JamesThorburn

I’ve opened up a new website for news and reviews on Media Centers and Home Theatre PC’s. Be sure to check it out at www.MCE-Pro.co.uk.

Short video I made showing off my Media Centre configuration the other week, with My Movies 3 and Maximus Arcade.

(Yes the spelling is intentional)

Today marks one year of up-time for my venerable server. It sits in the spare room, four hard drives crammed into its mATX chassis, drawing about 80W and running the houses DHCP, MyMovies, uTorrent (for all the Linux ISO’s we download), and streaming music to my desktop, laptop and media centre.

When I originally built it I honestly didn’t think the nasty MSI 915GM board it runs on would last a week, so here’s to it and its surprising persistence.

The end may be nigh for it in the coming months however – a switch to a pair of 1TB hard drives (currently theres just a mish-mash of what I had spare at the time) and a Atom based ITX board (to save power) is very tempting.

I managed to get hold of a first gen iphone to play with the other day to have a play with, so this is a quick test of Safari.Overall I’m quite impressed, the UI is extremely slick, but the lack of GPS is a downer for me. When my contract is up a 3G iPhone from O2 will definately be tempting.

Yep, a mere hour ago Virgin Media was returning pings in the 800ms region.

Now though its done something incredible!

Yep we’ve breached the 1 second mark now. Download and upload speeds have also managed to drop which is impressive given that they were already what experts would describe as ‘not very good’.

But wait, 10 minutes later and we have a break through!

“My word”, I gasped, “Thats almost a respectable internet connection”, forgetting that it was no longer 2002. Ok so its pretty far off advertised the 8Mbit but its a start.

Lets run another test just to confirm…

 Never mind, it was fun while it lasted I guess.

I started this posting adventure at around about 8:55pm, by loading up Speedtest.

I should have figured things weren’t going to end well when the page took until 8:58pm to load the testing applet and until 9:03pm to complete the test.

This is beyond a joke.

To even get to the content management system to make this post took another 10 minutes. I accessed WordPress directly rather than going through my websites frontpage to save time, but clicking items in the WYSIWYG editor leads to a nice long pause as it loads information from the server.

Put simply for anyone thinking about choosing Virgin Media as their internet provider and doing a little research into the company, don’t. They can’t, or at very least aren’t willing to, solve these problems and will charge you 25p a minute to tell you as such.

This isn’t just some geek complaining because his connection isn’t absolutely perfect, its someone complaining because to load his own service providers webpage in the (pointless) attempt to register a complaint with the online technical support (which isn’t working) has taken over 5 minutes.

So in conclussion 6 months of Virgin Media ADSL has been absolutely hateful, for any potential customers I would suggest you go with almost anyone else, BT, Plusnet, UKFSN, hell use carrier pigeon, just not these crooks.

Things had been improving, pings were down into the 50 – 100ms range and while throughput wasn’t fantastic at around 2.5Mbps it was better than it had been.

 

Clearly today is not a good day.

After a little searching I’ve managed to get myself a job sorted which’ll help get some money back into the coffers.

Things have been getting a little boring lately, after over a month off work its easy to run out of things to do to pass the time, so I’ve decided to have a bit of a play with my processor collection.

Anyone whos dabbled with overclocking must surely know the name abit, and after a little hunting I was able to find one of these…

The Abit TH7II-RAID was both an overclockers dream and their worst nightmare, with Abit’s excellent SoftMenu III BIOS overclocking tools and a little siren that would go off when you pushed things a little too far…. Or not far enough…. Or on a Thursday.Unfortunately I won’t be able to have a play with this straight away as while I have some Socket 478 processors here, and my new PSU arrives tomorrow (HEXUS have taken back all their equipment now), my old RIMM memory modules are still at my parents house. When I next head back I’ll also be sure to pick up my Abit BP6 – complete with a pair of Celeron’s – and a couple other boards I have back home.

I also should have an Abit BX133-RAID arriving tomorrow, along with some PC133 memory, which should allow me to bring up my Pentium III test system once I have found a PCI or AGP graphics card and an IDE hard drive.

This means I should be able to start populating my CPU Archive with further information such as CPU-Z screenshots, speaking of which I will be adding to this section of the site again soon.

If you are looking for a fine provider of ADSL you could do worse than looking at Virgin Media. You could, for example, take all your money and set fire to it, as a sacrifice to the gods of Internet – this will not give you an Internet connection. Virgin Media is a pretty close second however.

Since moving back to Swindon in July I’ve seen my XBox Live Gold account (£40) completely wasted, played the superb Team Fortress 2 for a total of around 3 hours, and given up using Skype at all (which used to save me a tidy amount on phone calls). My housemate, Colin, has stopped playing Counter Strike: Source, despite being insanely good at it.

