Loney

I can't seem to find any decent highway walls. I am looking for highway walls that look good with sunken RHW and maxis highways.

Router: Trendnet TEW-432BRP, C1.1 R I turned on encryption for the first time and set it to WPA2, PSK and AES (cipher type) a week ago, and that's when the wireless connection for all four of our laptops and an iPod Touch started dropping frequently at random times. It never happened before for the past few years until the encryption was set. We have to manually connect to the router as the iPod Touch's wireless manager, Intel PROset (installed onto Window xp) and Window 7's wireless manager refuse to automatically connect. We have to repeatedly attempt to connect because the programs would say something like, "Cannot connect". Rebooting the computers and the router didn't help. I also turned on Extended Range Mode but it didn't help The connection drops even when the wireless signal is at max strength. I haven't updated the firmware because it only fixed a packet size bug, and I'm not sure if it's related to the connection drops.

I noticed other computers outside of our house using our WiFi, and I do believe they were eating up quite a bit of bandwidth since everything they entered our router, my Youtube videos load at a few kilobytes per minute. I've triple checked the firmware was correct, and I was connected to the router via Ethernet.

Well, I fried my router and modem when I installed the firmware update to see if it would fix the problem. On the positive side, we got two other exactly same routers on hand for replacement. On the bad side, the same routers are most likely to have the same problem and I'm banned from managing the wireless stuff by my parents.

1. WEP is a broken encryption, it can be broken in minutes because of a major flaw. WPA is also broken and although it's more secure than WEP, it still can be cracked. 2. I tried turning off Intel PROset, but the two Windows xp laptops still have trouble. The Window 7 laptops and the iPod Touch didn't come with a third-party wireless software. 3. I tried resetting it, it didn't help. 4. We have two other exact same routers, because my dad felt we needed backups just in case if the router dies. And he will not buy new ones until all of the routers become fried from age. I'd say that would take about 20 years.

I would also recommend replacing the thermal paste. Rarely do manufacturers use quality thermal paste.

What is your fan's cooling system configuration? Where are the intake and exhaust vents located? No laptops are created equal, and the same thing applies to laptop coolers (especially active ones that come with fans). If your laptop inhales air from the bottom and vents it out from the side, don't buy a laptop cooler that pulls air from the bottom and out the side. You'll create a vacuum and it will choke the cooling fan, and not much cooling will be done by the laptop cooler. Even worse if the laptop cooler is too small, because that means the laptop cooler's exhaust air will be quickly be inhaled again. If there's no direct intake vent to the cooling fan or if it looks too small, take off the bottom panel (if possible) and see if it helps.

I installed Dataram's RAMDisk today, set it to automatically save a copy when shutting down, to use the same copy the next time the computer boots up and the size of the "disk partition" to 1.5 GB. I then moved Windows' TEMP and TMP folders to it. I also moved Firefox's cache to it as well. I read that sometime paging files are used even if there was plenty of free RAM. Since SC4 takes a very long time to startup, I don't want the OS/other programs to compete for hard drive bandwidth for unneeded paging. Completely turning off paging files seemed tempting as my computer with a 8 GB of RAM never exceeded 5 GB of RAM, but I was advised to not to turn it off. Here's what I did: http://img696.imageshack.us/img696/8706/unledbcy.jpg Was it a bad idea?

I have a question, is broadband really broadband when dialup is faster? Youtube videos are constantly loading around 2 kilobits per second lately. Webpages and pictures are fine, though I suspect my ISP is targeting Youtube for bandwidth throttling.

Well, here's a link to Tom's Hardware's list of recommended SSDs: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-price-ssd,3070.html You get what you paid for, though you will never find HDDs that can match SSDs' speed without costing as much or more than SSDs... Never underestimate the stupidity of humans and what they can do with fat, or supposedly fat wallets...

I'm on a "5 Mb/s" internet service plan that charges $65 per month, and the ISP is the only one around here. The other ISP that services the parts of the town but not my neighborhood charges like $70 for a 2 Mb/s connection. This is what I get during the morning and early afternoon, when I rarely use the internet, if at all: No you don't. This is what I get at night, when I actually need the internet: I'll get newer benchmarks when it's at night here. Anyone want to play a multiplayer game with me, such as Battlefield 3, Modern Warfare 3 or Team Fortress 2? I might lag just a little. Welcome to the club.

There's a more simple way of getting SC4 to run on another drive, if you're okay with Command Prompt: https://www.simtropolis.com/forum/topic/46084-questions-regarding-region-and-plugin-folders/page__p__1200601__fromsearch__1#entry1200601 If you need the info ASAP, here's a straight lead: https://www.simtropolis.com/forum/topic/46084-questions-regarding-region-and-plugin-folders/page__view__findpost__p__1198436

Simple solution: Build Higher Wouldn't carbon fiber reinforced concrete be sufficient? I know that they're much lighter than standard concrete and last for nearly a century compared to 10-20 years for unreinforced concrete.

