General Gaming Article |
- Newegg Daily Deals: All Pre-Built Desktop PC Edition!
- GOG Insomnia Sale Brings Discounted DRM-Free Titles to Sleepless Gamers
- Steam Hardware Survey Shows Linux Gaming Community is Growing
- Microsoft Apologizes for Dancers in Schoolgirl Outfits at GDC Party
- Give Your Hard Drive a Check-Up
| Newegg Daily Deals: All Pre-Built Desktop PC Edition! Posted: 21 Mar 2016 12:29 PM PDT Top Deal: PC builders are a special breed. While we all have our own separate interests and skill sets, but the one thing that connects us is our passion for building our own systems from scratch. Few things are more satisfying. Be that as it may, life sometimes gets in the way, and you might not have the time to roll your own rig. And if you have a friend or family member looking for a new setup, it's sometimes easier to point them to a pre-built rather than to offer your services, which inevitably turns into panicked midnight phone calls about why their PC is acting up (usually user error). Whatever the reason, if you're need of a pre-built machine, then check out today's top deal for an iBuyPower Desktop PC FX-6300 (3.50 GHz) 8 GB DDR3 1 TB HDD Windows 10 Home 64-Bit for $540 with free shipping (normally $550 - use coupon code: [BTEEHGF23]). This thing pairs a 6-core AMD Vishera CPU with a Radeon R7 360 graphics card for affordable gaming. Other Deals: CyberpowerPC Desktop Computer Gamer FX-6300 (3.50 GHz) 4 GB DDR3 1 TB HDD AMD Radeon R7 240 2 GB Windows 10 Home 64-Bit for $520 with free shipping (normally $530 - use coupon code: [BTEEHGF24]) CybertronPC Rhodium FX-4300 (3.80 GHz) 2 GB GeForce GTX 950 8 GB DDR3 1 TB HDD Windows 10 Home 64-Bit for $570 with free shipping (normally $580 - use coupon code: [BTEEHGF22]) Dell Desktop Computer APU A10-8700P (1.80 GHz) 8 GB DDR3L 2 TB HDD AMD Radeon R9 360 2 GB Windows 10 Home 64-Bit for $550 with free shipping (normally $580 - use coupon code: [BTEEHGF26]) Asus Desktop PC APU A8-5500 (3.2 GHz) 4 GB DDR3 1 TB HDD AMD Radeon HD 7560D Windows 7 Home Premium 64-Bit for $340 with free shipping (normally $360 - use coupon code: [BTEEHGF25]) |
| GOG Insomnia Sale Brings Discounted DRM-Free Titles to Sleepless Gamers Posted: 21 Mar 2016 10:03 AM PDT Prepare the caffeine drip Having trouble falling asleep at night? As luck would have it, GOG's annual Insomnia Sale is underway, so if counting sheep isn't working for you, stop fighting it and go beef up your game collection at reduced prices. If you're new to this, the way it works is pretty simple. GOG serves up "a round-the-clock steam of deals. Nonstop 'till the games run out." What that means is GOG will post a game at a discount, for which there will be a limited number of copies available. Once those copies are snatched up, another deal appears. This process continues until all the games are going, "Don't fall asleep, don't look away… heck, just give up blinking. Prepare yourselves a cauldron of hot coffee and stock up on eyedrops! Our infamous Insomnia Sale returns with a relentless stream of limited-quantity deals, one game after the other, nonstop until the games run out. Or the sheep doze off," GOG says. This time around, GOG plans to treat sleepy-eyed gamers with several titles never featured on its website before. And as an added bonus, if you buy 10 games, you'll receive a random extra title for free. Need help staying awake? GOG tasked its team of streamers with filling its Twitch channel with nonstop game play. There will be special guests, too, though GOG didn't throw out any names. |
| Steam Hardware Survey Shows Linux Gaming Community is Growing Posted: 21 Mar 2016 09:18 AM PDT Not so fuzzy math If you look at Valve's most recent hardware and software audit for Steam (February 2016), you'll see that Linux is represented by 0.91 percent of Steam gamers. That's less than 1 percent, and considering that it was at 2 percent two years ago (March 2013), it would appear that Linux is on the decline. That isn't the case. The number of Linux gamers on Steam is actually growing, not declining. How so? As PCWorld correctly notes, Steam's overall user numbers are also growing, so when you do the math based on percentages, there are actually more Linux gamers now. Where things get tough is that we only have some of the data to work with, since Valve sporadically announces how many Steam users there are However, if we compare the numbers from October 2013 to the numbers from February 2015, it paints a pretty clear picture of what's going on. Let's have a look. In October 2013, Valve announced there were over 65 million Steam users. That number nearly doubled in February 2015, when Valve announced over 125 million active Steam users. So, let's do the math based on that time frame.
