Sunday, March 25, 2007

Minor Technical Issues


Issue #1
- For some reason certain games cause my computer to emit an incredibly high-pitched whine at regular intervals. I am particularly sensitive to this noise. Every time it occurs I wince a little, then it goes away and I'm relieved, and then it happens again and I get the urge to smash something.

The whine appears when running Oblivion and Guild Wars.

It does not occur when playing WoW, which is to Blizzard's credit (people often wonder why WoW is so popular, and there are many reasons, but I think a big one is that the game runs on most of the major OSes from - at least - the past seven years - even, apparently, Linux via Wine - and loads up fine even in Vista without having to download support drivers).

From basic searches it sounds like the problem might be a video card fan. The fans are usually spinning at a percentage of their maximum and running intensive 3-d causes them to spin faster. If they aren't [seated properly/constructed correctly] then there can be a whine. I have no idea what I will do to fix this, other than NOT play Guild Wars or Oblivion.

That won't be acceptable for very long.

Issue #2 - The M-Audio Jamlab doesn't work with Vista. Just flat up will not install a few simple drivers for a USB port.

On their website they say Vista support is coming, but they don't even have Beta drivers yet.

I realize that in some sense this is still the early-adopter period. Maybe there were such major changes to DirectSound that the M-Audio guys need some time.

It still sucks.

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