Parky

Howdy, I just noticed Naturalpoint has these beta drivers up on their site. Figured I'd give those who are daring enough to try them a heads-up. http://www.naturalpoint.com/trackir/06-support/support-download-software-and-manuals.html Awwww hell.......I'll go ahead and try 'em and report back. Cheers, Parky

My kill/death ratio, hopefully.......

Congrats, CJ!!! How long before she takes her first solo flight???? Parky

My guess is it's going to arrive soon. Certainly in time for Christmas....at which point you'll realize it was worth every minute of the wait. It'll be best gift you've bought yourself in a very long time. Welcome to the forum. Cheers, Parky

I've been running this software on a few Windows 7 machines for the last several weeks. Absolutely brilliant product as far as I'm concerned. I used to run the free version of AVG on most of the PC's I look after, and it's not bad as far as free protection is concerned. I've also messed with Avast and a couple of others. Interestingly enough, Security essentials has detected and successfully removed infections from a couple of backup devices I use. It's also prevented infections on the fly on a couple of other occasions. These were not false alerts. The infections in question have been thoroughly researched and analyzed, and constituted legitimate threats. AVG on the other hand, was either unable to detect these infections, or in a couple of cases, was unable to cleanse or successfully remove the infections it did detect. Security Essentials is available either through Windows Update, or can be downloaded directly from the Microsoft downloads site. It installs in a matter of seconds, has an extremely user-friendly and intuitive interface, is easily configured, yet has some fairly comprehensive advanced settings for those that like a little extra control over how it operates. I've found it to be far less system intrusive than most other protection utilities, and I haven't run into any bugs so far at all. Basically, it's a great and very effective "set it and forget it" alternative for those looking for a no-cost and hassle-free method of protecting their PC's from viruses and/or spyware. Highly recommended! Cheers, Parky

Indeed......because we all know just how much Parky loves Microsoft in general . Glad to hear the lappy is working out for you. I've been eyeballing the same machine at Canada Computers out here. Might just wait for the Boxing Day sales though. Don't think the bride would be too impressed if I bought it right on the heels of picking up a 42" 120hz LCD as my new monitor.... Cheers, Parky

You deserve a new computer....tell your wife to go.......buy herself a new hat. That's a very nice hardware array you have there and should run anything your throw at it quite nicely. Well done. Cheers, Parky

If you have your heart set on liquid cooling, which is only really necessary if you plan on overclocking your CPU, I can heartily recommend the item you'll find in the following link. http://www.corsair.c...70/default.aspx It's a sealed unit. The chances of it springing a leak are extremely remote.....even during a nuclear attack. Hit the Awards and Reviews link on the main page there. The feedback pretty much speaks for itself. Btw.....I'm running an i7-920 overclocked to 4 Ghz with the H50 Cooler, and it does an outstanding job. Cheers, Parky

Simon,That's a very good point, and nobody is more shocked that it works as well as it does than I am.And Paulo.....tell your friend there would be less risk involved in making his own at home...as opposed to receiving it through his e-mail. Cheers,Parky

Howdy Paolo,From my experience, the built in firewall with XP does leave a lot to be desired. The built in firewall with Win7 is more than adequate if you know what you're doing with it. It doesn't hurt to be behind a router in either case. There's no better firewall than one that's hardware based and properly configured.Cheers Mate,P.S.Anyone who's still using Vista deserves to catch a virus....lolol(Just joking of course ;-) )Parky

Sure will, CJ....XP SP2 or higher, according to this: http://www.microsoft.com/security/products/mse.aspx Gonna' try that again.....lol Working on a MacBook G3 with an outdated version of Safari.....lolol (Bear with me please) Cheers, Parky

Guild Wars.....hmmm. Yeah, I remember that. I spent several weeks developing a Warrior/Monk who could solo the underground and collect ectoplasm drops by the bucketload. Of course the developers felt the need to release a patch that "nerfed" my build completely (the bastards)........*sniff*. I feel your pain....speaking of which.....have you equipped the M60 yet in Black OPS? Great stress reliever..... Cheers, Parky

I don't think switching it on strictly via Catalyst Control will put any additional load on the card at all.....because at that point, triple buffering ain't working....lol. I'd like to hear BirddogICT's opinion with regard to this scenario though, just to be sure. Hopefully he stumbles on this thread and offers us some additional insight. This Z-bias thing is an interesting find by Hellshade nonetheless, and although I've fiddled with those settings in the past, I may just fiddle with them again to see if I get some positive results. Cheers, Parky

Unless you're using something like D3D Overrider to "force" triple buffering, what you're seeing is a placebo effect. There are only a handful of games that provide native support for Triple Buffering, and I'm pretty sure they have to be run in OpenGL in order for it to work unless you "force" it with a 3rd party application. Merely enabling the feature through Catalyst Control Center would result in no difference whatsoever, as as OFF runs exclusively in a D3D environment. Not sure if you were aware of this and thought it might be helpful....

