I'm Your Handyman

For the past week I've been perusing peripheral options for my gaming activities. Oh, yes, I've been playing games too*, but my mind has been on other things

Perhaps it's the weather, but I've turned my attention to such projects as what it would take to repair the deck --likely replacing about 10-15 deckboards-- as well as finish the paint job that was so rudely interrupted by my knee injury. Once the decking is repaired, then I can focus on making some stands for the plant containers on the deck as well as getting a replacement gas grill.** 

All of this means spending some money.

Some of it is obvious --wood for the deckboards, etc.-- and some not so obvious: if I want to get a quicker result in replacing the decking, I have to purchase a power miter saw. I have a manual miter box, but it takes much longer to cut. I looked into power miter box rentals last year, and the price of the rental was enough that if I use the saw for more than one trip it is more economical for me to just buy a decent quality inexpensive power miter box.***

There are other projects that require spending some money too, such as getting the carpet cleaned. Last year in late Summer, I discovered that rental places were refusing to rent carpet washers, so if I wanted a carpet cleaner I have to buy one myself. And believe me, our carpets could use a good cleaning.

So yeah, there's a lot of stuff like that on my mind. And that has been creeping into my game playing, too.

***

Before you even think about it, let me make one thing clear: I'm not gonna turn into a streamer. 

Sorry, that's not my thing. And while I'd love to have a nice studio setup, likely combining it with a music practice room in the house, that ain't happening. We don't have the money for it, and if we did we'd get other repairs done first. 

So while the concept of getting an A/V setup going is very tempting, if for nothing else to indulge any music recording I'd like to perform****, that's not possible at this time.

Instead, I've been focusing on what I can do to improve my in-game interactions. 

Yes, I've got a wireless headset that I use. 

The Logitech G933 Artemis Spectrum.
Pic is from PC Magazine, likely
originating from Logitech.

 

And especially when I have to get up and move around a bit from time to time, yeah, it's a lifesaver. Not the greatest sound quality for music, but it'll do for both work and gaming. Build quality is good, and while it doesn't do noise cancelling, I've only had to crack it open to put tuner cleaner in spots once.

However, if people in the house try to talk to me, I'm not likely to hear them. When working, that's not an issue, but if I'm gaming I'd like to hear them. Because for some reason as soon as I put that sucker on in the evening to go play, somebody in the house just has to have a conversation about something. It's like magic, I swear.

So while the oldest mini-Red was around, I borrowed her Blue Snowball Ice microphone to use while I raided. It solved the isolation issue, and in a bizarre way it solved the "hey, I need to ask you something" issue. Apparently when I started using it, people did NOT want to be heard talking to me while the mic was up and running, so they saved their discussions until later.

(Genius!)

The Snowball is a pretty unassuming microphone, but it's not mine, as it follows the oldest mini-Red back and forth from college. So, I thought, I could just buy my own microphone and just do what I need to do without relying upon pestering my daughter for hers.

It's never as easy as it sounds, right?

I have since gone down the rabbit hole of USB microphones.

Indeed. This is just a small portion of
the available microphones. And the article
this is from only highlighted one (!) of
these mics. From Techstunt.

I can honestly state that I have no idea just how much time I've spent researching USB microphones, but I now know enough to realize that the most popular mics out there, the Blue Yetis and Snowballs, may not be the one for me. 

There's a time and a place for tweaking a microphone's gain and whatnot to make things just perfect, but when I want to just get going quickly that can suck. Especially when the software that comes with the mic (like the Blue Yeti Nano or X) deliberately has the gain set too high by default. And while I'd love to take advantage of extra mic patterns, the reality is that I won't need them any time soon. So it kind of boils down to the sound for the get up and go.

I'm not going to pass on the Blue Yeti's just yet, because the main competition in my mind is the Elgato Wave 3, and I cant seem to effing FIND one out in the wild to make a physical comparison. I hate going in blind like that, but if I want to buy a Wave 3, that's likely what I'll end up having to do.

And even then, there are some others out there, such as the Rode NT-USB Mini that's caught my attention as well.

Geez, I hate making a decision here.

***

The mic aside, I've been hoping to fix up our PC desk. The sliding keyboard + mouse part has a laminated fake wood look, and that cheap laminate has been fading away. I figured that now was as good a time as any to get it replaced with a nicer laminate so I didn't have to use a mouse pad when gaming. 

But boy is that going to be annoying to find. 

