What did I do for December until now(January 2009)?

Again, no updates for a long while. This is due to various circumstances, especially due to restrictions of time and good things to post. With that to say, I only post up things that feels worthwhile to post. =P

Okay, so during the first week of December, there was a small PC Fair at Wisma Saberkas. I decided it was a good time to search for... a new graphics card. And then, I saw it, the only ATI Radeon HD4670 unit available at one shop, the Gigabyte ATI Radeon HD4670 512MB GDDR3. According to various benchmarks I've seen, it is much faster than the nVdia GeForce 9500GT and very close to the nVdia GeForce 9600GSO. Overall, it's performance rivals the previous mainstream HD3850 by the least.

This is the result from 3D Mark Vantage Perfromance preset. Overall, seems to be somwhat at least 2 times faster than my previous card(nVdia GeForce 8600GS).

I'm not going to say much about it, since there are many reviews on this card elsewhere(just search for it using Google).

Okay, now on to the next subject...
Recently, I got addicted to Gundam. Through out December(when I'm at home and not going elsewhere), I watched Gundam 00(pronounced as Double O) up to the latest episode and the whole of Gundam Seed Destiny(although disappointing this one was). If you haven't watch Gundam 00, go watch it now! =P

Due to me liking Gundam 00 a bit too much, I even bought some Gundam 00 Gunpla(short form of Gundam Palstic Models) models when I went to Kuala Lumpur(KL) in the middle of December. I bought a total of 9 Gundams! All from the Gundam 00 series.

Man, that's a lot of Gundams and it was troublesome to bring home as I wanted the boxes to stay in good condition.

I'm not going to go into much detail yet, but I'll list out what I bought.
FG Gundam Exia x1
FG Gundam Dynames x1
FG Gundam Kyrios x1
FG Gundam Virtue x1
HG AEU Enact Custom Ali al-Sarchez x1
HG Gundam Nadleeh x1
HG Gundam Throne Zwei x1
HG Gundam Throne Drei x1
NG Gundam Exia(1/100 scale) x1

FG means First Grade, it's the most basic and easiest to build. Though, the details are lower that other grades and you'll need to paint it to make it look like the picture on the box. All are 1/144 scale.

HG means High Grade. Seemingly, this is the more popular grade to buy and most of them comes in 1/144 scale with great details(barely need to paint).

NG means no grade. It mostly comes in 1/100 scale(I ever saw a 1/60 scale NG Gundam Exia =P). However, it feels a bit more fragile than HG for me though but much better than FG.

Why did I buy so much? Especially when it was only a 1 week trip? Why? Because there was a 20% discount to all Gundam Gunpla models nearly everywhere I went. At that point, it felt worthwhile to buy at least some... but ended up with 9 Gundams, all from Gundam 00(since I like their designs more).

Sadly, I was unable to find me a HG Gundam Exia(finished stock I guess D=) and 00 Gundam(not yet available at that time I guess). I couldn't even find it in Kuching so far(except Exia, but feels a bit expensive here >>). I wonder where is a good place to get these stuff. I also want to buy the markers for lining and maybe some paint for it too. =P

Anyways, that's all for now. Stay tuned, if there even anyone that even looks at this blog, for a small review on the Gundams I bought. =D

Long Time No Update!

Well, with life going on and lack of mood to type long articles filled with information and sane stuff, I, today, decided to post up a short review article on an Acer desktop I bought during the April PC Fair.

Acer M5640-284X
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400(3.0GHz, 6MB L2 cache, 1333MHz FSB)
Genuine Windows Vista Home Premium
1GB DDR2 RAM
320GB Hard Drive
DVD Super MultiPlus Writer
NVDIA GeForce 8600GS 512MB Graphics Card
10/100/1000Mbps Gigabit Ethernet
40-in1 Card Reader
Wireless Keyboard & Mouse
Edifier E1350 Speakers

Free gifts;
D-Link Wireless Draft N Router
D-Link Draft N Adapter

Price: RM2188(!)

Looking at the specs, then the price, you have to say "WOW!". I mean, seriously, it's the best-bang-for-buck I've seen in a while.
Sadly it was cut short because of the 1GB of RAM, so I decided to manually upgrade by adding another 1GB of RAM(Kingston) for dual channel. The good part about this is that it speeds up this desktop by quite a lot. For those curious about the full specs you can visit the specs page on Acer here(this is for the newer model, difference is only the extra gig of RAM and they are using Sonic Gear speakers).

