Archmaille

It seems like not yesterday the number one game on both Credal and I’s Xfire profiles was Stronghold 2.  Now with only 162 hours and in third place it seems like we didn’t play the game at all!  Of course it kind of sucks that Xfire has some sort of glitch with Windows Vista and it shows me as ALWAYS in game for Company of Heroes.  Once I get in the game until I restart the computer it shows me as in game!  Which BTW I absolutely hate!  It doesn’t show a true record of how long I’ve been in game… the past 3 weeks I’ve probably gained 100 hours in CoH alone simply because I can’t get “out of game” without restarting my computer!  (I think it has to do with Vista’s caching system, since the game loads UBER faster if I’ve already had it up once… make use of that 4 gigs of RAM!)

Oh well, I still can’t deny the fact that I’ve got a good 600 or so hours in CoH, and at least 200 in Counter-Strike:Source.

Archmaille’s Xfire Profile

written by Archmaille

Wow, so it’s amazing to finally be back on Archmaille.com

Maybe I should just fill you in on a little history first.  Archmaille.com is and was the oldest and first site that I ever created!  Lets face it though… Archmaille.com sucked back then.  It was “designed” in a crappy text editor that used divisions and pixel placement of those divisions to place images, text boxes, etc.  It looked very basic and childish to start with, and if you used any different screen resolutions you may as well forget it.  The original intent was to sell my sterling silver jewelry on here… but let’s be honest it wasn’t going to happen with that website and a few PayPal buttons for orders.

Some time in 2005 I started using a slightly better system with tables, some basic images, and some copied CSS for the navigation links (that didn’t really fit very well might I add).  The look of the site was only slightly improving, but my knowledge was growing fast.

By 2006 (Actually some time between June 4th and 8th 2005) the site had been completely reworked thanks to some help I found on a webmasters forum, a guy made a simple banner, and helped me with some template/color issues.

The site stayed basically the same for quite a while since it was banned from Google for the use of “scraper” pages… which were my form of payment for using the site.  Since I wasn’t hosting the site, and didn’t own the domain Jordan put the pages up to help subsidize the cost of it.  He made plenty of money from it and eventually the ban was lifted though I never got PR back or really got indexed very well.  So I took the site to a new place ArchmailleDesigns.com and put a 301 redirect to that from all Archmaille.com pages.  Now that I’ve transfered all domains to my new server, Archmaille.com has sort of been in no-mans land for a while… but finally transfering it as well I’ve noticed that with the latest PR update it also has a PR4 from the countless hours of link building done for the site… so I’ve decided not to put the 301’s back in place but instead use this as my “gaming” blog.

I’ve been gaming pretty much most of my life and known in game as Archmaille for the last 4 years.  It’s only fair that I use this domain for my gaming stuff.

written by Archmaille

Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3160815AS 160GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive

What can I really say?  It’s a Hard Drive under $50 and double the capacity of the two 80gig HDD’s I have in right now.  Funny thing is I have my main Operating System on a Western Digital Raptor 74gig 10,000 RPM Hard Drive, and the output of this drive is the same as the Raptor.  The only advantage the WD Raptor has over this drive is faster seek times… which matters more for database driven systems and the like, not a huge difference for desktop applications… kinda makes me wonder why I paid $150 back in the day for the WD Raptor in the first place.

Oh well, I’m not complaining about either.  I have the Operating System, a few small programs, and games installed on the WD, larger programs, and a storage dump on the Seagate, music, and media files on the other drive.  My computer starts up quick enough (with most start-up programs coming from two sources), and does what I want it to.  I’m testing out the Seagate to see about later this year getting three more and putting four of them in RAID 5EE for ultra fast transfer speeds (also with a RAID controller that gives me a dedicated 500mhz processor for the Hard Drive, and 256mb DDR2 of dedicated Hard Drive cache)

Stats for both the Western Digital Raptor, and Seagate Barracuda:

HD Tune Benchmark WD Raptor

I thought the spike or drop in performance in the middle of the drive may have been a fluke, but I’ve tested it many times, it does the same thing every time.  Even with other hard drive benching software.

Seagate Barracuda 160GB HDD

The Seagate does not have as “straight” of a line across as the Raptor, but it has a much higher maximum output speed, no degrading performance spike in the middle, and a much higher capacity.  The higher capacity could be to blame for the sharp decline in performance towards the end of the drive.

written by Archmaille