Miscellaneous Knowledge

I thought it was time to upgrade my Core 2 Duo E6300, which has a default clock of 1.86Ghz but has been running at a steady 2.8Ghz for the past few years. So, I put down £220 on a new Q9550, a Core 2 Quad 2.83Ghz 12MB Cache monster, based on the new 45nm process. My motherboard is a GA 965p DQ6, which has a LGA775 socket. This is electrically compatible with all LGA775 processors.

However, I foolishly assumed that a LGA775 motherboard will take all LGA775 processors. Wrong! The BIOS must also support them. I only found this out when placing the processor in the motherboard, reattaching the heatsink and trying to boot. One weakness of the GA 965P DQ6 motherboard is that it gets stuck into a reboot loop if something is wrong without any helpful error beeps at all. It’s only when I checked the CPU compatibility list that I found my error.

So, i’ve got a new motherboard on the way, Asus’s PQ5 SE. Lets hope it all goes to plan and recgonises my Intel RAID0 hard drive array.

I recently formatted and reinstalled my computer. My Steam folder was over 100GB, a lot of games. Rather than making a backup copy of the Steam folder I decided to use the inbuilt steam backup. Big mistake.

The backup operation took a couple of hours, when making a simple zip wouldn’t have taken nearly as long. Once this was complete, I copied it to an external hard drive and did my format/reinstall. I installed steam and then began the backup operation. It took 18 hours to “complete”, or not. It seems it didn’t restore anything, simply recreating the Game Cache Files with no content. Excellent.

I re-ran it again with just a single game and it worked. It looks like i’m going to have to restore them one by one, not a short operation. Add to the fact there is no “uncheck all” option, and each time I uncheck one it takes ages to actually uncheck it while it recalcuates totals. Even so, some crash.

So i’ve given up, i’ve now got the prospect of downloading it all again on my pitiful 2meg connection. At least I have a 330GB offpeak allowance from my ISP…

I reccomend against using the Steam Backup option. Just ZIP or RAR your entire steam folder. Much quicker, much simpler and it WORKS.

Days are always long, you can’t fit 86400 into a short.

If you don’t get the joke, don’t worry – you’re not missing much.