Okay, on with the short review, but not any normal review, a hardware review, just a short and simple one.

Read more »

Vista Transformation Pack 7

Well, if you don't know what the title means, go to this site first.

Vista Transformation 7 or VTP7 has just been released today and can be downloaded from the site i provided earlier.

Now, I shall say that I already have Vista Home Premium at home but still wanted to try out this ever popular extension for the Windows XP SP2. Sadly, I could not rate 10 out of 10 as it is not perfect, but nothing is, but it still has the look and impression that will make some people say, "Hey, you have Windows Vista?". Haha, it did happen with one of my friends who had the earlier VTP6.

Then, it is time for some pictures!

First of all, the only graphical problem I've encountered so far. It's not a big deal since it's caused by Toshiba's zooming tool... which I never found a way to turn off(actually it was something else, something very simple was the cause =P). If you look at the bar on top, I chose Vista Home Basic skin just because my laptop doesn't seem to support transparency, seems only, maybe I missed an option.

I just love the sidebar! It's so well done and works like the real Vista's sidebar! The start menu also looks great. It's not half bad as I picked the Vista Home Basic skin. Somehow, I could not see any of my recent programs when I picked the Aero skin. I dunno why, maybe my laptop's fault or a minor glitch.

As a whole, I'm pretty impressed and I rate it on a scale of 7/10. I advice you to download it if you still have XP and want to make it look like the nicer looking Vista. =P

Maple Story, once again...

After roughly 2-3 years, I returned once again to Maple Story or Maple SEA(MS for short) since I'm playing the southeast Asia one. I have to say, nothing much changed. I wished I got to keep my first account all those years back, it got country locked and I couldn't log in into it at all. I came back a year or two later, making a new account which I'm using right now. It somehow did not get deleted even though I did not use it for months, well I did sometimes, when my sis wanted to give MS a get-go.

Today, I decided to play it again as I currently have some expandable free time. So far I'm level 13 at this moment. Yes, it sucks but at least it(the game character) has a nice strength stat. =P

Besides MS, I'm gonna show you a nice(to me) pic of my current desktop. Hehe. =D
Lookie there, it's a sketch I drew during recess today which I just lazily contrasted to a blue hue and sized to a small size to be enlarged into my current desktop wallpaper. Winamp is currently playing the Kingdom Hearts II game start screen "Dearly Beloved". Lol, I tell you, it makes me feel like making a game for this... I wish I could, lol. If ya cannot tell, the pic is based on Kingdom Hearts.

Oh yeah... if you claim this sketch/desktop to be yours, I'll hunt you down and take you down! >_O

That's all the randomness for today... my "g" button on the keypad doesn' t work so well. Bleh.

Long time no post, now I post =P

Aww, the holiday is about to end soon and it has only been a few days since I came back from my visit to the kampung. Ah well, at least I got to play two of my want to play games on the now semi-working Nintendo DS emulators! So happy! ^^

I get to play MegaMan ZX and Pokemon Pearl(I'll play Diamond later after I finish Pearl, maybe). Here are some screenies of some fun I had, well just to boast my happiness. lol.

Hearthrome City, the lower part is the item finder(much better than ever before!)
My main Pokemon party, and yes Lucario and Pikachu are hacked.
That's Aile using Model X at the transceiver at Guardian HQ.

At the very least most of the parts of the two games worked well with minor problems. I used the No$GBA for Pokemon Pearl and NeonDS for MegaManZX. Sadly, NeonDS doesn't emulate sound unless I missed the configuration. =P

Now off to more Pokemon fun... the best part is that you don't need to worry about your bag being full anymore! So sweet. ^^

Term Exam is... OVER!

Yay! To make things even better is the fact that it is the school holidays now! =)

It was a tiresome one and a half week of test and the old last minute study habit made things go ow. Cramping facts and techniques within a night's work is not easy, especially in high school, not to mention the least favorable subjects(and no I heart Maths).

