How To Spot A Psychopath

You know that DirectX problem, that I thought I’d fixed by buying a whole new video card?

Well, it looks as if what I actually need is a whole new computer. Isn’t that great!

Yes, the problem is back again. Last night I watched a movie just fine; today I open a video file and as soon as I switch to fullscreen I’ve got three frames per second again, because DirectDraw acceleration has just turned its own self off again for no damn reason at all, and cannot be turned back on.

This is the way it always happens. It doesn’t happen after I reboot, or after I install some particular piece of software, or in response to any actual change in the system configuration that I can see. DirectX acceleration just works one minute, and it doesn’t work the next, and that’s it.

From past experience, I am confident that rolling back to a previous system restore point, removing and reinstalling all video drivers, or even reinstalling Windows from scratch, will solve the problem for only a little while, at best.

I presume it’s something wrong with the motherboard. Or something.

I don’t need a new computer, I don’t much want a new computer (more speed nice, lost day setting everything up again not), and I sure as hell don’t want to pay for a new computer.

But since the memory and CPU in this computer won’t work in a new one, I might as well get a whole new PC, lacking only a video card. Clearly, nothing else is going to fix this problem.

I feel stupid, contemplating a whole new computer just because a couple of graphics acceleration modes don’t work on this one. Everything else works fine, and I can even cheat Direct3D into working, so I can play games if I want to. If I get a new computer, I’ll be doing it just so I don’t have to use crunchyvision low-res modes when I watch TV on my enormous monitor. How spoiled is that?

Kids are starving in Africa, et cetera.

God damn it.

So, I’ve got that DirectX Acceleration Not Available problem again. DirectDraw Acceleration, Direct3D Acceleration, AGP Texture Acceleration; all Not Available. Direct3D was available until I tried turning it off in dxdiag, then ran dxdiag again to see if all of the options were back.

Nope, that trick doesn’t even work once, any more; now they’re all gone. Again. Graphics card allegedly has “n/a” memory on it, et cetera et cetera.

The last time this happened I tried all kinds of things, not a one of which worked, and ended up reinstalling Windows. But somebody mentioned that this was exactly the kind of problem that Windows XP’s System Restore (which I of course did not have turned on) was created to solve.

So in this Windows installation, I left System Restore turned on. And when DirectX screwed up yesterday, I used System Restore to roll the system back to its status of about a week ago.

And hooray, the problem was solved!

For about twelve hours.

I’m not crazy about the idea of restoring my system to that save point once a day for the rest of my life. I can see no other option, though, unless I get a whole new computer. I know for a fact that cleaning out all of the drivers and DirectX files before reinstalling will not help at all; all that does is take a long time and require a large number of reboots.

Perhaps a new video card would do it. This GeForce 7800 GT is pretty old and dusty; perhaps the problem does in fact have something to do with the video card failing some kind of obscure internal test, as when hard drives drop back into PIO mode.

The graphics card does still work just fine, as far as I can see; 3D mode is A-OK when DirectX is, you know, working, and OpenGL 3D is A-OK even now. I just ran OpenGL Quake 2; everything’s fine, and the video card fan ran up to higher speed as it’s meant to.

But perhaps the card didn’t give Windows the right password yesterday, or something.

I could try digging up another graphics card, but I haven’t another PCIe card in the house, and this computer’s too young to have an AGP slot. So I’d have to find some ancient PCI card, and I think the only one of those I’ve got is in the file server.

God damn it.

When last we visited the wonderful world of image “retargeting” by means of the cunning seam carving technique, I envisaged a decent free seam carving Photoshop plugin in the near-ish future.

Well, that hasn’t turned up yet. But a couple of options besides rsizr.com and that GIMP plugin have.

The inventively named Content Aware Image Resizer is a simple command line utility that can only cope with BMP format images, but gets the job done (a bit slowly…), is multithreaded, and is GPL-licensed so C++ hackers can fiddle with the source.

Resizor is a standalone Windows app, which is only single-threaded but still seems a bit faster than CAIR (I think rsizr.com is faster now than it used to be, too), has a bunch of fancy resizing algorithms as well as the seam carving “Retarget” option, and has a graphical interface too.