Kind of like this but without the
wood/MDF. From Cabinetmaker Warehouse.

 

I've already been to a couple of hardware stores and struck out, so I think I may have to go to a woodworking specialty store, such as Woodcraft, to find what I need. 

***

My old backup solution has bit the dust. It was a Seagate Go system, long out of date, and now the hard drive died, and a replacement didn't work at all. Which sucks. 

So.... I might have to invest in a real backup system, like a Synology NAS, because my internet connection isn't good enough for me to consider backing up everything to the cloud. And I scouted the costs of 2-bay and 4-bay NAS devices, and yi-yi-yi.....

Very nice, but the price....
From Synology.

 

***

And, at long last, there's the speakers.

 

 

 

 

Back in the day, this was da bomb.
Pic from Amazon.

 

The speakers I'm currently using are the now ancient Altec Lansing ADA-305 woofer and satellite pair. Back in their heyday (circa 1999) they were considered the best speakers for the PC, but 22 years later their age has been showing, particularly in the crispness of the the highs and the overall sound. I've been contemplating making my own pair of speakers with a subwoofer, but I've also been considering just replacing the drivers for the satellites and see how that works. Either way, this is the one area that I refuse to skimp on, because I love listening to my ripped CDs when I sit nearby, working.*****

***

So, there's a lot of other things to consider moving forward, and by comparison my gaming is actually a nice diversion from all this.

*After a week of regressing and not being able to kill K'T, we one shot him this past Monday. And to while away the time, I started yet another game of Stardew Valley. For the record, I always think I'm going to choose someone else, but I typically end up picking between Penny and Leah to romance and marry. Probably because both remind me of my wife.

**While I love using my Weber kettle grill, using charcoal grills on wooden decks is typically not a smart move. And since my primary location for using the charcoal grill is on the driveway (for safety reasons), with the mini-Reds now sharing a third car we don't have as much space as we used to. Hence my interest in gas grills. This time, I'm getting a Weber gas grill; I've had Coleman and Sears/Kenmore gas grills, and I've learned my lesson. If you want a grill that lasts, get a Weber.

***And yes, those exist. Ryobi and Kobalt are two brands that make decent inexpensive models, but you have to check them out to see if they'll work for your situation. Seriously, it's worth it to do some hands on testing.

****I was a radio DJ back in college, and for a span of 5-6 years in the late 90s-early 00s I helped to run the sound at the Cincinnati Celtic Music and Cultural Festival.

*****My work laptop can't access anything in my home network, from printers on down, because of the VPN that the laptop uses. Oh well.

A Gamer's (Other) Pastime

I've been doing some tinkering over the past week or so on my system, because that's what a computer nerd does I suppose. The reason for these little tweaks were patches to my Radeon RX 470 graphics card that fixed the performance issues I saw after the last Windows 10 Creators Update.* I figured that if those patches did the trick, maybe this six year old PC can still pull its own weight for a few more years without needing major upgrades.

Apparently somebody is a Corsair fan.
From pocket-lint.com.

The system is what was in 2012 a top tier i7-3770 system, although with a slower hard drive, a mid-tier graphics card, and a good 1080 resolution screen. Don't get me wrong, it's light years faster than the old 2007-era 32-bit Intel Core Duo (running Vista, no less) that it replaced, but I realized that eventually the i7-3770 would be eclipsed by faster CPUs with better surrounding architecture. Honestly, I didn't think it would take this long, but I'd argue that's the state of PC development these days. Unlike my experiences at the turn of the Century where the brand new AMD Athlons were top of the line for a scant 6-8 months and totally eclipsed after 2-3 years, the i7-3770 based system has only recently been knocked off of the "recommended" specs for PC games.**

Even PC cases have come a long way
from when I started building machines.
From Gamers Nexus.

Obviously the machine still functions perfectly fine for non-gamer activites, although my wife complains a bit about the loading performance when I start it up***, so if I had to perform major component upgrades I'd be very likely to keep this system as primarily her system and just build a new one for myself instead.

However, what really caught my eye were my experiences playing games that you'd think would have major issues stressing the system but actually don't.

I figured that newer MMOs, such as ArcheAge, Wildstar, and ESO, or regular games such as the aforementioned Rise of the Tomb Raider or Mass Effect: Andromeda, would have issues with the old PC. Much to my surprise, however, none of those games --after accommodating the increased loading times-- stressed the PC much at all. A good part of that is, I believe, due to my insistence on sticking with 1080 resolution rather than trying to run on 4K; without the 4K performance sync to push the RX 470 to its limits, my PC has an easier time of it than it ordinarily would have.**** But I also think that the biggest difference between the newer and older games is the architecture behind the games.