For those who are interested... I had been using the Cat 10.7 drivers for quite a while, and they worked fine for me. Went out and picked up Call of Duty Black Ops (very nice addition to the COD series imho). Ran into some nasty freezing/lockup issues with that game running the 10.7's. Decided to swap over to the latest 10.10 drivers (Specifically the Accelerated Parallel Processing version....not that I think it matters much) . Anyway......Black Ops problem is solved. I've tested a couple of other games with these drivers, including OFF. No issues so far......everything running nice and smooth. Thought this might help anyone who was running into problems in Black Ops and figured it was worth a post. I'm running a Sapphire 5970 with the i7-920....just for reference sake. Cheers, Parky

He must have had his aircraft mechanic install a supercharger in his aircraft prior to leaving his airfield. No way they would have been able to keep up with him. That would also explain why he managed to kick the living schitt out of an entire formation of very good pilots before he died.

Actually, it was inaccurate when I said "he could have evaded the encounter entirely". That wasn't the case at the beginning of the fight. He was indeed caught right smack in the middle of more than one enemy formation....both high and low. As the fight progressed though, and reached much lower altitudes, escape would have been a viable option according to eyewitness accounts as follows: "Bowman and the fight had now descended to approximately 2,000 feet and roughly a mile behind the German front lines. This left Voss alone in the middle of the six S.E.5 aircraft. Bowman recalled ‘that it did not appear to deter Voss in the slightest. At that altitude Voss’s triplane had a much better rate of climb, or zoom than the S.E.5s had and frequently Voss was the highest machine of the seven attackers and could have easily turned East and gotten away had he wished to, but Voss was not that type and always came down into the fight again and again." Here's a link to the account in full......well worth a read: http://www.letletlet...-or-super-hero/ In hindsight, it seems terribly unlikely that Voss had a dead engine prior to his aircraft's final impact. It would seem far more likely that he was badly wounded, and was perhaps making a desperate attempt to land and finally passed out from loss of blood. Regardless, I firmly believe Lt. Voss made a concious decision to continue the fight until it was no longer possible to do so. I think the only time he would have chosen to withdraw was if he'd run out of ammunition, his craft was severely damaged or he was seriously wounded. As I said earlier......a true hero as far as I'm concerned. There's a very fine line between heroics, poor judgement and blind foolishness. I believe Werner Voss was confident enough in his own skills and the capability of the DRI that he decided to walk that fine line. Some will say it was poor judgement or blind foolishness that got him killed, but his valiant efforts certainly took a great deal of courage....and I'm inclined to think of them as being more heroic than anything else. Who was it that said "When I find myself in a firefight and surrounded by an enemy with superior numbers, they may very well kill me with my own gun, but they're gonna' have to damnedwell beat me to death with it, because when they finally get their hands on it, it WILL be out of ammo".... Cheers, Parky

Werner Voss would frown on this whole idea of "evading the enemy". Granted, he was flying a DRI when he decided to take on 7 SE5's from RFC 56....singlehanded no less, but I think he more or less proved that attacking under these circumstances is a viable option for a skilled pilot. From the accounts I've read, he managed to put holes in every single one of those SE5's, and severely damaged more than just one. Based on the climb rate of the DRI alone, he could have in all probability "evaded" the encounter entirely, but chose not to. Once again, a Fokker DRI vs the SE5 is not the same as SpadXIII's vs the DV, but the whole "take the attack to your enemy" strategy was well illustrated during this epic dogfight. Based on the amount of time Voss had been airborne during this event, there is speculation that the only reason he broke off the attack was that he'd run out of fuel or shut off his engine due to a fuel leak. If that was the case, it's anybody's guess as to what the alternative outcome may have been. A true hero in my opinion.....albeit a dead one. Btw......another outstanding video, Hellshade. Extremely entertaining and a great learning aid for those who need some helpful flying tips...that would include me....lol.

Evasion, once you've been spotted, and under those specific circumstances, is not usually an option. Take the fight to the enemy......you've got nothing to lose at that point. Well, except maybe a wing or two, and in the worst-case scenario.....your life. They wouldn't find any unspent ammunition in the wreckage of MY kite......unless of course my guns were completely jammed, or they found me shot to death in the cockpit!!