Resizor only lets you make an image smaller by seam carving (one of the interesting features of the technique is that it can just as easily enlarge images as shrink them), but it does what most people want to do.

I just installed the brand new v163.71 Nvidia drivers (the last non-beta release was v162.18), and benchmarked Supreme Commander before and after. There’s a small but significant improvement.

I’m tired of seeing articles about AMAZING NEW DRIVER IMPROVEMENTS OMG and then discovering that there’s only any difference if you’re using a GeForce 8800 on Windows Bloody Vista.

I’ve got a 32-bit-WinXP computer with a 2.2GHz (at the moment) dual core Athlon 64 and a 256Mb GeForce 7900 GT.

That’s probably still faster than the average, but it’s pretty far from the current cutting edge. (Only two cores, dahling? However can you cope?)

Driver tweaks aimed at the super-expensive dual-slot super-cards won’t help me at all. I’m guessing that they won’t help most of you, either. Tweaks that help a GeForce 7900 ought to be some use for various other current affordable Nvidia cards, though.

I’ve also got an effing big monitor, so I ran the tests in 2560 by 1600 resolution. That’s practical for fullscreen Supreme Commander if you’ve got some flavour of 8800 (ATI aren’t really in the very-high-end race at the moment), but it’s actually very playable if…

…you split the monitor between the normal view and the easy-to-draw topographic-view map.

Running the standard “perftest” benchmark in that resolution guarantees, despite Core Maximizer, that the game will be video-card-limited most of the time.

The Supreme Commander benchmark reports total frames rendered, “sim” performance (how fast the game calculates everything-but-graphics), “render” performance (graphics alone) and a “composite” score that roughly represents overall performance.

In this graphics-heavy test, my “render” result increased by nineteen per cent with the new drivers. The giant resolution and less-than-incredible video card meant that, in the peculiar jargon of the perftest benchmark, the “render” score only improved from minus 1029 to minus 863. But trust me, that’s still good.

The logged-frames difference was +0.7%, which probably means less than experimental error and definitely means nothing you’d ever notice. The sim score improved only slightly more, at +1.6%. But the composite score improved 4.7%, from 5794 to 6065.

You probably wouldn’t actually notice that in play - it’s a general rule of thumb that differences of less than ten per cent aren’t noticeable. But almost five per cent is not a bad improvement to get for free.

Complex Supreme Commander games are almost 100% CPU limited. Smaller games, though - and even complex games when you can’t see much of the enormous map you’re playing on - don’t give your graphics card much time to breathe, especially if you’ve taken advantage of SupCom’s still-rare ability to make use of a second monitor. So I don’t think I’m lying with statistics, here.

(I’m not, to be fair, actually playing much Supreme Commander at the moment. I got ETQW yesterday, and intend to Strogg 4 Life for a while before getting back to the direction of vast robotic armies.)

The Error’d series on what-used-to-be-TheDailyWTF occasionally features some magnificently huge error boxes. I think the second one in this post has to be the record-holder: A standard Windows error box, 401 by 737 pixels in size.

I, however, quite often see one with 3.8% more area, and even less usefulness.

When the server that supports the excellent Pennypacker Penny-Arcade-indexing Firefox extension is down, the extension becomes unhappy.

It, then, serves you up with not one but two of these petite little beauties…

…every time you look at a PA comic page.

That’s 683 by 449 pixels, folks.

And feel the quality!

My recent reinstall reacquainted me with the delightfully varied places in which Windows programs keep their configuration settings.

In the olden days, you knew where the config files were. Old DOS programs didn’t necessarily have config info; you just gave ‘em parameters on the command line, as the Great Beards intended.

When there were enough persistent settings to require separate configuration storage, you’d just have a text file called progname.cfg or something in the program directory. Easy.

Some programs still do this, even today. Blessed be the name of those programs, for you can often just run ‘em from their directory and have everything work, whether or not you’ve ever run an installer for that program on your current Windows install.

But there are so many other places where Windows programs, in this modern age, may keep settings.

Some of them make their own directory in Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data\, for instance.

