Luggage~SPARTA~

I am not even going to discuss whether you believe that has an out of the box true colour configuration! Here is the test card for calibration

Eeek don't stick it in a separate partition on the same physical, you are just asking the head to wander between potentially the two farthest, points especially on a single disk system. You will have the standup example of slowest performance Stick as much RAM as you can reasonably justify, this does alter to the machine function, but to give you an extreme example, I have no page file on this workstation as I have 16GB of ram. I don't do video or photo editing. Win7 (and probably every other MS OS) will still stick stuff in a page file even when there is spare ram, so switching it off does remove waiting for slow disk I/O I haven't had to look at this for a while, but the old standard was mirrored pair for OS and then a stripe for data (RAID level at your preference) , and I personally would stick the page on the stripe. But in a machine without a stripe I have used a dedicated disk to hold the pagefile to speed things up. Even an older disk dedicated to the function of page file in an uncontended role is going to beat a OS drive being asked to read data from one area, and page off data to another at the same time. However I will ask some of the server guys in work tomorrow and see what the latest vogue is. The challenge is that most of the machines we use don't have hotswap on the SATA/SAS, so you have to calculate expense against decomplexifying (real word - George W Bush told me) the build and maintenance. Sorting out a failed disk becomes a nightmare because you have to get the right one. The majority of the RAID that we get on the boards we use is 'fake' raid, a software hook in the OS doing the raid - hence why you are asked to load drivers at build time. I read an interesting article on Toms or similar where they benchmarked 'fake raid' against OS striping and the OS striping performed the same for slightly less CPU. For this reason I now use a pair of 1TB drives in a unprotected stripe. Even now I am not happy because I can see that one of the drives is slower than the other so is causing a delay on writes and I will have to identify the slower drive and eventually swop it out. Whilst I am not up to SSD speeds, I am definitely seeing faster load performance. To get proper RAID you are looking at £250 upwards for the card/controller I have: OS Two 120GB SSD in software mirror Data Two 1TB drives in software stripe Data One 1.5TB in standard mode Oh and P always beats me to the loading, so clearly he knows more than me about this. ps - I haven't read this is a while but I would think it will provide assistance as to when to use mirroring against stripes. My memory says small transactions favour the striping but I am sure you will correct me when you have read it. wiki raid link

A candidate for your server here Windows Home Server 2011 here

Yes, still regarded as a legal document for contracting, unlike plain email.

I understand why people buy NAS, but for my own personal use I prefer to go down the old fashioned server route. I feel positively ripped off to have to pay some $500 for an intelligent disk enclosure, when I can have a full fat Xeon server with spare processing power. I appreciate why this may be overkill for some, but being able to run up a server for ARMA or L4D2 or any other game is invaluable. The argument, which is valid, is that a traditional server does not an "out of the box" solution make - as you still have to stick a OS onto the beast, but you can get opensource to cover that, or being lazy as I am, have Windows Home server 2011. Cheap as chips. This is Windows Small Business Server with a few restrictions, but it provides out of the box: Automatic workstation backup Media streaming Standard Windows shares with full security Access from the internet via a web front end In addition you can enable: DHCP DNS FAX Server Print Server and some others that really are probably even more useless to a home user! There are third party plugins which seamlessly integrate, my favourite being Drivepool, which provides directory mirroring, and the ability make a bunch of disks into a single large disk without having to worry about stripes etc. This allows you to remove/add disks more easily as off-lining a disk automatically copies the data elsewhere. You can get Apple streaming support and many other interesting things to play with. I know that this is not for everyone, but Custard is going down this route and can comment as a new user of the software.

I am not sure about that Vi, apparently some of the air I was managing to take on Spa yesterday made the Russians look like expert drivers! I managed several rolls at one stage and still didn't come last (thanks for attending Cy, you can come every week)

Those screenshots look good. I am quite impressed. Your previous comments on graphics settings have always made me assume you were running CGA standard, something along the lines of the original Castle Wolfenstein. However that looks good. I will give up fancy lighting effects and reflection bollocks for smooth lines any day.

I am a voice and data networking man, so apart from providing gobs of bandwidth for V-motion and the like I don't touch the virtualisation 'stuff' It just provides me an excuse to go and play with DWDM and OTU2 Has anyone got any experience of the VMware free Hypervisor, installation knowledge etc.? I want to virtualise my ML110 G6 from WHS2011(basically small business server 2008 r2) to get away from the 8GB OS memory limit and run WHS2011 in one virtual and allow me to run up others as necessary. I have a spare server ML 115 G5 which I don't mind trashing, so that can be used as a test bed. Anyone brave enough? Cheers

Thanks to everyone for making last night great fun. A particular welcome to Peter who has never played the game before, and is probably wondering whether he will again! I think Castle appears to be outstanding a return as we didn't manage to complete it before nursie came and told me it was bedtime and the server had to be switched off. In the meantime I will download the files mentioned by Dai and get them loaded.

