Mal and Weasel’s Tech Crap

(Or, the continuing adventures of Zoey the Laptop.)

I’ve mentioned my HP laptop in the past – a Pavilion N5170 that was phased out of production ten years ago. Its age shows, pretty plainly, but a few extra attachments later and somehow I’ve got it playing more games than it has before. It’s becoming my old-games machine more than anything else.

I was at first disheartened that Half-Life somehow dropped to 2 seconds per frame when running in hardware-accelerated mode. But I wasn’t upset. After all, Zoey’s performance in software rendering was quite good, given its Pentium 3 processor clocked at 600 MHz.

Lately, though, I’ve been experimenting with games that can actually put the onboard S3 Savage/IX graphics chip to use, all the while discovering new limitations on what the laptop can do. I’m amazed at how relatively locked-down the hardware is; there are some things that the drivers refuse to let it do, and I know of no way to allocate additional memory to the graphics chipset. (Though that’s only become a problem in one large instance.)

The first game I tested recently was Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear, the game that turned me into a gun nut. I wasn’t impressed with how it completely failed to display the in-game graphics, but then, I had assumed that it needed to run in Software mode. Upon (begrudgingly) setting the renderer to the S3 chip, though, not only did the game display graphics, but it actually looked just like the game used to on the Pentium 2 that I first played it on – right down to the texture filtering!

Then I remembered, I had some old discs for games that didn’t work on Francis (the Dell XPS gaming rig), among them being Star Wars: Jedi Knight. I remembered this game coming out at the precise moment that 3D accelerator cards were coming into fashion, and figured that if my S3 didn’t run it, then I wouldn’t bother with the thing again. To my amazement, it worked at a perfect 60 frames per second – even despite the game running from an ISO (which tends to negatively affect poor Zoey’s hard drive performance).

Here, though, is where I discovered the major limitation. The S3 Savage/IX does not have enough onboard memory to run at any higher than 800×600 with 16-bit color. Any higher, and the game will usually complain about it and revert to a “safe” video mode.

Zoey’s also played host to games that Francis suddenly decided to dislike, such as Links Extreme (with its Demolition Driving Range), Balls of Steel (with its Duke Nukem table), and a couple others that escape me at the moment. Ah, backward compatibility…even though I dislike it sometimes, I enjoy the fact that I don’t need to rely on it!

About this time last month, we had our Verizon-provided router die on us. Well, maybe the router itself didn’t die, but I had noticed that the power cable (a standard “wall wart” type) appeared to have warped a bit. Lacking money, I called Verizon to get them to ship me a new router.

That router showed up after a week. Took ‘em long enough, I thought, hooking up the replacement router (while first checking to see if the power cable would fit in the old one…it didn’t). This router somehow completely failed to connect to the internet, after three hours of it attempting to ping the ISP. So another router showed up in two days. This third router succeeded in getting the family back online, at least enough to browse websites and play World of Warcraft (which is really all my parents seem to care about, ‘Net-wise).

Unfortunately, this router being a slightly different model from the previous one, has quite a different web interface than before. It looks similar, and in fact the instruction guides are almost identical, but there are little things that prevent it from being as friendly as the old one.

Little things like, well, port forwarding. This router has absolutely failed to allow me to forward ports for things like serving files outside the LAN, hosting games on Skulltag or Half-Life, and seeding for BitTorrents. In some cases I can’t even join other peoples’ game servers. Even wireless support seems to be dropping the ball, with my XBox 360 being, at times, unable to connect to the Internet at all. This was not the case with the other router. Setting up port forwarding through the front-end proved to be a frustrating experience, even for Malachai, who does this sort of thing for a living. After three hours of fiddling about with it, neither of us were capable of getting my Linux server (Ferretcage) to have any presence outside of the LAN. There goes one of the main reasons why I set the thing up.

I am most displeased with this router, and I am not sure I trust Verizon to provide more. I might as well quit while I’m ahead, though, considering that if I were to get another router, there might be a chance that it’ll have an even more frustrating front-end than this one. Malachai continues to recommend that I buy the same model of router that he uses; that might actually be an option, but I’d need to keep this router around, assuming his model doesn’t have an Ethernet Coax port with which to serve Verizon’s FiOS TV channel guide and on-demand programming. (No idea why the cable boxes aren’t hooked up with Cat5 ethernet or similar.)