Others use Documents and Settings\username\Application Data, just to keep you on your toes.

(Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data also contains the XP IconCache.db file, deleting which can cure some weird icon problems. Or at least change them.)

And some programs, of course, tuck their settings away in the registry. Typically in some branch that’ll have a different name when you reinstall, so you’re thwarted even if you get all clever and “Export” that branch from regedit.

(I was quite proud of myself when I successfully edited the exported .reg file to put the settings for that one awkward program in the new long-nonsense-named registry branch.)

Some programs even decide to strike a blow for individualism by putting config files in the parched wasteland of My Documents. Cunning!

(Yes, I am aware that Mac OS X has one place where all of this stuff Must Be Kept, and Often Is. I agree unreservedly that just switching to a lovely trouble-free Mac would make settings transfer a great deal easier, by relieving me of many of the programs whose settings I would otherwise have to transfer, not to mention a substantial amount of the employment that so tiresomely requires me to use said applications.)

The whole installation-transfer adventure did have some bright patches. Some applications that look as if they ought to be a mass of horrible encrypted untransferable setting info actually aren’t at all. Valve’s “Steam” game download system, for instance, can trivially easily be ported from one Windows installation to another. Just install Steam on the new computer, then copy the (huge) steamapps folder from your old install to the new one. Done.

I even successfully exported and then re-imported the security certificates for the Australian-Government-issue Goods and Services Tax software, which isn’t as legendarily bad as you might think but still doesn’t inspire confidence that such a feat will actually be possible.

Oh - I’m also sure I’m not the first to be annoyed by all of the software companies who insist on making their install directory not Program Files\ThisProgram, but Program Files\CompuGlobalHyperMegaNet\ThisProgram, apparently because they assume you’re going to be so impressed with ThisProgram that you’ll buy a whole suite of other Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net software, which must be kept in one directory for, um, neatness. Or something.

Later on, if you’re trying to find the ThisProgram install directory (or even its entry on the Start menu, which will of course also be a company-named subdirectory), your eye will slide right over the CompuGlobalHyperMegaNet directory, because nobody outside CompuGlobalHyperMegaNet has any idea what the company is called.

The most outstanding example I’ve seen of this approach is from one Juan M. Aguirregabiria, whose programs, that’s right, want to install themselves in Program Files\Juan M. Aguirregabiria\…

(And then the program of his that I tried had some DLL error or other and didn’t even freakin’ run.)

One of the great entertainments that awaits you whenever you reinstall Windows is seeing what new and strange personality features your fresh install exhibits.

It happens almost every time, and usually within days, or possibly even hours, of the reinstall; some weird thing arises that you’ve never seen before, even if all you’ve done is reinstalled the same version of Windows on the same computer you were using before.

Munged icons are a pretty common Windows problem - the OS messes up the pointers to its cached icons file, so each class of file or folder gets a semi-random new icon. But this new install of mine just came up with a variation on that theme which is a new one on me.

Yes, it munged the Quick Launch icons!

(In case you’re wondering: No, none of those icons match the programs they’re connected to.)

No problem, said I. I opened TweakUI and used its “Rebuild Icons” option, confident that everything would now be fine again.

Instead, I got this. Now all but one of the icons is invisible!

More “Rebuild Icons” attempts caused the single still-visible icon to change, and more and more icons on the desktop to disappear.

Well played, Windows! Well played!

Sometimes, your computer decides that you’re not allowed to get any work done, or have any fun, today.

Mine did it to me today, by suddenly deciding (according to the DirectX Diagnostic Tool, dxdiag) that my graphics card had no memory and was not capable of DirectX acceleration of any kind.

Yes, as per Microsoft support document 191660, “The DirectDraw option or the Direct3D option is unavailable when you start Microsoft games for Windows“.

The “Adapter” page in Display Properties (I’m running Windows XP) lists the right specs for my GeForce 7800 GT, but dxdiag believes there are “n/a” megabytes of memory on it.

This doesn’t cripple Windows in general, but it means I’m not going to be playing any 3D games to speak of (OpenGL games still work fine, but most Windows 3D is Direct3D), or watching much video. Small-dimensioned video files play OK as long as they don’t have to be scaled to a higher resolution; scale ‘em up and the frame rate dives as the CPU begs for mercy.