Update Number 1: I have downloaded the GRAW 2 map bundles from the Downloads section of the Sparta Forums and stuck them into the rotation. You will need them if you want to play on the server. The rotation is currently on a subset of these coop maps. I decided you probably didn't want to play 3 versions of the same map, fog/day/night so I only selected one of them. Secondly we briefly played some Hamburger Hill, mixed results. Not everyone's cup of tea so we lost a player or two, and that meant that the smoke time was probably too low for the quantity we had in the server. However it did bring forward some useful information. It is clear that Custard is not the senile, past it, has-been that I assumed, but rather a tactical genius (in his own head at least) and a someone to watch. Forrester, still sounding like the Doctor from the Simpsons, is a sneaky little tinker and knows some devious routes into the smoke. Watchy is a devil at range, oh and I still can't use any of the weapons and a pistol is probably my best option.......at 2 metres.....if they aren't shooting back........preferably they need to be facing the other way.......and deaf. Which brings me around to headphones. I was definitely at a disadvantage using speakers for this. Not really able to hear much over my own two bags of salt and vinegar attached to my knees, I was being tracked down and skewered with far too much regularity. So it's time to break out the musty headphones I reckon. pip-pip!

Update:GRAW 2 Dedicated server We have a dedi server up and running, at the moment it is a work in progress but seems to be ready for coop missions. It has a max players count of 12 in this gamemode. I must warn you that neither Krambo or Zeno (who have been beta-testing) are at all competitive and they are not playing for keeps at all! I am playing with the other gametypes to see whether they are worth a look. I am sorry we couldn't get a GRAW 1 server up in the time, I just couldn't make it work. If anyone has any memory of what the process is please do let me know. 19:30 GMT Server name is "Luggage test2" Server password is test2 Any queries let me know.

How is the task of spelling wife going? Do you want us to test you? Any other words you need to learn/practise? Custard will probably have an app for that.

Happy Birthday Peter, long may your lens not droop

I44-ARMA2CO-v2-6.7z @CBA_v0.8.3.175_hotfix2.7z Both on the download list - thanks!

I hope you're reading this thread Cent.

SSD 120 HDD 1TB

Sorry? Your beer is not brought you to by a scantily clad woman on demand, cold and cool? Only way here in the UK. We couldn't possibly consider having to open our own beer?!?!?

I have SSD + standard 7200rpm HDD SSD holds OS and certain games HDD holds everything else AND temp/pagefile and some redirected folders I am dubious about this being anything other than a failing SATA connection/broken SATA controller/General IO issue on the MB which is a fault, rather than an inherent outcome of your deployment of your files.

We were steam , he was retail - never the twain shall meet apparently. We are hopeful he will be ok on a non-addon version.

Zeno, Floyd and myself have downgraded back to basic Wolves of the Pacific in the hope we can get some time in together. Time to install without U-boat missions Custard.

Well I know that everyone has been completely ambivalent regarding my small project using proper software and hardware, but as I was discussing the matter with Panic last night (everyone else saw me coming) I thought I would drop a small update for everyone to ignore. The server is fitted with five 2TB drives, and I am using drivepool from stablebit to create the dynamic mirroring and striping. Initially this was performing very badly and copying to the disk was unacceptable slow, but since release M3 4133 it has been working a treat. The point of the post is that improvements are on the way. M4 release will deliver a completely rewritten file system which will be instead if NTFS, What's new: ?A new file system, CoveFs, specifically designed for pooling. 100% native, on par with NTFS. No reliance on any user mode service. Needless to say, this is very big. ?DrivePool is now a disk. Yes, it has a drive letter. ?Deeper integration with the Dashboard. ?Usability improvements such as background duplication changing. ?Indexing support. ?Refreshed UI. Read the blog post for more... Link to developer site blog. http://blog.covecube.com/2011/12/a-tour-of-stablebit-drivepool-beta-m4/

LuggageBPR Already associated between EA and origin - no idea how - I really must stop this sleep-registering

Has anyone got any experience of taking part in an Incursion battle? I need some advice if anyone is willing.