Bartimaeus

Maybe it's just because I'm older, but I couldn't get through season 1 of LoK. Couldn't stomach all the silly love drama - the original Avatar series had its fair share of that, too, but it felt more spread around the series, and by the time it showed up, you were already sucked into the show too much, anyways. I might be misremembering, since it was such a long time ago when I tried watching LoK, but it also seemed a lot more over the top. I nearly stopped watching the Last Airbender towards the end when they started doing that stupid exaggerated...emotion/expression thing. One of my greatest nitpicks about anime. It always weirded me out that they avoided doing it for *so* long, and then suddenly started adding it here and there. Did they do that a lot for LoK, too? I remember seeing it at least a few times in the few episodes I watched.

Now that you mention it, I remember this, too. Last time I played the game, I played at like 3x speed with Cheat Engine everywhere, even in real time battles, 'cos everything was so easy. I recall Desther kicking my butt a good 5-10 times at normal speed before I lucked out and was able to win. Then I got to Port Llast and stopped playing because gosh, what a boring game.

So basically you want some sort of a benevolent dictator in the mold of a modern day Solon to take power? Yikes. Hopefully more Marshal Tito and less Mussolini in such a scenario... Yes...and no. With the way our government is set up, (i.e. non-autocratically), the only way a dictator could ever really seize power is if they're almost certainly (at least mostly) horrible - it would be a paradox, by my estimation, for a "just" person - i.e. someone we would actually like to see on the throne - to seize power in that manner...especially so in our current political climate. Any succeeding hegemon would also likely be horrible...at least for a time - probably at least the duration of our lives. I think it would be a huge, gigantic, unestimable mistake to have that happen to a country of the U.S.'s size and power in this day and age. The Roman Republic didn't have the strongest military force in all of human existence, nor unimaginable and devastating weapons of mass destruction that could end life as we know it within a mere few hours. Now, if the government were actually properly transitioned...even then, I'm not sure I'm entirely comfortable with the idea. As much as our system is broken, there are still at least half-functioning checks and balances that keep things from *truly* going out of hand. Autocracy is probably the most efficient form of government...when under the perfect circumstances, (a great ruler is absolutely necessary...but also a highly nationalist, undivided, and great people, at the bare minimum - none of which we're even coming close to fulfilling - not that anyone else is, either, but...). The idea was a half-joke, but I do like to privately theorize how much more efficiently and strongly nations could be run under the perfect conditions. Perhaps, with a triumvirate of sorts...

As an actual person with Asperger's syndrome, I take offense to the latter half of your post.

I feel pretty out of touch with both parties. I'm generally fiscally conservative, lightly liberal with an equally light libertarian bent socially, and strongly pro-imperialism/hegemonism for foreign affairs. Both parties seem pretty imperialistic...although I always feel like both parties generally do a poor job of it...neither parties are really fiscally conservative - they can be fiscally conservative about *some* things - and different things, depending upon the party - but it never really feels like across the entire board...and neither parties are really hardly libertarian or liberal at all for social matters. I guess the Democrats are generally a little more liberal than the Republicans, but it seems like they make up for it with being a little more authoritarian. That might just be perceived, though. Honestly, I dislike both parties enough that I probably won't vote, unless someone does some serious convincing for me. Ideally, I'd like to see an entire new voting system devised, the entirety of our current Congress dissolved and disbarred, a limit made on how long you stay in politics, and a bunch of new parties created before I think I could vote more than half-heartedly. I can't see any of those happening in the near future, (10-20 years). Can always hope, I suppose. Alternatively, an emperor/empress that could just fix all this crap in the duration of their lifetime after which the old but revitalized system falls back into place would be cool, too, I guess. The problem always lies in finding the right one...

I really, honestly thought the title of the topic was "pickup trucks"...I was like, seriously? Well, whatever people have fun with, I guess. Having actually entered the topic and then being subsequently confused, I realize now that would've been much better.

I hook Cheat Engine to pretty every singleplayer game I play and have hotkeys enabled to multiply the game's speed to specific levels to get past that sort of thing, so...uh...lol

Po:E. I have no intention of ever playing the other two. BioWare's type of game just doesn't interest me anymore, and I've never cared for turn-based combat. I'm not even sure about Torment anymore, but since it's supposed to be light in combat, it'll probably have an easier time of convincing me than Wasteland.