The reason? Latency.

Unless we want to play games in the narrow window between around 3am and 7am where our connection is actually usable then the Virgin ADSL network appears to be overloaded to breaking point.

Download speeds at 9:33am are a pitiful 1023Kb/sec. This is an ‘upto’ 8Mbit/sec connection. Our actual line only syncs at around 4.3Mbit/sec, which isn’t Virgins fault, and running tests at 6:30am sees Speedtest.net returning results at almost full speed. When everyone wakes up things fall apart however.

Now personally this isn’t a deal breaker, ok slow download speeds are frustrating but 1Mbps is just about acceptable, but the lag is simply appalling. Try playing a first person shooter with a ping of 200ms is absolutely pointless. This isn’t even as bad as the connection gets, at times we’ve seen reports of over 500ms.

Just for comparative purposes I got a friend in Scotland to run a test to the same server a few minutes later.

Download and upload speeds are way up (granted his line syncs at higher speeds than ours) and despite being around six times further away from the test server pings are a whole 200ms longer.

Just to put things into perspective, a good 56Kb modem and ISP can give pings around 120-150ms, and the ISDN line my parents had 10 years ago could offer sub-50ms times.

To make matters worse, Virgin refuse to accept high latencies as a fault, at all. Nor will they accept packet loss (100% packet loss to www.virgin.net over a ten minute time period at one point, while the site worked fine for other users). According to their technical support so long as BTs test site returns results of over 400Kb/sec they are not under any obligation to investigate the issue.

So far I’ve spent around £25 on calls to technical support without Virgin even accepting there is a fault. Some of the phone operators have tried their best to be helpful but others have been outright rude.

In total I’ve wasted the following due to having Virgin Media ADSL as my service provider.
XBox Live Gold - £40
Team Fortress 2 – £10 (one third of the Orange Box)
World of Warcraft 3 month subscription – £25
Phone calls to Virgin – £25

Add in the cost of the service (£20 a month for the ADSL, £10 a month for the phone line) and in one year I’m going to have spent £360 on a service which is bordering on unusable, along with a further £100 on tech support and game subscriptions.

Given Virgin spends millions on advertising I’d like to suggest they perhaps cut back a little on this and instead invest in some back-end infrastructure worth a damn, because right now they are quite possibly the UKs worst ISP.

The original Golf GTI was an incredible car, here was something that was inconspicuous, sensible, perfect for dropping the kids off at school or nipping down the shops, but if you were feeling playful could punch well above its weight, taking on performance vehicles many times its price.

But the little catagories bit at the bottom seems to think I’m in a computer mood right now so what relevance is this?

Well I want to see the same thing applied to the CPU world.

Anyone interested in computers can see the Extreme Edition’s or the FX’s of this world and want one but few can afford, or perhaps justify, actually spending £600 on a processor.

Of course there have always been enthusiasts favourites such as the Celeron 300A or Athlon 1GHz AXIA which with overclocking could offer incredible bangs per buck but I want to see some of the top end features pulled down to a mid-range hero product aimed at the enthusiast, a warranty which allows for slight increases in clock speed and voltage over stock and multipliers which if not completely unlocked allow an increase of 2 or 3x over standard to give it a little more headroom for those who can’t afford a motherboard capable of big FSB’s and memory to match.

A prime candidate for this would be the Core 2 Duo E4300. Right now it’s too close in price to the E6300, and with a 800MHz FSB speed rather than the 1066MHz of the E6300, to make it a sensible purchase. Whats more the reduced L2 cache means it’ll never, even overclocked, outpace a lightly overclocked Core 2 Extreme on outright performance.
But open up the multipliers and give it an Extreme Edition style warranty and suddenly you’d make it more attractive to the casual overclocker and help instill a feeling that Intel ‘cared’ for them offering enthusiast orientated products at a price point they could afford.
It may seem like a small trivial idea but in a market place ruled by ‘fanbois’ and with forum based flame wars it would probably tip a few people to choose Core 2 over Athlon 64 purely on this perceived kinship between producer and consumer.

This would help Intel too as it would drive adoption of the cheaper to produce Allendale core over the larger cache crippled version of the Conroe used by the E6300 and E6400. Give it a small price premium over the standard E4300 too.
OEM’s and business users would still buy the more expensive products if they wanted more performance as in those environment overclocking isn’t an option, enthusiasts have a nice new product catered towards them that makes them feel all warm and fuzzy inside, its win/win surely?

Or maybe I should just get some sleep, but if you see a Core 2 Enthusiast Edition remember who’s idea it was….