Nope, no problems here. Go figure.
From origin.com.

Take LOTRO, for instance. At 11 years old, it is a fairly ancient MMO by today's standards, and you'd think that a top end PC whose guts are 8 years old (but a 2 year old graphics card) would be able to run this at max settings without an issue. However, the lag when you enter into graphics heavy zones with lots of toons, such as Bree, LOTRO struggles on my PC. I pulled up the Windows Resource Monitor and ran LOTRO with it in the background for a little while, just to see what the results were, and I discovered that while LOTRO wasn't stressing my CPU much (about 15-20%, so it was active on one core most likely) or the GPU, it was hitting the hard drive and network quite a bit. Some network activity is to be expected, it's an MMO after all, but the amount of activity suggested that LOTRO was busy getting data from the network servers and then either transferring it to my disk or memory. Even if it was placing the data straight into memory (and the GPU), LOTRO was referencing data on the disk to an extent that wasn't necessarily the case in other MMOs. Back in 2007, Turbine likely decided to utilize their own version of memory swap to get around the 32-bit memory limitations, and in the age of 64-bit PCs this isn't necessary. However, the old architecture remains, and you only notice it when your PC bottlenecks.

In SWTOR, released in 2012, a similar issue is the case as well. The Windows Resource Monitor showed that my GPU was pegged when I ran about Alderaan --the locale that has caused the worst performance issues outside of an Ops run for me*****-- and CPU was at 25% (likely an entire core). The thing is, the RX 470 was sitting at 1 GB of memory utilization when it had 4 GB to play with, so it was being artificially constrained. It's only when I pulled back on quite a bit of the graphics resolution that the GPU was no longer pegged, but the CPU was in a near constant state of activity. This suggests that a CPU upgrade would help a bit, but with only one core being utilized, there's only so much that motherboard/CPU upgrade can do.****** Again, SWTOR is an older game that needs to be rearchitected to spread resources around to take advantage of newer PCs' capabilities.

I was about to mention that the older machines run on DirectX9, but I don't think that's as much of an issue as at first glance. Age of Conan runs perfectly fine in either DirectX9 or DirectX10, and switching between 9 and 10 in LOTRO doesn't have an impact. And I do play GW2, which runs in DX9, and the only issues I have are loading. Once the zone or locale is loaded into memory, everything plays fine.

***

So what does all this mean? Basically it means to stop worrying and just relax. There's only so much you can do without doing a complete rebuild, so fretting over whether an 8 year old PC can handle games at highest resolution without hiccups is a bit of a fool's errand.

That doesn't mean that a guy can't dream or tweak (or whatever). It does mean that I'm likely going to have to build a PC of my own, because the Old Battleaxe isn't going to give up the ghost anytime soon, and I can't see my wife saying "Yeah, we need to upgrade the PC" either.

If anything, getting faster internet speeds is what she'd want, and in a few years that'll take care of itself with the mini-Reds all off to university. (And that will cause it's own problems.....)





*And here I thought the performance issues were long term degradation of the system. Oh well.

**Rise of the Tomb Raider had the i7-3770k as the "Recommended" setup in 2016, and I can't imagine that in 2018 that's still the case. The specs are TBA at this time, however.

***Replacing the old had drive there with a SSD or a hybrid would help out a lot, but I'm not so sure I want to do that if it means a ton of work breaking the old hard drive into a SSD for the OS and traditional hard drive for games and other applications.

****If I'd go with a 4K monitor, I'd want one big enough to really appreciate the 4K difference, such as 32" or larger. But I'm not about to blow that sort of money on a system at this time, because priorities.

*****Yes, I've been in Ops runs before, almost totally during special events. Don't look at me like that!

******I kind of expected there to be disk activity like LOTRO has, but that wasn't the case. My old Barracuda was doing a good enough job of keeping up with the system, although I did notice that when Chrome was on in the background but only when SWTOR was running I saw disk activity while I was running at around 9/12 GB of RAM. Once I killed Chrome, however, the disk activity vanished. As another test, I killed SWTOR instead of Chrome, and still the disk activity went away. Therefore, the two combined must have led to some disk swap activity.