Yeah, but the point I was trying to illustrate is that PNY doesn't give anything with the drive, (also, nothing came with it in the very minimal packaging). Kind of weird - I don't see any way to even get the latest firmware off their website. Could swear they used to have a download for it...

http://www.pny.com/support/technical-support/solid-state-drives/faqs Does my SSD require special drivers? No, the standard drivers for any HDD will support PNY SSD drives as plug and play components, such as those bundled with Windows or MacOS.

Hah! I didn't care the slightest about speed, as long as it was within the ballpark, which the later gen Sandforce drives (mostly) are. That, and I only paid $35 for it new. Like I said, I'll have to talk to PNY and get it replaced...uh...eventually.

https://www.google.com/search?client=opera&q=PNY+XLR8&sourceid=opera&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&channel=suggest&gws_rd=ssl Great suggestion. Really helped figure out what I was dealing with.

Anything that's currently on my SSD is not really sensitive to data loss. All sensitive data is on my 1TB Seagate HDD, and then a copy of it all on my other HDD. Yeah, like I said, the graphics options don't matter in the slightest. I can be on static lighting (DX8!) on the bare minimum settings, and it runs just as well as on the highest, and it runs just the same: only the SSD stuttering mars both. Yes, I have ZRP, which is more likely to make it run better than worse - irrelevant, though, as I tried it without. Additionally, I tried playing the Lost Alpha mod, and it had the same exact problem. I thought it was just unoptimized at the time, but I was incorrect.

Decided to see if any other games would exhibit any problems like Stalker showed while being played off my SSD that never happened while being played off my HDD: loaded up Medieval 2, and what do you know, the game stutters randomly in a similar manner to Stalker right on the main map campaign screen. Not as much, and it's rarer - but that's to be expected, given that it's a fairly static screen. I never remember it happening while playing it off my HDD. Stupid drive...

Yeah. Still: slower than a traditional HDD? Even the absolute worst SSD should be faster than that, haha.

That's the problem: how do I tell? And why would there be? I mean, it's essentially the same as a hard drive for program usage, except way faster, so...there's no reason it should be doing it, especially if a traditional HDD doesn't have the same problem. The reason I haven't done a secure erase yet is because it's currently my boot drive for my main system, and I'm almost absolutely certain it wouldn't make a difference at this point. I'll have to contact the manufacturer to see if they have any ideas.

No, I didn't do a secure erase. As it's a fairly new drive, (approximately 3 months old), what reason is there to? It's a clean...-ish install of the game. The only mod I have is a bugfix and minor feature compilation mod (ZRP) - it's irrelevant, though, as I've played without it on this PC and it had the same problem. So I doubt that'd make much difference!

Did a final test - only one I could think of. Stuck the SSD in another computer as a storage drive - i.e. not the boot drive - and loaded up S.T.A.L.K.E.R. from it. Still suffered from the stuttering, even doing nothing else besides playing Stalker. Blah.

Is this solely a TBS game, or..? Your post makes me want to play the game in question, but I'm usually more of a RTS kind of guy, or better yet, hybrid.

1. Sleep after: Never; Turn off hard disk after: Never. I also have any special "power savings" modes disabled in my BIOS. 2. For the image, what I basically did was setup a super basic computer, stick in an old 80GB Barracuda, formatted it to Windows 7, 64bit, install all the stupid Windows Updates that take forever to install, (this was the main purpose of creating an image - so I wouldn't ever have to install the hundreds of Windows Updates as a result of having the initial release copy of Windows 7 every time I reformatted a computer), and not install any drivers specific to the computer, nor any third party programs, so that I could re-image any computer I wanted within a fairly fast amount of time, and without worrying about incompatibilities. I'm sure a few generic drivers were installed to make the system usable at the time, but that shouldn't be a big deal. My previous AMD system was not a re-imaging, but, as I said, had the same problem - this system was re-imaged, but it came from an entirely different computer I setup, so it doesn't really make sense for the problem to translate over. FTR, it was an old Intel Pentium 4 system. 3. Thanks. Tried it, but no effect. 4. I actually started with the Microsoft standard AHCI driver - I didn't really know I was supposed to install the Intel one. I also started with the third party ASMedia SATA controller, too. As far as I can figure out, there's something wrong with the SSD itself...can't see how it can be anything but at this point. Wanted to fix it on my own, if possible...but at this point, it seems unlikely. Another thing - I only updated the firmware fairly recently - the previous version of the firmware, which was a few versions back, had the same exact problem. Bah. lol. Uhh, thanks.