Anyways, Now it's the school holidays, time for me to enjoy some gaming fun! ^^ Namely, Kingdom Hearts 2 Final Mix+ and some others. So wish NDS emulators work with most of the games I wanna play, sigh. Well, in a few more years I guess. =(

I know that not many people read this blog, maybe none at all at the moment, but... umm... I got nothing to say. =P

At any rate, I wish a happy school holiday(yes some other countries are experiencing summer!) and a happy Gawai!

Basic port-ing, for a friend at most, but can be useful for others(Vista)

Before you are able to use a port, you must give a static IP for your computer to connect with the DSL. A random IP will sadly make port forwarding nearly impossible.

Okay, to make this fast and brief, I will give you a summarized edition for now.

See that? Click it.
When you arrive at the Network and Sharing center, click that.
Right click and pick properties.
Spelling fix: "Obviously", missing the "v".
Just follow the on screen instructions...
You can put any number, well almost. The IP address must be in your DSL's range, I'd advise not to go into the hundreds. DNS, well any should work, if not, well, I'm too paranoid to tell you mine, lol.

Well, when you are done with the previous step, you are done with the earlier parts.

Got to portforward.com to get a better insight of this.

The following is for if you want to configure the bitTorrent client, utorrent.

First of all, configure your utorrent port by going to Options > Preferences > Connections.

Just enter any 5 digit number or let it do by itself by clicking "Random Port".

With that, I direct you to this site to further this configuration.

That's as brief as I can do this kinda random post, lol.

My (not first) Experience With Windows Vista on my new laptop(brief)

If you lookup the US Toshiba website, you should know about the Toshiba Satellite A100 series, which I'm one of them. It's pretty big and heavy, but hey, I'm not traveling to lots of places. =P

The Vista experience.
Well, if you have browse around and read the many, many articles on Vista, you should have a good idea how it works and its many faults. Hey, it may be new and looks quite nice, but it can get annoying.

When I opened and turned on my laptop once again, the annoying UAC(User Account Control) keeps bugging me when I tried to install some important programs(Anti-Virus, Anti-Spyware, Mozilla Firefox, etc). At least I can still disable it by going to the user account menu in the control menu(enable classic view to make it easier).

After disabling that, everything should be easily tolerated. lol. Well, there's not much more to say which can be gotten from most of the other Vista articles around. There IS one more... the "Welcome" screen takes quite a long while to load. At first when the startup loaded quite fast, I thought it was gonna be fast. I was quite wrong. =P

Dual-booting Windows XP and Xubuntu 7.04 Fiesty Fawn

MAJOR UPDATE 27/04/07(look at the bottom of this post if you're lazy to re-read)

Well it has been three days plus since my last post. No, my Vista isn't here yet, so forget about that for now. Right now, I'm gonna give you, the readers, a brief info on how I dual-boot Windows XP and Xubuntu 7.04 Fiesty Fawn(also applicable to all other Ubuntu distributions) as well as some other stuff which I did yesterday. =)

What's dual-booting?
Dual-booting is having to OS(Operating System) install on one computer. Some have done tri-boots and quad-boots but I don't encourage you to do it unless you are brave enough to take some risks which can spoil your computer(same goes for dual-booting).

Well, what's Xubuntu? More specific, what's Ubuntu?
Visit this site to find out about Ubuntu and Xubuntu.

If you read that and have visited the Xubuntu webpage, you would know by now that Xubuntu is the lower end one. I chose it because my couldn't handle Kubuntu(tried this one first, failed) as it need RAM more than my laptop could handle. Yes, I'm dual-booting on my laptop, which I'm using right now to post this.

Okay, on with the long blog post which some may not want to read at all. Hey, this is good reference here! =P

My laptop's specs;

Source: http://pc.toshiba-asia.com/

Name: Toshiba Satellite L100-C430
Pre-installed OS: Microsoft Windows XP Home SP2
Chipset: ATI Radeon Xpress 200M
CPU: Intel Celeron M 1.6GHz
RAM: 256MB DDRII 533
HD: 60GB SATA 5400RPM
OD: CD-RW/DVD
Screen size: 15"
Internet connection: 56k, Ethernet and wireless

See how lame my RAM is? Yeah, that's right 256MB only... and runs Windows XP... =P

WARNING!
I have to admit, I didn't check up on my XP partition after the successful Xubuntu dual-boot setup. If you still wanna try, I'll tell you how to fix the errors that I've experienced at the bottom of this post.