It's 2012 on a planet exactly same as Earth, with some exceptions... -Human population: 11.6 billion -Fossil fuel supply: Estimated to last less than five years if fuel consumption doesn't decrease (and it won't), almost completely depleted. You get the idea of how much greenhouse gas was emitted. -Clean water supply: Less than 50% of it remain due to a combination of extensive pollution, over-usage and rapidly changing climate. -Alternative energy technology: While everything is in the 21st century, this field is still in the 1980's. Aka, still in infancy. -Forests: 99% cleared, all of the rainforests have been cleared. -Coral reefs and kelp forests: Extinct -Oceans: All commercially harvested wild fish species are threatened or endangered due to a combination of massive overfishing and water pollution. -Diseases: Many of the curable fungus/bacterial diseases are now incurable as most of them became super bugs, resistant to almost all antibiotics. -Political situation: Like late 19th century Europe, aka, extreme nationalism throughout the world. Now throw in arrogant, incompetent, power-hungry leaders that rule major countries. -Weapons technology: It's in the 2030's, aka, very advanced. Oh, and don't forget about massive stockpiles of WMDs. I've been researching and trying to predict what would specifically happen to each major country (for example, what would happen in China or UK?), if all of the above occurred. I know for sure that WWIII would start while all of the countries experience severe political instability.

Redid the conditions:

Get the cheapest SSD you can find, SC4's loading time will be much lower. It will be godsend when you're loading 5+ million pop cities with 3+ GB of plugins. For the processor, assuming it's a desktop, the Sandy Bridge i3 2130 is the fastest dual core (3.4 GHz) and it's quite cheap, only for $138. If you have a larger budget though, you can get a quad core i5 2500K (3.3 GHz, no hyperthreading) for $216, buy a powerful cooling system, and overclock the i5. Intel demonstrated that they managed to clock it to 4.9 GHz on air cooling, I think you can get close to 6 GHz with decent water cooling. AMD's Bulldozer processors are the last thing you would want for heavy single threaded programs. It was designed for servers dealing with heavily threaded workload, and AMD decided to port it to desktop computers. Unless if SC4 can use 8+ threads, stay away.

Today I ran SC4 in windowed mode with Window 7's Resource Monitor open next to it and anti-virus off. After running the time simulator at full speed on a 4 million-pop city, I noticed that cores were rarely parked for more than five seconds. Odd, SC4 uses only one core, and I set it to use one core so the OS doesn't bounce SC4's thread around on the cores. While one core was at 100%, all of the other cores had 0%-5% load. That prevented the core that SC4 was using from ever being turbo boosted past 1.73 GHz for more than a few seconds. I was told that setting processor affinity for background tasks is an invitation for a crash, but is there a way to safely force all of the background tasks on one core? Or better yet, stop the OS from bouncing the threads around? OS: Window 7 SP1 Home Premium 64-bit CPU: i7 720qm (4 cores, 8 threads, 1.60 GHz) RAM: 8 GB GPU: Mobility Radeon 5730

There's one problem, when I'm running SC4 without forcing it to one core, all of the cores report 25% load while SC4 is running like molasses. I see as not thread spreading, but thread bouncing. I'm fairly sure a processor with two loaded cores and the other two cores parked would produce less heat than a processor with all cores loaded. If you're only web browsing and typing, a quad core would be an overkill as a dual core would be sufficient. However, for gaming, quad cores are recommended since more and more newer games support more than two cores. Hexa-core is often considered an overkill for gaming. On my old laptop, even though the dual-core T7200 (2.0 GHz, Core Duo 2) processor has similar performance for single-threaded benchmarks/programs, one of the games that I frequently play uses more than two cores and there's a noticeable lower performance. Even with graphics set to absolute minimum, the quad core outdid the dual core in frame rates per second. How do I get Window 7 to recognize that I don't need all four cores active for a large single thread and some background tasks? And if there's no solution to that, how do I turn off two of the cores to force Turbo Boost to kick in?

Intel was the one to come up with the term, "Hyper-threading": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-threading For SC4's CPU priorities, I left that alone.

Why do you think so? It never uses more than a single thread at a time. Worth a comparison test. Skewing an operating system's algorithms usually has a serious overhead cost. I have only a dual processor, but the game runs quite happily without messing up the dispatch queue with priorities. And, hey Tungston, I thought the i7 was only a quad processor. Do they have dual pipelines? The i7 Nehalem, the type of microarchitecture that my processor has, ranges between 2 to 4 cores. The newer i7s, the Sandy Bridge, have between 4 to 6 cores. The i7 I have is quad, but it also has hyper-threading. I see eight cores in the Resource Monitor, and four of them are almost always parked. I'm assuming those are the "pseudo" cores.

I wanted to load SimCity 3000 Unlimited's music files into SimCity 4, the problem is that SC3U uses .xa sound files and SC4 uses mp3. I tried using the WAV MP3 program, but it would keep on cutting all converted files into half unless if I purchase the software. I also tried to follow this guide ( http://www.sc3000.com/underground/showarticle.cfm?id=1167 ), but this problem is preventing me: If anyone knows an easier way of converting .xa files to mp3, I would appreciate it.

I finally managed to convert the .xa files to .mp3 using the NCH's Switch Audio Converter: http://www.nch.com.au/switch/index.html The SAC didn't recognize the .xa files when I was loading them so I had to switch to "All Files".

Installed the free version of GEAR CD-RW 7.03, and for some reason, it won't start regardless if I use Administrator privilege or adjust compatibility. I also tried renaming the .xa files as mp3 or wav, but it didn't work.

Audacity didn't recognize the .xa files. I imported them as raw data and all I heard was static. I did edit the hexadecimals of the .xa files as the sc3000 thread instructed to do. EDIT: Tried Zamzar, it didn't recognize the .xa files as well.

Agreed. I had a first hand experience with the Eternal Commuter Bug, and to add fuel to fire, I also had CAM and Super Demand Ordinance. My main city, which had about 2 million residents, was hit with a massive crash in the residential demand. I deleted the city and tried to restart, but even the new city had a massive residential demand crash. As a result, I abandoned the entire region and restarted on a new one.