Laptop Cooling Pad

My home network is really my pride and joy.  I have 8 machines total - 2 netbooks, 3 desktops, and 3 laptops.  There is a 9th machine in storage, but I don't use it for anything and it largely just sits in the closet.

At the heart of the network are two machines - My HP DC7600 and my Compaq laptop.  Unfortunately, Compaq (Hewlett Packard), through brilliance on their part, made rather poor design moves when building the Presario CQ62 series.  These are a budget line of machines that price between $250-$500.  And are comprised of Intel and AMD offerings.

My particular machine, Presario CQ62 220AU suffers from heating issues.  This is because Compaq uses the same chassis with most of their CQ62 - Intel and AMD, simply putting the different motherboard into the same case.  Unfortunately, this was a mistake on their part.  The Intel offerings were pared with Intel GFX, which, quite frankly, run very cool.  They are somewhat underpowered and most likely underclocked to improve battery life.

Commando as Told via animated GIFs

It started as somewhat of a joke, inspired by the work of several others.  I decided there should be a more complete telling of the story.  I will admit, I scoured several dozen websites to find these and spent the better part of an afternoon trying to get them to upload.

Unfortunately, my preferred image host, imgur.com did not work properly with some of the images.  It's times like these I wish I still had my hosting account.  I will add pictures to this post as I find them, but please feel free to help out.

Retro Gaming via SNES and NES Emulators

Last couple of weeks have been busy with job interviews and in between meetings and general job hunting, played a few retro classics - Unreal Tournament '99, Hitman, and quite a bit of NES and SNES games.  I went through Super Mario Bros. 2 and 3 and Super Mario World. 

I hadn't beat Super Mario Bros. 2 in several years - the final boss, Wart, is a major pain in the ass.  You must hit him repeatedly - 8-10 times to take him down.  

Note: this video is from Mario All-Stars Version of SMB2, which is also the basis for the GBA version.

Super Mario 3 was fun to run through again.  The nice thing about playing it with an emulator, you can save progress and start up from scratch.  Also, the save feature comes in handy when playing the match up game.

Super Mario World, is also quite a bit of fun to play.  Luckily, the game has a built-in save feature.  Saving with the emulator will let you pause a game indefinitely.

It's interesting to note, playing these games on the original NES rom is much more fulfilling than the SNES Mario All-Stars.  While the Mario All-Stars allows you the option to save in-game, the graphics and feel of the game is different.  The sense of tempo you build up playing the old NES version is lost on the newer remakes. 

Still, a fun time and worth a few hours of mindless button mashing.  Pick up a gamepad to play any of these games via emulator.  I can suggest the PS2 USB gamepad as it is the best SNES copy out there.  There are remake gamepads to replicate both SNES and NES pads, but most of these you will have to buy from an overseas seller.