Saturday, July 18, 2009

Blurry text disease strikes again

A little while ago I wrote about how the Windows 7 RC jump lists are affected by such a problem. I decided to install Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 and to my horror, it has also been struck by this illness in several places. Apparently something to do with that thing called WPF. Have a look at this over-sized blown up comparison of the main menu between VS2008 (top) and VS2010 Beta 1 (bottom):

Link to comparison screenshots

Look at that N, p and r! The Intellisense drop-downs are also quite bad.

How anyone can think that is remotely acceptable is beyond me, though apparently they are going to fix the Visual Studio problem for Beta 2.

Dan K kindly blew up my Windows 7 RC screenshot, and as you can see the problem is not nearly as bad there: http://shots.kordix.com/20090714_1.png. Still not great, though. Seems like they might have fixed the Windows 7 issue in builds after the RC, but the real test will be when the final version is out and installed here...

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

PSU whine/squeal/buzz... (under graphics card load)

Just wtf is this about. I'm referring to this, or this, or this, or this... It's horrible, and loud. Seemingly known as 'coil whine', but it's some combination of a whine, buzz and squeal.

I had it when I had a GeForce 9800 GTX graphics card - but it wasn't that loud and happened in fewer situations. At that time I never realised it was coming from my PSU, I just assumed it was my graphics card. Then I read about the PSU issue. Then my GeForce GTX 275 turned up and the noise was happening in far more situations and it was a lot louder. Then I double checked where it was coming from and indeed it is the PSU..

This was one of the more informative things I read about it. But I'm going to blame my PSU since it happened in some capacity with two fairly different video cards. After reading lots of PSU reviews (jonnyGURU.com at least made that slightly less of a chore :p) I've ordered a Corsair HX750W. Let's hope it can stop watching videos making me feel like my computer is about to explode :p

Update
My HX750W turned up. The great news is that it makes no buzzing at all under GPU-stress (that I can hear). It also came in a velvet bag :o

But the bad news is some of its cables seem like they could have had a bit more thought put into them. The combined EPS12V/ATX12V 8-pin/4-pin connector splits off right at the end of the lead, so if you split it you end up with a stiff V shaped thing, which is likely to get in the way of something. It doesn't look like the image on Corsair's website, but like this which I borrowed from Newegg. In my case, connecting it split resulted in it blocking a PCI Express slot - though luckily I had enough space to connect it with both bits joint together. If it split a bit further up the lead, it wouldn't have be a problem. Though my old Antec Neo HE just had separate 4-pin and 8-pin leads.

The other problem I had were the SATA power leads. The cable is flat and not rounded, it is quite stiff and ends up bending outwards quite far which is no good if your drives are close together and you don't have a lot of clearance (which I don't). The way they bend out also gets in the way of using two sets of leads in the same run to work around the clearance issue because the first lead gets in the way. I had to rearrange my drives to get around this. My old Neo HE did far better - it had sleeved, rounded SATA power cables which I was able to bend sideways out of the way.

Friday, July 10, 2009

Let's put the View menu before the Edit menu


Well, it has been annoying me at least. I might be alone on that though...