Spire

Techies PII 333 MHz PC

Desktop

Status

Retired; replaced by Barrax

Specifications

Intel Pentium II 333 MHz CPU
MicroStar 6117 motherboard with Intel 440LX chipset
2003 eSupport Award BIOS (see upgrade fun for more)
Hansol 17″ monitor (1152×864 @ 75 Hz, 32-bit)
Windows 2000 Professional Service Pack 4
512 MB SDRAM (1 × Hynix PC133, 1 × Samsung PC100)
ABIT Siluro (NVIDIA GeForce2) MX200 video adapter, 32 MB, at AGP×2
Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 120 GB IDE drive
3Com EtherLink 3C905-TX network adapter
LG 50× max CD-ROM drive
TDK CyClone 401248B CD rewriter
Internal Iomega Zip-100 IDE drive
Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 (see Sound Hack below). The card is a SB0060, which could be one of several versions of the Live! 5.1…

Fun

Unusual ways to eat CPU cycles #1: Run the Geiss 2 Winamp visualiser plugin in desktop mode (so that it effectively becomes dynamic wallpaper, except you get a pretty screwed up desktop with Geiss running as you can see from the picture), and then stick translucent windows on top of that :)

See the screenshot (JPEG, 220 kB)

Don’t try this at home.
How to make your desktop pwn #1:

See the screenshot (JPEG, 168 kB)

You may need to stand back to see this one; warning, excessive nerdishness ahead.

The drivers for my Live! card – but not those for the Sum∑Vision card I was using briefly – exhibit a painful problem. After approximately 320 to 350 MB of memory is in use (irrespective of how much is fitted), the sound card driver seems to get paged out of memory shortly after the point that you stop playing audio. When a program next attempts to play sound, the system hangs for several seconds with the hard drive light illuminated (but no audible indication of activity) before sound playback commences. When whatever I am playing in Winamp finishes, alert sounds repeatedly cause Windows to hang until I start something else playing.

My solution thus was to leave Winamp on permanent repeat. When busy coding on the Macintosh and I’ve only give Winamp a single file to play, I might loop around the same song three, four or five times until I twig that I’m stuck in a loop and hit pause (not stop!) to kill the audio. Pressing pause leaves the card locked in active mode and the drivers can’t wander off anywhere.

I used to hate the card in general, but after playing with another card, I’ve realised that all the sound-related crashes were caused by hardware resource conflicts at the BIOS level from having the card in the “wrong” slot, and the new card got a far worse deal. Sound cards only work in two or three slots of my motherboard: the ones on the right, not the ones on the left (although it doesn’t require that it go to the right of the NIC like the MicroStar 6119 board requires of the Live! card). And I have come to realise that the noise gating on the card is quite valuable, so it’s staying. It’s a good card.

Sound Hack

So, I needed a solution to its only flaw. I finally tried out the idea that I’ve had for a while: write an app that plays a loop of silence forever. This is Sound Hack. It eats no processor time, causes no bother and I can stop and start audio in Winamp as I please without trouble. Finally got my sound under control.