Once again, I forgot to mention something: its firmware is flashed to the latest. Pagefile...as well as my entire user and temp/appdata folders, are all on my D:\ drive, not my C:\. So, if anything, the stupid SSD should be having an even *easier* time than it would normally - not that there's any bloody excuse for what it's doing now even if I were running a typical setup. I run Diskeeper, an automatic and manual defragmenting program. Enabled for my D:\ drive, completely disabled for my C:\ drive, obviously. You might've missed my previous edit: "(edit): Except, now that I think of it, my previous install, for my AMD computer, was a completely new format - not a re-imaging...and it had the same exact problem. So that's bunk, too."

Oops, I forgot about that. Yes, I did use AS SSD to do that - incorrect alignment, incorrect controller, and incorrect drivers. Fixing all of that didn't really make any difference, besides switching from the ASMedia SATA controller to the Intel solution, which made the SSD go about 15% faster. Speed doesn't really seem to be the problem, as far as I can tell, though, so... I also installed the RST drivers - I didn't originally, 'cos I didn't think I needed them, but apparently they include some semi-important drivers that are good to have even if you're not planning on using RST itself. The alignment was incorrect because I foolishly used the Windows 7 re-imaging process, which was the sorriest excuse of a re-imaging tool I could've ever possibly imagined, so it didn't surprise me when I found out the alignment offset was incorrect and set to 31 K instead of a more normal value, (I corrected it to 2048 K, and it reports as being good). I'm new to SSDs, so give me a break. Like I said, though, none of that really made a difference. Mayhaps I should try a secure erase and a complete, clean reformat - no Windows re-imaging? (edit): Except, now that I think of it, my previous install, for my AMD computer, was a completely new format - not a re-imaging...and it had the same exact problem. So that's bunk, too.

I'm sorry: what was warned against? I didn't propose actually doing anything, I don't think, so I'm not sure what you mean! Thanks for the input. I decided to monitor Resource Monitor on the drive tab on my second monitor while playing the game on my C:\ drive. Strange results. For every spike you see for the queue length on the C:\ drive, there was an associated stutter. This was easy to notice because during the time where there was no drive activity for a little, there were also no spikes. I'm not sure what it's loading, because, as I said, I'm not moving my character or even my camera, and the one major thing that would normally cause stutter loading in in Stalker - AI characters as they reach the arbitrary distance from your character to be switched "on" - I have virtually completely disabled, (the vanilla switch is 150 meters - I have it set to 1 and I'm in a remote location - ergo, no character switching). My OS is also not hardly interacting with my SSD when it's happening, so I don't think it's that that's causing the stutter, either...

Motherboard: Asus Maximus VI Hero CPU: Intel i7-4770k RAM: 2x4GB DDR3 1600MHz Video Card: AMD 5770 System Drive: PNY XLR8 120GB Storage Drive: Seagate Barracuda 1TB 7200RPM OS: Windows 7 SP1, 64bit I have two copies of a game, S.T.A.L.K.E.R...one on my SSD, one on my HDD. I'm playing at minimum settings for the sake of the test. The HDD version plays perfectly. The SSD, on the other hand, while having much faster load times, stutters for about half a second every 3-10 seconds, no matter what I'm doing - even if I'm standing perfectly still. I'm loading from the same save, with the same settings. Both drives are plugged into the Intel SATA solution on the board, not any third party controllers. It is in AHCI mode, not IDE. My specifications should be more than capable of running S.T.A.L.K.E.R., particularly on minimum settings. Light benchmarking utilities say my SSD reads close to 400MB/s for 1MB random reads, with my HDD only getting around 50MB/s. The system is not overheating, (having monitored my drive temps, as well as my CPU and HDD temps). Anyone have any idea what's going on? (edit): Oh, also, the SSD is only 40% filled - about the same for the HDD, too. (edit): Also, furthermore: this happened on my previous computer, which was a quadcore Phenom II 3.5GHz with a Gigabyte 990FXA-UD3 motherboard. This is also a recent reformat, and it's new for this computer. So I can't see this being anything else besides the SSD itself.

I don't fully understand what's going on, but it looks ridiculous.