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.

Tragedy at the Garbage Junkyard

I was playing through the Barkeep's mundane missions and chose to "Eliminate the bandits at the Garbage."  This mission has you returning to the junkyard to kill off the bandits that infest the woods surrounding the Garbage Junkyard.  What I didn't realize is this mission is a death sentence for Bes and the remaining fighters in the junkyard and the game does intend to collect by any means necessary.

"Neither a saint, nor a scoundrel. The Barkeep knows his worth and is respected by all stalkers." ~ STALKER Wiki

Eliminate the bandits at the Garbage

Reward: 2000 RU, bottle of vodka and an F1 grenade.  A job, eh? Let's see what we've got… Aha! Here you go: can you knock out that pack of bandits at the Garbage? The Duty, with all their speeches about law and order, just can't get down to it. Those are some rare scumbags, so they won't last long anyway. But the guy who gets them first will score big… and the booze is on me, of course.

The woods behind the junkyard are filled with several anomalies, artifacts and a few goodies stashed by the bandits.  If you take the fight tot he bandits rather than allowing them to invade the junkyard, expect to run into 8-10 bandits intent on killing you and everyone else in the junkyard.

"I try to fight the lawless just as I did on the outside. I train up rookies and teach them to survive in the Zone." ~ Bes

I rushed back into the woods and carefully engaged all of the bandits while dashing behind trees, crates, and the concrete highway tubes.  I quickly dispatched all of them and began looting, confident I'd spared my  Junkyard Comrades a death at the hands of the vicious bandits.  About halfway through stacking the bodies, I began to hear sounds of gunfire and dogs.

Occasionally, dogs will run through an area and the local will open fire on them.  But these were different sounds, the dogs were attacking the remaining Stalkers, and they were winning.  I ran over to their campfire in time to see Bes firing away at two dogs.  I managed to shoot one of them, but Bes fell to the remaining dog.

Glorious Russian BBQ: Not all dogs go to heaven, some burn slowly, tenderized and marinated by 9x19...

I played through this turn of events several times, but in each turn, Bes fell to either dogs or bandits.  This man's time had come and death was certain to punch his timecard.  Distraught over losing an ally, I did what any Stalker would do - I avenged his death.

Stacking the Dead
This tactic was born of necessity.  Some maps can get pretty crowded and when looting the bodies, you need some way to tell which have been looted and which have not.  Stacking them into piles can alleviate this.  In addition to wasting time, it can also make you a target to re-spawned forces - making more bodies needed to be stacked.

STALKER Complete 2009 Mod

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl Stalker Complete mod

Having finished the game with the "bad" ending, I've now gone back through a couple of times to pick out the undone missions and pick-ups.  I also decided to try to download the "Stalker COmplete 2009" Mod my brother had suggested.  The mod is available at the link listed below.

 

http://www.moddb.com/mods/stalker-complete-2009 

 

This mod makes graphical, effects, sound, and some balance changes to the game that really do improve gameplay.  I am impressed with the changes they made to the game and there is a 2012 Update in the works.  The improvements don't seem to have any negative performance problems and I've noticed some of the buggy play has been fixed with this mod.

 

Complete 2009 Mod adds graphics, sound, and effects improvements as well as addressing some game play issues with the original game.  The graphical fixes are simply awesome.

 

The changes to the graphics make me wish I had a better monitor and is quite close to tempting me into putting the game on my laptop.  The gameplay fixes work quite well and I'm glad to see the often buggy freezing and lagging is gone.  I was already quite impressed with the graphics in the game and this mod add even further refinement.

 

A word of warning during download, Firefox did not like the install file and did some strange things when downloading the install file.  It caused my system to hang up several times, requiring me to reboot and delete the downloaded file.  I tracked this back to an issue with Microsoft Security Essentials - I had to disable the program to download.  This was on my desktop machine which is running Windows XP Pro SP3 - am not sure why this happened, but it did cause me some trouble downloading.

 

I eagerly await the next version of this mod and am on my way back through the game.  Thanks to my brother for suggesting it shortly after buying the game for me!  :)