Hmmmmm.....it occurs to me that this problem is more likely CFS3 specific, as the OP clearly indicates "I have no problems with any other applications". If any of those "other applications" are games, it stands to reason that they would also stress the system to the point of failure, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Doesn't hurt to run some additional stress tests or check for temperature issues, but frankly I'd be more inclined to look at the application itself. This wouldn't be the first time we've seen this kind of finicky behavior from CFS3 in general. I think CJ is on the right track with his advice, but if the OP is uncomfortable with the idea of even swapping out a graphics card, I'm not sure I'd recommend he go messing around in the registry. Might be wise for him to hook up with a computer-saavy chum and have them attempt a complete uninstall of all CFS3 related software including removal of any relevent registry entries. Carefully reinstall CFS3 all by itself as per the Vista-proprietary instructions in Pol's link. Test to see if the problem still exists with just CFS3 installed, and if the problem is solved, carefully reinstall each add-on independantly, testing each one for a reasonable period before proceeding any further.

You really are getting soft, old chap.....

Not exactly......it's a wee bit more involved than that.....actually, a LOT more. Paulo......you opened the BIOS can. I'm leaving this one to you........

Olham......I wouldn't put too much faith in that Windows diagnostic tool. It's not all that reliable. We could simplify things somewhat here. As you did previously, run on two sticks only......for as long as it takes. If you get a system crash, put those sticks in the next two slots. If the system crashes again, take those two sticks out, put them in an anti-static sleeve and write a big question mark on it....lol. Now test the other two sticks exactly the same way. I'm sure you see where I'm going with this.....and yes, it's time consuming, but we really need to rule out bad RAM sticks as a possible cause of your problems. The problem (sometimes) with running with all four dimm slots occupied is the additional load it puts on the memory controller, which in your case is on the northbridge chip. Typically, that only becomes a problem when overclocking is involved as the northbridge will require a touch more voltage for the system to remain stable. The problem with that is the additiional heat that comes with increased voltages. That scenario really shouldn't apply here as you're running at default speeds right now. It is possible that your board just doesn't like having all four slots occupied even at default settings, but I seriously doubt that. I'm still inclined to believe you have ONE bad stick of RAM. Either that, or as Paulo has hinted, perhaps you'd benefit from a BIOS update that improves system stability. By the way.....those e8300 CPU's overclock quite nicely on the right platform.....just for future reference. For now though.....let's make sure you don't have any bad RAM ;-)

I don't see anything there that jumps right out as a possible cause of your crashes. If you're familiar with Event Viewer, there may be some valuable info there. That's the first place I'd start looking for clues. Also, I'd probably follow Von Paulus's advice with reference to eliminating your RAM as a possible cause. Running memtest with all dimm slots populated should tell you if it's a bad RAM stick or possibly even a bad dimm slot. The other way to go about it is to run on one single RAM stick. If the system crashes....pull that stick out, replace it with the next one. Rinse and repeat until you've tested all four sticks of RAM in the same slot. Then in order to eliminate the possibility of a bad dimm slot, you do the same thing all over again sequentially using different slots. Time consuming, but effective. We can worry about overclockability of the e6300 once you get the system stable. If memory serves me correctly however, those chips will overclock quite nicely on the right platform as long as you have an okay Motherboard, decent cooling and fairly good RAM.

Actually Olham, that's not what I said at all. What I said was I was confident that in Herr Prop Washe's case, his AMD X2 4200+ @ 2.33 Ghz wasn't the bottleneck in his system. The 8600GT graphics card is, and if he were to swap it for an ATI 5670 he'd see some significant performance gains. In answer to your question though, no....a 2.3 Ghz or 2.4Ghz CPU is not necessarily too weak to run OFF, although higher core speeds would certainly be beneficial. There are a number of factors that must be considered though. First of all, CPU architecture comes into play, the better the integrity of a CPU's chip architecture, how it handles instruction sets, the amount of cache memory and son on and so forth. Having said that, and assuming we're not dealing with a crappy CPU, memory or chipset, overclocking can indeed result in some serious performance increases. In your particular scenario, a 170 Mhz increase in core speed isn't going to get you any worthwhile performance benefits.....certainly none that would be noticeable anyway. In my case, I have an i7-920, which at stock speeds runs at about 2.66 Ghz......not all that much faster than 2.33Ghz when you think about it, but due to it's superior architecture will run OFF just fine when left at default speeds. Never satisfied with "just fine", I run it at 4.0 Ghz with no heat or stability issues whatsoever. That kind of substantial overclock results in some tangible performance increases.....it can also result in some fried hardware if you don't know what you're doing. Best to proceed with due caution when overclocking any hardware at all, particularly if you're relatively inexperienced. If an overclock results in instability or heat issues, it may be best to bite the bullet and start looking at upgrading some hardware. Sounds to me like you've got your stability issues sorted out, and as long as the performance levels you're seeing are reasonable enough for now, it might be best to leave well enough alone until Santa drops some new hardware down your chimney.....Cheers