Back On Track

Check out this awesome EVE song paradoy by Aideron Robotics pilot Billy Daniels.

Cautionary Tale

So I'm was loving my new ASUS PC when yesterday morning after some casual gaming before work an app opened up and notified me that there was a BIOS update available for my machine, did I want to install it?

Maybe I was distracted, maybe I was so comfortable with constant windows updates and the smoothness that my new PC was running for the past two months since I purchased it that I was lulled out of cautionary awareness into complacent dullness, whatever, but I clicked OK without a second thought.

"All done, you need to restart your machine," it prompted happily after a minute of work.

Computer shuts down, computer starts, power light comes on, internal fan spins...

And nothing else.

No beeps, no POST, no BIOS.

She's dead, Jim.

As much computing power as my PC has.

The worst part is I should have known better. I know BIOS updates are risky business, I know how badly a botched BIOS update can destroy your motherboard, I know. But I slipped up. I hit OK.

Now I'm entering the long torturous process of manufacturer tech support and product returns.

MOAR POWER!

My current computer was 5 years old and while it ran EVE fine, it was starting to get long in the tooth despite an upgrade to add an SSD drive last fall. I tried to upgrade the RAM from 2 GB to 4 GB so I could play Call of Duty Ghosts but the motherboard rejected it despite a BIOS update. But I could survive, even if I couldn't run Fraps while playing games or enjoy my Call of Duty games.

But then we ran into a problem. The Boys like playing Minecraft together but only one of them could handle the 10 FPS on the old computer with the 19 inch screen. While this was not an earth shattering issue, it was starting to cause some irritation.

Well, I came into some money recently and got permission to upgrade my main computer so the 5 year old PC could be handed down the chain and replace the 9 year old PC.

I didn't get a top of the line machine, but I'm pretty pleased with the ASUS machine I picked up on sale. The CPU and video card are decently rated and I have ordered a 250 GB SSD drive to throw in later. I can record EVE at 60 FPS with no lag and highest graphics so I hope to get to making videos again.

 Here's the spec sheet for you hardware experts.

Processor Type - Intel Core i5-6400 up to 3.3 GHz
Processor Speed  - 3.3 GHz
RAM - 8 GB DDR4 2133 MHz
Hard Drive Capacity - 1 TB SATA HDD
Hard Drive Speed (Revolutions Per Minute) - 7200 rpm
Optical Drive - Super Multi DVD RW
Pre-loaded Operating System - Windows 10 64-bit
Graphics Card - AMD Radeon R9-370 2 GB (1 HDMI, 2 DVI, 1 DP)
Dedicated Graphic Card - Yes
Video Memory - 2 GB

How To Move EVE to new Solid State Drive

My computer is about four years old but it was pretty decent when I bought it and upgrades to RAM and video card have kept it pretty good for the gaming I do. Except the hard drive. The old IDE drive was so slow with the IO that some games took forever to load and I was beginning to suspect some of my mystery 2-3 second freezes in EVE were a symptom of this as well.

With SSD prices dropping lately and my wallet flush with cash from selling my soul, I decided to purchase one and add it to my computer to store my games. Here are my steps to how I moved my EVE client and kept the settings on my Windows 7 computer.

1) Install Solid State Drive - This means get it in the box with power and data connected, and formatted in Windows. If you don't know how to do this get someone to help you. On my computer my SSD is the E: drive

2) Copy your EVE client files to the SSD. For me, this was copying the folder C:\program files (x86)\CCP to E:\CCP so I could get both the Tranquility and Singularity clients.

3) Start EVE launcher from new location. Notice how it works but has lost all your settings, overview tabs, shortcuts, etc. It's OK, we'll fix that.

4) Go to your Appdata\Local\CCP folder, for me that was C:\Users\\AppData\Local\CCP. You may need to tell Windows Explorer to show hidden files in order to see the AppData folder. Under there you will see a number of folders like this image:

See how each client instance creates its own folder? The new one for my SSD client instance is e_ccp_eve_tranquility. Copy everything from your old Tranquility instance folder to the new one. For me this was from c_program_files_(x86)_ccp_eve_tranquility ro e_ccp_eve_tranquility.

