Hackintosh with a P55A-UD3 (Rev.1.0)

Now that I have a spare 1TB drive with me, I wanted to try something that I wanted to do for a long time. Which would be, installing OSX natively on the PC. Few months ago, I installed it in Virtual PC, but it was no good.

On TonyMacX86 forums, I saw a thread that someone with the same motherboard got OSX up and running. Alas, it wasn’t the same revision of the board I have, and he had a different graphics card. But it looked promising, as he had posted all the steps that he followed to get OSX up and running.

After a lot of fiddling around and cursing, I got mine to run OSX.

Crysis 2 MP happiness

I’m loving playing with the Marshall. It indeed is underpowered and you are screwed if you miss a shot (and you most of the times have to use the melee to bring down the opponent) but it is so much fun. It is so light weight that it allows me to move so fast. I am also using the perks that suit the fast movement. Energy Transfer, Stealth Enhance and Mobility Enhance is what I am using. I have to use the silencer for the gun and although it adds more weight to the gun hence slowing me down a notch, I cannot attract more people because the firing rate is so damn low with this shotgun.

On the good side, I am improving my accuracy and K/Ds. Too bad I couldn’t record any video with the Marshall. The FPS drop is affecting my performance.  

The stats as of 4/25 are like this.

Logicool (Logitech) G500 replacement

I got the new mouse yesterday via Black Cats. Funny how a cat delivered a mouse. With it I also got a wrapper to send the old mouse back and the shipping address. I will send it tomorrow.

Yes, the middle mouse button is working fine for the moment. I don't know how long it will last though. Since the mouse has three years of warranty, I will be covered for the entire time I will be in Japan.

Logitech gets points from me for the customer support.

Playing Crysis 2

I bought the game off EA store when I went back to Sri Lanka. It is cheap over there. About 4 times cheaper than here in Japan. Anyways, I played through the Campaign and it was fun. It was kinda lonely though, as I was the only one with a nanosuit. The game is playing very well on the HD5870 but it is DX9. I wonder what sort of performance drop we will see with DX11. Doesn’t matter. We don’t have to apply it I suppose.

I recorded a few videos of the campaign as well as multiplayer games and uploaded to youtube (Love this internet connection!). Check them out below. (You can scroll through the list using the arrows)

These days Suresh and I are playing multiplayer together. Too bad we cannot set it so that we always are on the same team. Doesn’t matter. Here are the stats so far. I don’t have all the stuff unlocked at the moment. I am playing with the Marshall these days. It is fun playing with a shotgun. Heck, it improves the accuracy. XD

G500 lost its middle button and Logicool RMA service rocks!

My 3 month old Logitech G500 mouse was losing its middle button functionality. Too much Crysis I suppose. Now it doesn't work at all. No click sound. This is exactly what happened to my G5. I guess I need to take more care of the mouse.

Anyways, I contacted Logicool about this and they were great. They are replacing the mouse in a couple of days. All I had to do was to upload a screenshot of the invoice and they are sending me a new mouse. They told me to send back the broken one later, which is alright since I do not have to pay for shipping. Now that I have some experience with sending packages NO THANKS to the DOA Samsung F3 drive, I think I will be fine.

People in Japan don't cheat so this must be why they are sending the mouse without even checking the broken one. When will SL ever become like that??

Samsung F3 RAID-0 benchmarks

Finally I got the RAID volume up and running and the real world performance is very decent. Copying large files and extracting large archives is much much faster than before.

Here are some synthetic benchmarks.

I sent back the defective F3 yesterday. I hope it gets there.

Samsung F3 drive woes continues

In the previous story I mentioned how my girlfriend’s brother’s Samsung F3 drive gave a lot of trouble. I wonder if he will ever go and claim warranty. He is waiting for someone else to do it for him. I just hope the warranty period is more than 1 year, because otherwise he will have to get a new drive.

Now, that was one isolated problem. I was having trouble with my F1 drive which I use as my data drive. (F4 is for backup only.) The troubles were only speed issues. When I copies files and sometimes did few things at the same time using the F1 drive, the PC would become very slow and stall at times. It is not a newly developed problem. That is how drives work. They are so slow because they are slow to access files.

So I was thinking about adding another drive and build a RAID-0 array. I know, RAID-0 is not good for data, but since I backup my data, I didn’t see a problem with that. But the issue was finding an identical drive. Remember this is anyway slow for today’s standards. Newer 7200RPM driver were faster despite having the same rotational speed. It was mostly due to the drive density, which related to how much data could be read in one go. Newer drives were at 500MB or even 667MB (as for my 2TB drive) per platter. Anyways, the cheapest F1 drives I could find online were very expensive, compared to the newer and faster drives everyone was buying these days, specifically the  Samsung F3 drive.

One messy Samsung F3 1TB drive

My girlfriend’s brother is once again having problems with his PC. Previously it was the integrated NIC getting burned and now it is his data drive failing.

I cannot explain what really happened. At first, he couldn’t write to his partitions. It would make the PC freeze up. However, he was able to read the files. When I plugged it in dad’s PC, I couldn’t see the first partition. I could see the second partition, but couldn’t write data nor read some files.

I gave Spinrite a shot. It found errors, some were not correctable; some were. But after running it for hours and hour, and seeing the estimated running time as 10000 hours, I gave up.

One more thing. The partition table seemed to have gotten screwed up. There was a 0 sized partition at the beginning and a 0 sized partition at the end. I tried removing these from Acronis Disk Director but it didn’t find those partitions. But the weirdest thing comes now. It somehow screwed up Windows in dad’s PC. Upon booting, it would always detect an error and automatically go into recovery mode. There was no way to boot normally. When I told the recovery process to go ahead and do its thing, it would stall there.