, are you still doing the D J work or has that also dried up a bit, still it is autumn and the party season is that much closer. As for the new proposed PC I think like you AMD is the way to go and you get more for your bucks. I will say night night and I enjoy your posts even if I don't reply to them so keep them going.

 

[muckshifter]

you probably have pleurisy, but that is usually pink fluid because of the blood mixed in, so I'm banking on pneumonia.

However, it could be a really bad bout of influenza, that did kill more people in WW1 than the war itself.

If you don't get a free flu jab, I recommend paying for one once a year till you do.

 

[floppybootstomp]

No blood, so not pleurisy.

I've had the flu jab for the last five years, last one was in Oct '10.

Have also had the one-off pneumonia jab.

I'm fairly certain I've never had any flu all my life, certainly never had pneumonia but I have had tonsilitis a few times which knocked me for six each time.

The Doc was convinced it's just a virus, a rather virulent cold virus, that's doing the rounds at the moment. I rather suspect it's one of the Russian germ warfare programs that escaped.

If you look at the BBC online news you may notice that the singer Adele has had to cancel many tour dates becuase of ''A serious cold and chest infection' I think she may have the same as me. I wager it will be some time before she's ready to tour again.

Today the coughing spasms aren't so frequent but the inablility to draw breath is more frequent and that's the part I hate, pure panic, think I'm gonna snuff it by suffocation. Antobiotics don't seem to be doing anything, two full days now, but sometimes I know they can take up to five days to work.

Gout is a lot less severe today, I'm going to attempt to walk to M & S to get some decent food.

Bootneck, thanks for reply, hope your sleep patterns improve.

 

[crazylegs]

Huh reading your symptoms I'm pretty sure I had what you have now last year, It took about 6 weeks to thoroughly remove itself from my system, and I felt absolutely drained for a while after, I thought it was flu at first but it was just a really nasty cold virus that had me going through rolls of toilet roll with all the fluid I was coughing up and blowing through me nasal passages!
Hope you feel better soon Flopp's..
Antibiotics take at least 48 hours to get in and will start working properly after about 3-4 days, remember to finish the whole course too or it'll come back..

Good stuff on the Pension, spend it wisely

 

[floppybootstomp]

I still not well but possibly getting better, three weeks tomorrow this thing will have run so far. The past seven days have been amongst the most scary of my life, 4am, alone, dark, suffocating, trembling and feeling very sorry for myself, lol Not getting quite so many breathless coughing fits now but far from out of the woods yet. Finished antibiotics today, didn't make any difference, still producing infected mucus. I possibly should extend course but GP's not open til Monday now (prescription).

Fairly recently I have started two or three threads about upgrading. A few days ago my hand was forced which I'm still not sure is a good thing or a bad thing. I thought I'd go for modest graphics card upgrade, an Nvidia 560 for £145.00 which I thought would be a slight improvement on my GTX9800, double the memory and bring me up to DX11.

So I got this one: http://www.scan.co.uk/products/1gb-...pu-850mhz-shader-1700mhz-336-cores-plusfree-b

On same order I got a pair of 2.1 loudspeakers which I can report are really very very good, these ones: http://www.scan.co.uk/products/cors...er-system-big-gaming-sound-in-a-small-package

Fitted video card, plugged in mains lead to computer, attached monitor, mouse and when I attached Saitek Eclipse keyboard USB lead I noticed there was a sparking and the backlight to the keys flickered and went out, they're normally on all the time. Didn't think anything of it but when I switched computer on it wouldn't POST.

To cut a long story short I ended up with motherboard outside case with nothing attached except keyboard, mouse & monitor and by a series of deductions figured motherboard was fried Almost five years old, has served me well that Asus P5B deluxe.

So, ignoring most all of advice I'd received in my 'upgrade' threads, I chose a system, this is it:

Motherboard

CPU

CPU Cooler

Memory

Hard Disk

And as I had the pox with the Saitek keyboard I also ordered a replacement for it:

Keyboard

I've built the thing, had to activate Win 7 by phone, and it's running right now.

Here's a Speccy screen grab:

Notes:

I would not have upgraded had my old system not failed, yes, it was a lot of money but hell, I did really want to upgrade and if I'm lucky this'll do me another five years. I spend most of my leisure time on the PC, gaming or otherwise, so to me it's a good investment.