Even though there was a slight percentage drop from October 2013 to February 2015, the number of Linux gamers on Steam nearly doubled. Unfortunately, Valve hasn't stated how many Steam users there are today, but it would be surprising if the above trend didn't continue to some extent. What's also interesting to note is that Steam's survey doesn't factor in Valve's SteamOS. If it did, the percentage of Linux gamers represented in the February 2016 survey (unchanged at 0.91 percnet) might be a little bit higher. This doesn't mean you should rush to replace your Windows gaming PC with a Linux box, nor does it mean that's what happening. In the grand scheme of things, the number of Linux gamers is a very small fraction of Windows gamers. However, it's nice to see that the community of Linux gamers is growing. |
| Microsoft Apologizes for Dancers in Schoolgirl Outfits at GDC Party Posted: 21 Mar 2016 08:20 AM PDT Not the message Microsoft wants to send Twitter lit up with criticism and condemnation at Microsoft's decision to hire female dancers in schoolgirl outfits for an Xbox party it hosted at the Game Developers Conference last week. It also drew stern remarks from Xbox boss Phil Spencer, who said the party did "not reflect the core values and beliefs of Xbox, where we believe in respect." The party took place last Thursday night in San Francisco. Just hours before it kicked off, Microsoft held a networking luncheon for women in the industry, The Wall Street Journal reports. Spencer also posted an email that was sent to employees regarding the matter. In the email he talks about having an "inclusive culture" and the perception that consumers have on the Xbox brand. "It has come to my attention that at Xbox-hosted events at GDC this past week, we represented Xbox and Microsoft in a way that was absolutely not consistent or aligned to our values," Spencer said. "That was unequivocally wrong and will not be tolerated. This matter is being handled internally, but let me be very clear – how we represent ourselves as individuals, who we hire and partner with and how we engage with others is a direct reflection of our brand and what we stand for. When we do the opposite, and create an environment that alienates or offends any group, we justly deserve the criticism." Women in skimpy outfits were once commonplace at various technology conventions, where they're often referred to as booth babes. However, there's been a concerted effort to move away from the trend, especially as tech companies look to bring more women developers and engineers into the fold. A woman named Kamina Vincent from Australia attended Microsoft's Xbox party. She told WSJ that she spoke with some of the female dancers in plaid miniskirts. When asked why they where there, the dancer told Ms. Vincent that they were hired to interact with attendees and to try and get them to dance. "Game developers are predominately male and to see women being paid to mingle really devalues women developers," Ms. Vincent said. Since this is being handled internally, it's not known what actions Microsoft plans to take. |
| Give Your Hard Drive a Check-Up Posted: 21 Mar 2016 12:00 AM PDT How to give your hard drive a checkupLongtime computer users have likely at one point or another experienced that sinking feeling after their trusty rig develops a new "click-click-click," or a whirring sound. It certainly should raise the suspicion that it could be the last gasp of a failing hard drive. The problem is that while in some cases these new sounds are a "click of death" for an aging storage device, it's not always the case. For example, a cooling fan that has worn out can sometimes have a similar sound to a crashing hard drive. If you have any fear that your mechanical hard drive is reading and writing its last bytes of data, the first priority should be to grab any and all data from it. In some cases, the telltale noises will precede the drive's total failure, and there should be a window of opportunity to access the data before the drive completely calls it quits. This can also be an opportunity to verify that backups are working and current, including those on a USB external hard drive or network attached storage (NAS). However, even with backups functioning, a direct data grab off the potentially failing hard drive is a good idea at this point, so that you can be sure the data is captured to a convenient location, such as a USB flash drive, optical media, or another hard drive. Once the drive crashes completely, it will require a data recovery service to retrieve any data from it, which is quite expensive and has no guarantee of success. Get S.M.A.R.T.With the data saved from the drive, and the suspicion of a drive failure remaining, there are methods to help you figure out what's going on. Modern hard drives use what is called S.M.A.R.T. Data, which stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology, and is commonly referred to as SMART. It debuted in 2004, and grew out of IBM's Predictive Failure Analysis technology for monitoring multiple drives' health in servers. SMART Data can be accessed on internal drives on both the IDE and SATA interfaces, as well as external drives of the eSATA and USB varieties. Crystal Disk InfoYou might think that figuring out if a storage drive is dying would be a core function of Windows, but this is not the case. However, there are several freeware solutions that can easily get access to the SMART data on a storage drive and display it. The program we turn to for this is Crystal Disk Info, as it is frequently updated and has a good interface. An alternate that works as well is HD Tune, but