Want to try it to? Here's how I did it.
First and most important, get any of the Ubuntu distributions(desktop versions) or else you won't be able to install it even(logic). If you want speed, get Xubuntu, if you want nice looking interface, get Kubuntu. But it doesn't hurt to get the regular Ubuntu. After it's downloaded, burn it onto a CD. Don't burn too fast as it might cause the CD to glitch during its functions.

Before attempting dual-booting, one needs to get the proper software. Partition Magic or Grub are some of them. These two are the most advisable ones to use. Preferably, use Partition Magic(you can get it through "certain" methods).

"Install Another Operating System"

Source: http://softpedia.com/

Once Partition Magic is installed, create a partition using the menu option on the left as shown in the picture above. If you can't find it or want to do manually, is not a problem. You need two partitions. One ext2 for the Linux OS to install on and a swap partition which should be 2 to 3 times the size of your computer's RAM. I advise you to give at least 10GB for the ext partition and make sure it's a primary partition. Now apply it and let the program do its magic.

Once the process is done pop in the installation disc and pick the topmost option. If you are planning to dual-boot on a laptop, then press F12 or whatever hotkey the laptop gives to go to the multiboot screen and pick CD/DVD or whatever indicates your optical drive. When the desktop is fully loaded, click the "Install" icon on the desktop to install. The first 3 questions are up to you to answer. Once you reach step 4, pick manual. Then, pick/highlight the ext2 partition and click on the "Format?" box. The following procedures should be easy to do. Let it install. Once it's done, pick the reboot option and take out the installation disc.

Pick the topmost option once again and let the desktop load. The rest, is up to you. By the way, if you think anything is lacking, open up the Add/Remove Application program from the System menu to download/install or remove programs. If you want to run Windows programs, visit this site here. For games, get Cedega.

How was my experience?

Look at how many games I've installed using "Add/Remove Application".

My internet related stuff, so many browsers I've installed, lol.

I have to say, Xubuntu is very damned fast, Firefox opens in less than 5 seconds! It takes even longer on Windows which is like 30 seconds. My wireless didn't work very well at first, but just adding a few "numbers" made it work fine till today. Also, my USB mouse and flash drive work well, surprisingly(to me). Well, I haven't done much with it just yet, I still have to get use to something quite new to me, but it's a good learning experience.

Lol, that's one long wall of text with a few pictures, maybe I'll put some extra pictures up when I have some extra time to edit it. XP

How to fix errors[that I know of, might add more later on(add comments to ask)].
-XMNT2002.exe and autocheck error which prevents XP to continue its functions(BSOD).

Look here for visualization.

-For this one, just load Xubuntu and use the Add/Remove Application, select "all available applications" on the top right selection bar. Then, search "parted" in the search bar. I advise you to get both, just in case one or the other fail to function for your hardware configuration. After it's all installed, pick your XP partition(NFTS) and un-tick the "hidden" flag in the properties which makes the NFTS partition unable to boot.

My first experience with Vista... was cut short(another quickie)

Unluckily, I haven't got my notebook, not for another week. Oh well, at least I got a chance to try it out for a bit(around 10 minutes). The good news about it is that the boot up process is not as long as I thought it would be. It was fast at a total estimated time of 3-5 minutes(not really). The only negative part was when the OS has finally loaded to the desktop, I was prompted with many stuff to let Vista run or not. Never, that I can remember, XP doing that. =P I won't bore you with the already known details. I'd give pics(the not already on most websites ones), if only I HAVE it with me right now... lol.

Other good news is that I finally got my brand new black BenQ 7.0 megapixel digital camera and... Kingdom Hearts 2 Final Mix+! Yay! The drawback of not getting the notebook was nullified by this two nice items. Here are a few SMALL pics of these items.=)

The front of the camera.


The back of the camera.


Look how thin it is!


The front of KH2FM+... sorry for the shiny-ness.


The back of KH2FM+... still shiny.

Right after this blog post, I'm gonna have some fun with KH2FM+! Though, it is in Japanese, but who cares? It has English voice overs. Roxas's voice is so sexy. =P

Still, watch out for "My First Experience with Vista" next weekend.