I’ve had this problem once before. Then, I just had to run dxdiag, turn off whichever DirectX Features were still available in the Display tab, then close dxdiag and run it again, and turn all of the now-available-again features back on. Totally opaque for the everyday user, but a doddle when you know how.

Now, though, DirectDraw Acceleration, Direct3D Acceleration and AGP Texture Acceleration are all Not Available, and the enable/disable buttons for them are greyed out, no matter what I do.

(Needless to say, the DirectX Files tab in dxdiag says “No problems found”!)

And this is the way it is apparently going to bloody well stay, because I’ve been banging my head against it for more than six hours now, making no progress whatsoever.

I can get work done while the computer has this problem. If anything, it makes it easier to work, because I sure as hell can’t play. But I have a hard time doing anything, including sleeping, if there’s an unresolved problem like this dancing around in the back of my brain.

There’s quite a lot of info on the Web about this problem, including some pretty freaky suggestions, most of which are mentioned on the Microsoft page.

Herewith, the list of Things I’ve Tried:

I’ve reinstalled the graphics and motherboard drivers, and the latest version of DirectX 9, multiple times. Yea, multitudinous have been the reboots.

I’ve cleaned out the old Nvidia drivers with Driver Cleaner Pro (previously mentioned here) before reinstalling them.

(Oh, and yes, “Hardware acceleration” in Display Properties is set to “Full”. I’ve tried setting it to None and then back to Full, too.)

I’ve tried the weird-sounding suggestion to enable, then disable, Remote Desktop Sharing in Microsoft NetMeeting, because the sharing feature apparently blocks Direct3D, and cycling through it can perhaps cancel some other application’s similar block.

I’ve disabled the Terminal Services service, which I don’t need anyway.

I’ve uninstalled my monitor in Device Manager and rebooted, even though this particular piece of voodoo is only at all likely to work if you’re removing phantom monitors from an extra graphics adapter, like an integrated motherboard adapter that you’re not using.

I’ve reinstalled Windows over the top of itself.

(Actually, the first time I did that I accidentally told Windows the wrong drive, picking the other one in the system that’s the same size as the actual boot drive. So I created a shiny fresh copy of Windows that I didn’t want. That was thirty minutes I’ll never get back - though I didn’t bother installing graphics drivers in the new Windows. I suspect that DirectX would then have worked, but who knows?)

I’ve restarted the computer with a “clean boot procedure”, by using the System Configuration Utility, msconfig, to skip all startup items and non-Microsoft services.

(This, entertainingly, showed me that msconfig does not consider Windows Defender to be a “Microsoft service”.)

I’ve turned off “Enable Write Combining” in Display Properties and rebooted. And then turned it back on again. And rebooted.

And, the last option on the Microsoft page: I created a new user account.

The Microsoft page doesn’t tell the hapless troubleshooter what to do with the new account, mind you. It just tells you to make it, and… wait for its healing energy to permeate your computer’s chakras?

I presumed that I was actually meant to restart and log in as the new user, so I did that. But it of course did not help.

Next, the Microsoft support page points you to another Microsoft support page, “How to troubleshoot display issues in Microsoft games“. But that contains nothing helpful, either.

(I love how Microsoft’s pages always mention “Microsoft games” in particular. That’s not really a good PR message - it suggests that other DirectX games might work fine, but ones from companies owned by Microsoft wouldn’t.)

I’ve even visited the More Help tab in dxdiag and then clicked the DirectX Troubleshooter button, with the mad hope that this might be the first instance in human history of a Microsoft Troubleshooter actually shooting some trouble.

So much for that.

All of this screwing around has messed my Windows installation up a little more than it was before. There was one incredibly bizarre problem, now resolved, that I’ll leave for another post, and all of my icons are of course bunched up on one side of the screen because layout.dll has forgotten where they were.

Oh, and ACDSee now has a great error:

But the problem remains.

If Web pages about this are anything to go by, this problem can be a bit like lower back pain; it makes you suffer for a while, then just goes away as mysteriously as it came, when you reboot for some other reason. I’ve made a frickin’ hobby of rebooting today, though, and the problem ain’t gone away yet.