All Done! Start up EVE on your Solid State Drive and see all your settings like you expect.

BONUS: I decided to move my AppData\Local folder to the SSD as well since most games make use of this folder for storing local settings and saves and such. In Windows 7 if you look at the properties of AppData\Local folder there is a Location tab, and in there you can select a new location. I suggest manually copying everything to the new location first and then just changing the location without windows copying them for you, but your mileage may vary.

Upgrade!

Back in the day when Warhammer 40K table top gaming was my raison d'etre I didn'd have much need for a high end gaming PC. I played games but they tended to be strategy games with abstract squares and circles or static pixelated models that an on board GPU could handle. A big boxed stored special off the shelf had more than enough horsepower for those games and mainly saw use for browsing the internet forums for new army ideas and fighting in holy wars over rules interpretations.

When Eve came into my life, the Shelf Special PC could not keep up. It often crashed warping into belts with three other players, and had performance issues all around with the graphics. So I upgraded.

But I was still fairly afraid of hardware (my strengths being in software) and I was constrained by budget on how much I could spend. So I went to Dell and in March of 2007 I purchased a Dell Special for my gaming needs. With a 19 inch monitor this PC proved adequate for Eve and other games; some lag was encountered but overall it was operable and playable.

Then in Christmas 2008 I upgraded to the 24" widescreen monitor which looked beautiful... but gave my Dell Special graphics card a stroke in trying to keep up drawing Eve in 1600x1200 display. So I delved into the complex and archaic world of hardware, specifically graphics cards, and managed to get a decent card to help my PC overcome the extra real estate. It took some wrangling, including bending some cooling sink prongs and sacrificing my DVD drive's ability to burn DVDs, but it worked and Eve was beautiful once more. The only time Eve lagged was in situations of gas clouds or grids with lots of structures and ships like complexes or missions.

But all was not well in my world still. Switching to voice comms to change channels often meant 10-15 seconds waits between alt-tabs, bringing up a browser sometimes was good and sometimes caused my machine to thrash for 30 seconds, and as the corp moved into 0.0 and did complexes together I found the client lag very frustrating and trying.

But most importantly, my wife discovered that her photo editing was taking longer due to a new 12 megapixel camera. Since she was taking more photos of large size, they had to be moved to an external drive and the lag involved with browsing them and editing them was driving her crazy. I got the green light to get a new PC.

The Search

I didn't want to make the mistakes of the past, but at the same time I was leery of trying to construct a PC from scratch. Worried about socket compatibility, adequate power, distilling the best parts for a reasonable price since I still had a modest budget... it was all very stressful.

I avoided Dell and the big box store knowing now that they cut corners on quality and use big numbers to try and make the sale sound good, and I went to a local shop that specialized in servicing the more knowledgeable clientele. I saw that they had a series of "bundles" built for various purposes and I found one that was in my price range. I then took every piece of hardware in it and checked up on reviews on the internet, confirming that the piece appeared adequate for my needs.

Motherboard with decent CPU? Check.
Graphics card with comparable Frames per second in benchmarks to my old one? Check, big improvements actually.
Memory? Harddrive? Check.
Windows 7 64 bit compatible? Check.

I checked with some corp mates into PC hardware and got confirmation: decent setup for the price. I pulled the trigger last Thursday and went home with my new PC. MUHAHAHAH!

The Result

Last night I logged into Eve from the new PC, setup voice comms and overview settings, and overall I have to say.... WHAT A SWEET RIDE! Client side lag in the fleet gate camp I participated in (~200 ships) was non-existent with high graphic settings and all effects turned on. Switching programs to Teamspeak was seamless, and the browser loading was not even noticeable. So far, its been extremely satisfying.

I haven't tried dual clients yet, nor compared windowed mode versus full screen mode, but I'm confident it will all be good for the next three years for Eve playing. Next big challenge will be to see how Batman: Arkham Asylum looks and performs on the new PC. My old PC didn't even match up to minimum requirements (CPU was too low) yet I slogged through it and finished the game anyways on worst graphic settings and horribly laggy fight scenes in some cases. We'll see.