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I spent some time tonight observing comet Machholz C/2004 Q2 visiting our skies this month and well into 2005. It seemed like a globular cluster at first but after a little while there’s no doubt; it truly is a beautiful site. Popping-in the 9mm LV eyepiece was a great big blur, so I’m sticking with the 26mm. The moon was also great tonight, it never fails to amaze me… Here’s some great moon maps to explore and the official lunar republic website in case you wanted to be a lunar citizen.

Perry Vlahos (our vice-president) has appeared on ABC’s GNT show with his usual astronomical enthusiasm. If you missed that, here’s a direct link to the wmv video.

Whilst on the astronomy topic, were getting closer to Cassini’s Titan-B flyby, followed by the Huygens probe separation from Cassini on December 25 and its 21 day journey to Titan. Cassini continues to deliver stunning images from the ringed world.

After reading so many steam forums, knowledge bases, trying all those ‘voodoo’ settings (that worked for some people), I finally got Half-Life 2 to run (that is no crashes, and no audio stuttering). I had a suspicion that memory was to blame after I played around with memory timings, running it on single channel etc. So, I bought 1GB of the most reliable DDR400 memory one can currently buy, Corsair memory.

As soon as I replaced my GeiL RAM with Corsair RAM, HL2 has been running flawlessly! So there you go, after all that it turns out that the source engine must indeed push memory to it’s limits, enough to make it fail, even if the memory is not faulty in the first place (my GeIL RAM has been fine for a long time now, and no probs with any other games). The timings on the Corsair RAM is not that much different from my old RAM, 2.5-3-3-6 so I suspect it’s not the latency to blame here, more so it’s ability to function properly when pushed to the limits - and the thing is, I never had any probs with the old memory or running a memtest.

The latest steam updates seem to fix the audio stuttering to some extent, however I can’t help but think that the audio stuttering was somehow also related to memory, as that too greatly improved with the new memory. It seems like an expensive solution I know, paying 80$ for the game and then $300+ for decent memory, but if that’s what it takes to fully experience a masterpiece like HL2… (1GB of new RAM can’t be a bad thing at all!).

There’s also some merit with some posts claiming the only way to get around the crashes is to underclock the FSB a little bit - if you’re having similar problems with HL2 and you can’t afford new RAM, perhaps that’s the way to go. As I said in my earlier posts, none of the recommended solutions short of getting new RAM worked for me, however before you head down the path of new RAM, it’s worth exploring all the other options first.

:: Half Life 2 Crash Problem: Memory could not be read
:: Half-Life 2 Stuttering Problem

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