The only option left, as far as I can see, is a proper nuke-from-orbit Windows reinstall from scratch. (I suppose I should have kept the accidental install on the other drive, instead of deleting that Windows directory when I got back to booting from the proper drive. Oh well.)

That’ll mean losing most of the system setup stuff I’ve done over the last year and a half of largely trouble-free computing, which is not that big a deal, of course.

But it’s ludicrous to have to do that just because Windows has arbitrarily decided not to let the graphics card accelerate anything any more. It’s like having to reinstall Windows because it’s decided to not let you use anything above 640 by 480, or because the audio “mute” box is permanently checked. It feels like buying a new car because the horn doesn’t work in your old one.

(And yes, I have been tempted to use this as an excuse to get a whole new computer. Mmmm, quad core…)

I’ve swapped e-mail with a fellow who works at Nvidia; I’ll drop him a line and see if he’s got any ideas. I also invite you all to contribute your own hare-brained schemes in the comments.

I will, of course, also update this post when the problem’s fixed, whether by diplomacy or the nuclear option.

[UPDATE: Yeah, I reinstalled Windows. Latecomers haven’t missed all of the fun and games, though; check out the comments!]

This Consumerist piece about Why Geeks Steal Porn From Your Computer (When They’re Meant To Be Fixing It, If They Get A Chance), is both informative and entertaining.

Let me tell you right now that if I were 21 again and working in some dead-end computer store McJob, I too would be rifling through the files of any user who needed our help to install iTunes. Anybody who is even marginally surprised about this would probably be horrified to see the contents of the back-room bulletin board of the average one-hour-photo place before the advent of the affordable digital camera.

There are some good tips in the Consumerist piece, but I disagree with the assertion that “drive encryption on your home computer is worthless”. There are many easy-to-use encryption systems which provide data security that’ll probably defeat the National Security Agency, never mind some dude in a pot-leaf T-shirt. If you just use Windows EFS and hand your password to the computer store along with the PC then they can of course access your data (and ordinary users who use EFS often lose all of their data as a result…), but there are other very fine options for people who just want to encrypt their accounting data, passwords and pr0n.

Hell, just putting that stuff in a Zip file with a ten character password’ll probably do the job. Standard Zip encryption isn’t very secure compared with many other schemes, but it’s still often not practically attackable from any normal human’s point of view. If the password’s moderately long and not a dictionary word, and the attacker doesn’t already have a copy of some of the data in the archive (giving the option of a “known plaintext” attack, which is the major weakness of standard Zip encryption), then a brute force attack is likely to take a very long time indeed. Even refined brute force attacks are likely to take centuries on current hardware.

Learning how to use encryption software is a good step towards learning how to use the rest of your computer like a “pro” as well. Before you know it, you won’t have to hand your computer over to Super Excellent Computer Store’s Data Commandoes just because you can’t get rid of some crapware.

When I reviewed the Pertelian X2040 external display doohickey, I mentioned that cheap Windows SideShow devices from big manufacturers would completely eat the lunch of little manufacturers like Pertelian.

It would appear (via) that SideShow devices with full colour 320-by-240-ish screens…

…based on electronics modules like this will indeed be available for as little as $US80.

Well, at least according to the Winbond propaganda that led me to the Ricavision site, where you can see their only-renders-as-yet examples of wireless Bluetooth external displays with and without keyboards, not to mention an e-book reader thing that’d presumably be less excitingly priced, since the display is most of the expense for e-books.

If these devices aren’t pie in the sky, then Pertelian, and even Logitech, are definitely going to have to get with that program or be run over.

There’s still some attraction to low-tech LCDs like the Pertelian, and not just because they don’t make you upgrade to Vista in order to use the artificially-limited-to-Vista SideShow technology. I like that I can have the X2040’s simple four-line display sitting there announcing what MP3’s playing at the moment without its backlight on, so the glow doesn’t distract me. You could probably do much the same thing with a colour Sideshow display, though - use a greenscreen colour scheme and wind the brightness down.