…haven’t exactly been the most fun for me, firstly the Phoenix has officially changed hands and the future is uncertain, whether it’s doors will ever open again is neither here nor there at the moment. What is almost certain is live music will never be seen or heard again in the venue that kick started the live music revolution in Plymouth. We now have venues like The Hub, and The Viaduct, both have a 5.5Kw Opus sound system, which sound amazing, but was always out of the price range of the Phoenix. I went out to The Hub last night, although my night was tinted with sadness as I knew that it was the lasy night the Phoenix would be under the ownership of Leslie and Helen. I have decided to stop engineering completely, I want to concentrate on my photography which started my interest in live music in the first place. The gig last night was very good, I would go as far as saying it was excellent, I took my first pictures outside of the Phoenix in three months, which can be found here.
Other problems over the last couple of days have been computer related. My PSU decided to die in the middle of writing a blog entry, which was ironically about how much I hate computers. I was having all sorts of problems with games like Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 being too dark and setting the 3D display settings brighter in the catalyst drivers made no difference, every time I started the games up, the brighter gamma levels in the catalyst drivers didn’t kick in, so the games were really dark and unplayable. Now I really think it was power related as my 300w PSU obviously couldn’t cope with the latest raft of upgrades, mainly the graphics card that is powered directly from the PSU, which the old Geforce 4 didn’t do. Seems that pushed the already stretched PSU over the edge. So the net result was that I had to spend out £40 on a 450w PSU which should be adequate for my needs. If you are wondering what I have connected, which you are not, but hell I am going to tell you anyway; 5 x 80mm case, 1 x CPU cooler, 2 x optical drives, 2 x hard disks, 1 x graphics card and 1 x cold cathode tube, which is quite a lot of strain for a 300w PSU. Everything seems to be better now, the machine is running a lot quieter now as well, seems that it was the PSU fan that was making all that racket before. Still need to test the 3D performance, but fingers crossed it will work without a hitch, then I can be a happy gamer once again!
Some airport based fun for you… pure comic genius this…
Update: I am still having the same problem with the dark 3D graphics in fullscreen mode. Initially it worked as it should, then the next time I tried to play the same game, it reverted back to the default settings of the Catalyst drivers, which isn’t bright enough for the Windows desktop, let alone games. I have searched all over the internet for a solution, but despite finding some people with the same problem, no-one seems to have a solution to the problem. What’s the point of having a DX9 capatible graphics card if I can’t even see the damn effects, ARGH!!! I have even posted on the PCFF, something that I swore I would never do after an incident a few years ago, that’s how desperate I am to solve this problem!