Red Chair Software - Shitty Support

Red Chair Software company produces Anapod explorer. Anapod explorer is a dumbed down no frills piece of software that allows me to transfer music to and from my ipod with great speed. I prefer it 100% over Itunes. I bought a license for the software back in 2006 and had an Ipod video hooked up with the account. The Ipod video has died and now I have a nano and thought about trying the software out again for it. Unfortunately they only allow you to license it with a specific Ipod - mine being destroyed it obviously did not work on the new nano. Idealy I would like to have it work with the new ipod. After searching under their support section for about 20 minutes I noticed that they were not willing to give up any kind of tech support email. Basically they offer a lifetime guarantee for their product but they do not offer accessable tech support to the public or the registered users for that matter.

In studying some of their other plainly named e-mail addresses I discovered that support@redchairsoftware.com might work. If you had a problem with copyright addresses the available email address was ip@redchairsoftware.com. I'm taking a gamble with the support@redchair but I haven't gotten an email back from Mailer Daemon telling me that my email did not go through. If I recieve an email in the morning from Mr. Daemon, then I'll send another email to ip@redchair and ask them to transfer me to the support section. If that doesn't work I'll continue to send emails through any other posted available email that they have on their site.

Not providing a very accessable tech support pisses me and others off I'm sure. I have a reasonable request and should not have to pay for a piece of software again when I've already purchased it in the past. If they choose not to support my new ipod while terminating the old one's licensing (to make sure I'm not trying to double-dip or trick them) I will be very pissed off and basically spread the word that they are shit.

Will post update.

Call of Juarez - Why good graphics aren't enough

After playing through Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood - I really came to the conclusion that some video game makers really don't have a god damn clue as to what they are doing. Don't get me wrong, the game looks pretty, is put together nicely in a boring linear shooter kind of way that will keep 13 year olds happy. BUT it just made me go ZZzzZzZzzZZZ the entire time.


Cons:

Typical man vs. all setup. No real new innovations, slow mo shooting has been around for awhile, so has the run n gun type of gameplay.

There's no intriguing story. The game probably has a solid hour worth of cut scenes that I just really didn't give a shit about.

WW2 shooters hate Nazis; Juarez hates Indians. The white man kills off all the Indians because they are too stupid to setup a formidable attack.

When do I get better weapons? - There are a few weapons to choose from in each class but they don't really vary much. They get better as you find the same weapons in better condition. Totally lame.


Pro(s): You get to dual wield six shooters. Cool.


All in all it isn't a particularly bad game - it's just got bumped up graphics with not much attention put to gameplay detail. It just didn't do anything for me at all. Call of Juarez is much like a night of taking E. You just not going to be feeling much at all after it.

The computer update

She's running just fine. I have to admit that I was amazed at the graphic beauty and detail that this budget/mainstream system could produce. I was sitting in the graphics menu of Mirror's Edge figuring I could turn some stuff on high and have some really detailed textures. My friend James sitting next to me, "Just turn 'em all up son." That's just what we did. And it ran. And it ran without a hitch!

Going down memory lane I can remember paying $300 for a videocard ( Radeon 9800 ) and being super excited to plug it in and hook it up. It ran most of the games that I had on medium or high detail but at an average of 1024x768 or MAYBE 1280x1024. The $200 wonder, the 4890 ran pretty much everything out of the box at maxed out details. It really only has problems with problem type games (specifically poorly coded games) ARMA2, and a Need for Speed title that wasn't overly pretty when cranked up to begin with.

Overclocking this has been a joy (mostly). The motherboard is full and capable of doing some serious work in the overclocking department. However, a review on newegg.com has pushed me to ease up on the overclocking, at least for the moment. Being told that the board burned out when a chip was running at stock voltage does not put good things into one's mind. I have been running the computer at 3.3ghz up from 3. All stock voltages have let me do this without a problem. Only issue I've had here is that for awhile the bios would not work with a USB keyboard. I had a regular keyboard connector that I hooked up and then I had no problem, but Legacy USB decides to come and go as it pleases.

Another problem I ran into is while it is prime stable it has locked up on me two or three times. It isn't a blue screen or a boot down, just a hard lock. The hard locks have not been in intense situations either, they only came when I was installing or uninstalling a game or moving files around. This leads me to believe that it might not be overclock related but an issue with an aging hard drive.

The upgrade list has a new harddrive on it for now, we will see if I can hold out long enough for the price point of SSD's to come down. I can pay $60 now for a decent SATA hard drive or I can wait 3-6 months to pay $150 for a blazer of an SSD. I am also waiting becuase I would love to see the price of harddrives after the fact of SSDs. They should be cheaper than dirt.

Overall the system is working well and I am still very happy with it. Remember if you're making a build to put more emphasis really on the cores of the system than the accessories. I should have went for a better motherboard, and also a fresh harddrive. We are seeing the results of cutting corners right here and now.

Valentine 1

I have always been curious as to how well radar detectors work and I pictured it's the kind of gear that batman would use if he were a daily commuter. Bat man is pretty in right now so I think I'll do what he's doing.


I've been told numerous times by angry neighbors, well yelled at not told, to SLOW DOWN (with waving arms). The only difference between them and police is that police will give you a piece of paper that will hike your insurance rate - all because the DMV grossly under rated the potential of that nice open stretch of road in front of ya. So now that you're traveling at the speed you want and not at the speed of what the man told you to drive at you'll want one of these suckers.

I'll have pictures and a written review up soon.

The computer

Finally got my shit together and got myself a computer. I have put together several computers in the past, my first rig being a 1ghz t-bird. Long ago things were simple, and you could only run one program at once really. If you opened up another one, you could expect shit results and performance from both.

Years later the computer gods have answered my prayers; they created multiple core processors and now you can run a whole bunch of shit at the same time at 100%. Kick ass and take names. Here's my slut worthy build - the decision process and the reasoning behind it other than just, "this was my $600 budget, and thats it."

Amd X4 Phenom II 3ghz 125watt Black Edition - a highly overclockable chip at a price point that makes sense. Anything more and you're going to get killed on a premium price. There is always a price point at which you are going to pay way way more for another 10-15% performance boost. The idea is to find that happy medium between price and performance and then overclock your stuff yourself to give it that 10-15% boost ---- for free.

Biostar TA790GXB A2+ - Was in a combo deal on newegg.com for only $20 instead of the original $90. Getting this board saved me $100 at least downright. The board is no slouch either, it overclocks nicely, has very adequate voltage settings. Downsides are that it is not crossfire and it doesn't have a fan on the north/south bridges. This may run a little hot after overclocking and is clearly the weakest component of my system. But it's also $20.

Ati 4890 1 gigabyte - A clear choice for me - $200 makes it mainstream price, not too much, and gives blistering performance for that. I remember paying $300 for a Radeon 9800 256mb and being able to run all current games at medium graphics detail. Now I can run everything current on the highest settings without much of a hitch. Impressive for a "mainstream" priced card.

OCZ 4 gigabytes ram - Ram is ram to me since I am not looking to overclocking the FSB or memory much. In the recent past, when the multipliers were locked this was your only option to overclock and therefore you'd think twice about throwing down more for capable ram. However, ram that is high speed or high clocked is recognizably a good profit for most companies so they charge an arm and a leg for it.

750 watt corsair psu - A beast to say the least. There is an enormous fan that is literally the entire bottom side of this power supply. It really doesn't emit much noise at all, and claims to run at 40C no matter what kind of load. Impressive again. A little pricey but it pays to have a rock solid base.