The Noctua cooler is giving me 33C on CPU, it's huge and because of it's size I cannot use one memory slot or fit 120mm side case fan.

I'm a little concerned that Speccy thinks my SSD drive is an IDE device and is running at 128C. It's not on both counts, it feels cool to the touch and has a front of case 120mm fan blowing directly on it. Odd.

So how does it perform?

Overall, it really isn't a lot faster than my Core Duo system with a pair of Raptors in RAID 0 but it is - a little. It does boot a little quicker as well.

Where it excels is games. Whether this is the graphics card, the new system or a combo of both I don't know but my oh my, games are superb. They faster, sharper, more vibrant, hell, even the sound sounds better (still using the Auzentech Prelude X-Fi).

On the few games I've tried so far they are simply more immersive.

Thinking about it, all I have left of old system is Case, PSU and sound card. Both my optical drives had been going flakey for several months, neither of them would even read the Asus motherboard DVD at all, so I replaced both of them.

I love the new look BIOS.

I was actually determined to get a Gigabyte board for this build but after a lot of searching the Asus range seriously offered a whole lot more for the money. Looked briefly at Asrock as well but.... nope

As I couldn't recover my Win 7 install from the RAID 0 setup (and no, I didn't back it up - grrrrr) I have lost a lot of bookmarks and a lot of saved games. C'est la vie. My Steam folder was on a secondary hard disk, I logged on to Steam and installed the Steam client to my existing Steam folder and the whole thing was reinstated perfectly. Steam is seriously good shiznit

I had a problem reactivating Alice: Madness returns with EA cos they were convinced mine was a pirate copy, had to get on chat helpline and scan the manual and DVD before they would issue another serial number. I don't like EA, they can get stuffed and poke Origin where the sun don't shine - Steam roolz

I have most stuff reinstalled, now just going through games, have installed Witcher and luckily I had saved CoD4 & CoD5 profiles.

So, I'm now all up to date until.... well, about ten minutes ago, probably

 

[bootneck02]

Sorry to hear you are still not well, it all seems even worse when you are living on your own, so get well soon FSB I am thinking of you.

Well your new PC looks great so that will see you through for the next few years of gaming although I personally am not to sure about SSD cards as I understand that they can fail without warning any way good luck with it

 

[floppybootstomp]

Thanks, oh fellow boot person

Anything can fail without warning.

Intel made a batch of SSD drives that did fail without warning, they suddenly went from their full size to about 20Mb but they have now been withdrawn from sale.

As far as I know Corsair haven't suffered any large failure rates as yet.

An SSD has no moving parts, apart from electrons. All mechanical hard drives are just that - mechanical.

PS: Not quite on my own, 24 year old daughter has a room in this place. She suffered this malady before me, probably her I caught it off.

 

[crazylegs]

Sorry to hear your still suffering Flopp's, hopefully you feel better soon..

Made to upgrade huh, yeah I like them ones..ha ha

At least the games are looking and running better..

 

[V_R]

Hey Flops thats a nice speced system right there. will do you proud for a good while i bet.

Dont pay any attention to Speccy, that is way out. As you said, SSD's have no moving parts, they dont even get warm let alone hot. mine is and always is just ambient temperature at most.

Try Speedfan? Or maybe, better still HWiNFO (check my sticky - https://www.pcreview.co.uk/forums/essential-pc-software-updated-29th-august-2011-a-t2697599.html

Did you set the BIOS to AHCI Mode before installing windows? Some benefits from it, but not all. It cant hurt to try it.

See this thread and scroll down some and it shows you how to set it up so you can swap between the two after OS install (Windows wont boot if you change it after installing the OS)

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/f...3-*-Windows-7-Ultimate-Tweaks-amp-Utilities-*

There are some other handy tips on there too actually.

Yeah UEFI BIOS is great, i want to upgrade just so i can play! lol

I've been saying it for ages, Steams great for when you need to reinstall, saves soooooo much time not having to reinstall, patch and setup each and every game you own.

Hope that new PC serves you well.

 

[floppybootstomp]

thankee crazylegs, V_R

Something keeps nudging me saying 'overclock' lol

The CPU is supposedly unlocked so is it simply a matter of increasing multiplier or will memory speed and/or voltages have to be tweaked?