doesn't seem to be updated as frequently. Here we see a screenshot of Crystal Disk Info. At first glance, it's clear that there's a lot of data provided about the storage device. Starting with the general information, at the top is the type of drive, the manufacturer, model, and capacity listed. In this case it's a Toshiba 1TB drive. Below that, we see listed the firmware version, the serial number (removed from the screenshot), the interface, and its speed, which is SATA 300. There is also the drive letter Windows has assigned to the drive, the buffer size of 8MB, and the spindle rotation rate of 5,400rpm. So far, this is all information could be gleaned from looking at the physical drive, except for the firmware and the drive letter, and while interesting background info, is not really informing us about the health of the drive. SMART data analysisOn the left side is a general "Health Status," which in this case is "Good," and reassures us that this drive is not failing and is fine to continue to use. This Health Status is an overall indicator of the condition of the drive. There's also an indicator of the drive's temperature, which, at 29C, indicates that the drive is within the ideal temperature range of 25C to 40C for maximum longevity. When considering the age of a drive, there are some indicators of how much the drive has been used, which can raise the suspicion that perhaps it's worn out. One of these is the "Power On Count," which tells you the number of times that this computer's drive has been powered on (137 in this example). The other is the "Power On Hours," which tells you how many hours the drive has been used (171 in this example). Both of these are low in this case, as this is system is only a few months old. Older research had indicated that three percent of drives failed in their first three months of use, and then a steady rate of hard drive failure after two years, until five years, when most of the drives were at their end of life. Unfortunately, while the hours and Power Ons give an idea of the drive's use, it does not predict the drive's impending failure. One of the difficulties in looking at SMART Data to try to figure out which parameter will indicate an impending drive failure, is that the hard drive vendors are not forthcoming about which of these parameters are most predictive of failure. This is probably because drive manufacturers hardly want to highlight that their drives fail at all (why dwell on the negative?), but as sure as death and taxes, a hard drive failing sooner or later is just one more eventuality of life. Predicting drive failureWhile mum's the word over at the hard drive vendors, one company that has been forthcoming is Backblaze, which has experience with 40,000 hard drives worth of data. With that many drives, you can bet they have learned a thing or two about drive failures along the way. They report that they use five stats to predict a hard drive failure:
If we look at Crystal Disk Info, it does not follow the same numbering scheme; we'll have to put on our hexadecimal thinking caps and do the conversions. So, while 5 is still the Reallocated Sector Count, the reported Uncorrectable Errors is not 187, but BB, and Command Timeout is BC. The Current Pending Sector Count is C5, and Offline Uncorrectable is at C6. By looking at the Current value, and the Threshold, an estimation of how close a drive is to the end of its life can be made. A word about SSDsWhile the previous discussion is focused on mechanical hard drives, the same approach can be applied to solid-state drives. While these flash memory storage solutions with no moving parts (except the electrons) do not fail from the mechanical issues that plague traditional hard drives, the NAND chips and controller boards of SSDs can still fail. While Crystal Disk Info software can certainly be used for SSD SMART Data analysis, there is also manufacturer-specific software for analysis. One of the advantages of manufacturer-specific software for an SSD is that it can check for a firmware upgrade to the drive. Here we have an example of a Crucial MX100 SSD that has a 256GB capacity. Most of the parameters in terms of SMART Data for an SSD are the same as on a mechanical hard drive, although there are some differences due to the flash-based storage technology of the SSD. For example, parameter 5 is no longer the reallocated sector count as on a mechanical hard drive, but now Retired NAND Blocks. Another useful parameter is 202, which is the "Percentage Lifetime Used." This is not reported for mechanical hard drives, but takes advantage of the fact that SSDs have a predicted lifespan based on a finite number of write cycles according to the manufacturer. For example, on Intel SSDs, this is based on 20GB of data written daily, over five years, which is a total of 37TB of data written (and the 20GB daily number is higher than what the majority of home users will write on a daily basis). The "Percentage Lifetime Used" tracks the amount of data written and can give a value of the useful lifespan of the SSD based on the data written to date. This is another way to figure out if a drive is close to a failure, or has plenty of life left in it. An ounce of prevention...A storage drive failure is a reality that most users will encounter at some point. With the use of software, such as Crystal Disk Info, or manufacturer-specific tools, SMART Data can be obtained from the hard drive. With an understanding of the value and limitations of SMART data, as well as which parameters to keep an eye on, you can get a feel for the health of your drives. |
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