A whole lotta nothing

[azekeil]

Haven't said much because, well, not a lot has been going on. The last couple of weeks, barring travelling to London for the course, have been spent lazing around at home. This weekend we've all been feeling a bit run down and consequently doing very little, other than gaming and watching films.

Didn't get any exercise last week due to being on the course, and now it's frosty so I'm not looking forwards to trying to get back into the swing of things. I'll be cycling to roleplaying tonight, though.

I did spend a bit of money, on an OK steering wheel, which I took back, and then a nice steering wheel, which has yet to arrive. Oh, and also some nice surround speakers, which prove to me I really need to change my surround and centre amplification, which is going to be expensive :/

ev1ldonut and I are getting better at Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance (although we still have resources set to 2x)

Oh, one interesting thing I did do, was decide that if VirginMedia wouldn't offer a better deal on broadband, we'd switch. We were on 4Mb down, 384Kb up, cheapest telephone and free TV deal for £36 a month, and I was looking at switching to up to 24Mb down, 1.3Mb up, cheapest telephone and freeview TV for £29 a month. Virgin came back and offered us 20Mb (guaranteed, but still subject to their traffic shaping) down, 768Kb up with the rest the same for £34.50 a month for the first 12 months. So with the reduced hassle, more for less and the fact that Virgin will be getting DOCSIS 3 sometime in 2008 (50Mb/s anyone?), we decided to stay with them. Anyone else who's on Virgin may want to look into getting more for less. The company I was looking at going with for broadband was BeThere.

Comments

[microchip.livejournal.com]

Be are absolutely awesome for broadband - and if you let me know if you switch, I can get us both a free month :D To be honest though, they're absolutely spotless customer service wise, and they keep managing to impress me, which is shocking in itself. Simple things like texting you to let you know if there's any issues or scheduled downtime, tech support who know their stuff, and customer service that bend over backwards. It's shocking to think they're actually owned by O2, but still good! *laughs*

To be honest though, it's all well and good Virgin upping their connections, but I've found my Be connection to be significantly faster all the time. That, and the 2Mbit upload helps (I'm on the £22/month package). That, and of course, no lousy traffic shaping. Not to mention I'm concerned that I don't think Virgin actually has the capacity for a whole bunch of people on 50mbit. They seem to struggle to support 20mbit much of the time. Still, YMMV - I'm interested to see how it performs for you.

On another point, Forged Alliance is a HELL of a lot harder resource wise than the original SupCom, isn't it?! (I'm assuming you played SupCom first!) Although I have to say, as a Cybran player (used to play a lot of UEF, but the monkeylord attraction was too much!), the new Megalith is *insanely* good.

That said, I did get my backside kicked by my mate who was playing the Seraphim...

If you two ever want to join us in our games, we play regular multiplayer ones on Thursday nights. That said, we also need a pair of new machines. It's making my poor Sempron 2GHz thing cry!

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

I realised that Be are better for all the reasons you say.. it's just we'd have to pay £130 up front to get reconnected to BT, then I'd probably have to get a digital areal (£80), then I'd need a freeview box (£60-80 for a reasonable one), plus all the hassle of changing over... so decided to go with the more for less 12 month deal instead.

From speaking to the customer service guy (who seemed quite knowledgeable) the DOCSIS3 stuff is going to be a different network to the rest of it.

Virgin have been a bit slow of late, but that's probably mainly down to us always getting throttled. Now we're on the 20Mbit service, throttling leaves us a bit better off than our previous max speed...

[microchip.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the upfront costs would suck quite severely. I hadn't taken into account the BT reconnection - would it involve a new line being fitted? If there's an existing one, it's normally an instant connection.

I'll be interested to hear how the DOCSIS3 service actually performs, and if they keep doing their (rather harsh imho) throttling. I personally prefer to pay a bit more and keep the speed, but then again, I didn't have that huge outlay that you'd have to put in.

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

Well, during peak hours it's not great, but here was the result this morning:

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

Also, this story speaks of a direct comparison between Virgin and BeThere..

[microchip.livejournal.com]

That's interesting to see - that said, the last time I used Virgin properly, it was back when it was NTL and pre-traffic management. I'd imagine that will play a large part in freeing up their network. That said, I can download solidly at around 1.5-1.8MB/sec for days on end, without being throttled. All works out really, depending on if you're a heavy downloader (peak times especially) or doing other things.

I do find speed tests to be somewhat less-than-accurate for real-world performance though, and it's mainly about the everyday experience - from general surfing, basic downloads and torrents.

At the end of the day though, as long as you're happy with what you get, that's all that matters! *pats his torrents, and chuckles*

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

Playing Supreme Commander: FA with you might be fun :) How do you do it? (Hamachi, etc?)

[microchip.livejournal.com]

We can do it direct through GPGnet - providing, of course, you have legit keys. (We pre-bought ours for both SupCom and SC:FA!) Their multiplayer service is rather good. I think we could do with another week's worth of practice though first, and (as said) possibly new machines - even over the LAN at the moment, we're having issues with major chugginess, even on the likes of Seton's Clutch, and low graphics settings. Still, I'll have a new dual core box in the new year, which will make life easier.

My GPGnet ID, if you're on there, is "Microchip" (shockingly).

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

Hm. GPGnet is not currently an option for us. I think we're busy this Thursday as it is, and ev1ldonut has some fairly specific preferences around how we might play too. I'll point him at this thread.

Would you be willing to consider Hamachi or something similar?

[microchip.livejournal.com]

Shame. It's extremely efficient.

Yeah, Hamachi is an option, I haven't used it in a while, but it does do the job. It'll probably be new year when we are ready to get decent games going (getting a core 2 duo box clocked at 3.4-3.6GHz, probably 2-3GB RAM, and a 640MB 8800GTS in it :D) - at the moment it's near unplayable with this box.

The original SupCom was a lot less heavy on the machines. Guess they decided everyone had time to upgrade already!

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

Great, you can host then ;)

[microchip.livejournal.com]

With my 2Mbit upload speed, I was planning on it ;)

Shame there's no dedicated server option though. I've got a core 2 duo box in the states that I use for development. Would mean 100ms pings though. *laughs*

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

Yeah, we have issues with major chugginess, and that's with a 2GHz Core Duo laptop!