Plus my memory is 1600 and it's currently set at 1333 will have to have a look round the BIOS.

 

[V_R]

Do it, OCing the i Series is dead easy. Just make sure you do a little reading, just dont change the BCLK.

 

[floppybootstomp]

Me no change base clock. 'k. Goddit. Can't seem to find any OC guides newer than 2009 so OC-ing on backburner for now.

A few leetle statistics, if anybody's interested. SSD C drive is 120Gb (111Gb) and I'm currentlty using 43Gb of it. Have a pair of Samsung 500Gb drives installed, one for data, which includes all my photos, and one for games. There are no games at all installed on C drive.

I have used Acronis True Image 11 to make a backup of the 44Gb used on C drive to the data drive, it is almost 17Gb.

This is what's on my C drive:

Win 7 Home premium 64 Bit all drivers and updates
Crap Cleaner
Speccy
Malwarebytes
Microsoft Security Essentials.
Windows Movie Maker
Foxit
Winamp
WS_FTP Pro
Nero Essentials V10
MS Office 2003 Full version
Photoshop CS5 64 Bit
7-Zip
Mailwasher Pro
Epson Scanner software
Canon G9 Camera software

And that's it, so far, though I don't have plans to install anything else at this time. All movie and audio processing done on AMD machine in bedroom (I have movie maker installed for making slide shows to audio for Youtube).

The games disk has 290Gb space used of 465Gb leaving 175Gb free. My Steam folder is on that drive and it's 158Gb.

Other games installed so far:

CoD 4
CoD 5
The Witcher
Crysis 2
Battlefield: Bad Company 2
Alice: Madness returns
Bulletstorm
Dungeon Siege & Dungeon Siege: Legends Of Arana
Dragon Age II

Which will do me for now though I do intend to install some more later.

Bit annoyed at having to start the Witcher again, it's a long game and there are five levels. I had completed the first one and a half. But I do now start the game fully conversant with all gameplay which I didn't originally, was pretty much learn as I progressed.

Was going to buy Dead Island for thirty quid but read a few reviews and they weren't exactly sparkling, average score was 7 out of 10 so I shall wait until it's a cheapie.

Looked at the new Deus Ex and I really don't think it's my kind of game, edging through tricky levels on stealth with a small inventory and scarce ammunition is not my idea of fun. And all that hacking. No thanks.

Really looking forward to Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and I have to say Battlefield 3 is looking good.

Serious Sam III is a must-have, I lurve (almost) mindless shooters. Yes, I know, I blame it on the tap water in these parts.

And finally the data disk on this computer is using 223Gb of 465Gb, my photos (backed up to both media machine and external hard disk) is 98Gb.

So there we go, facts and figures, some of you may be interested, especially if you're considering a new build.

And me medical condition. I keep getting reminded of that gravestone with the inscription 'I told you I was ill' Had my worst ever unable to breathe session this morning at 6am then too scared to go back to sleep again.

Phoned NHS Direct helpline and after a long conflab was informed, more or less 'See GP in morning and use more pillows' and yes, they said, an inhaler would help. Great. Autoglass coming to replace windscreen in morning they turned up here Friday but with wrong windscreen. Another competent company, lol. My insurance covered it but I had to pay a £60 excess.

Then in afternoon I still have to install that loudspeaker at local school, I've delayed it cos I feel like crap. I may go see Doc instead, health more important than work, really. Almost.

And that's it for now peeps. Pip pip!

 

[Taffycat]

I keep getting reminded of that gravestone with the inscription 'I told you I was ill'

Wasn't that Spike Milligan?

That bad chest of yours sounds awful Flopps and yes, another visit to your Dr would be lots more beneficial than trying to work right now. He/she needs to know that it hasn't cleared up with antibiotics.

My other half has 'cough variant asthma.' ( I know that's different from the lurgy you have,) but unfortunately, our Drs went through the whole gamut of remedies and medications, before eventually prescribing inhalers. They instantly made a huge difference for the better, so might be worth asking directly, if they would be of any help for your complaint.

Liking the sound of your new system hope you get loads of enjoyment from it.

 

[muckshifter]

"Duirt me leat go raibh me breoite"

 

[Taffycat]

How are you feeling today Flopps? If one might enquire, that is