The Red Hurricane

It's time for a new gaming PC for me.

I built my gaming PC, I affectionately called the Red Storm, back in 2020. It runs Windows 10 and I’ve had a lot of fun with it over the years. Now Microsoft plans to abandon support for Windows 10 in October of 2025. Rather than upgrade my gaming PC to Windows 11, I've decided to simply unplug it from the Internet and continue gaming on it offline from now on.

After all, the danger to Windows 10 no longer having updates for security vulnerabilities comes 99% from the Internet. My previous gaming PC that runs Windows 7, you may have heard me refer to as, "The Brick of Doom", still runs happily offline to this day and remains valuable to me because it runs an old version of Microsoft Office that does not require a constant Internet connection.

Microsoft's antics with Windows 10, which they initially claimed would be the last version of Windows, but of course is not as they try to drive customers to migrate to Windows 11, have really annoyed me. Windows 11 offers no new features of any interest to me and just appears to be TPM/spyware hell, as well as an excuse to sell computers to people that already have perfectly good computers. Additionally, the constant badgering to use OneDrive, or trying to force everyone to use a Microsoft account to just be able login locally to their computers did not help my disposition towards the Windows ecosystem in general.

This is why my new gaming PC will run Linux instead of Windows. I think we're finally at a point where enough games run on Linux that I can justify having a dedicated Linux gaming PC. My new gaming PC will run Bazzite and will leverage a Radeon GPU instead of an Nvidia one. Up till now, I've always used Nvidia GPUs for my gaming PCs, but again because I'm tired of nonsense...this time from Nvidia such as overpricing their GPUs, deprecating support for 32-bit PhysX on their new RTX 50-series GPUs, or what looks to me like the pyromaniac's dream come true, the 12VHPWR connector, nothing Nvidia is offering looks appealing to me right now. This is why I chose a GPU for my new gaming PC that still has 8 pin power connectors and is much more reasonably priced, the Radeon 7900 XT.

For my Steam titles and MMORPGs I still play, my new gaming PC running Bazzite will be called the Red Hurricane. These are the specifications for the Red Hurricane, along with links to the components in case anyone wants to get one for themselves:

The Red Hurricane

• AMD Ryzen™ 9 9950X 16-Core, 32-Thread Unlocked Desktop Processor
• Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 SE ARGB CPU Air Cooler, 6 Heat Pipes Cpu cooler, Dual TL-C12C-S PWM Fan, Aluminium Heatsink Cover, AGHP Technology, for AMD AM4/AM5/Intel LGA1700/115X/1155/1200/1851
• GIGABYTE B850I AORUS PRO AMD AM5 LGA 1718 Motherboard, Mini-ITX, DDR5, 2X M.2, PCIe 5.0, USB-C, WIFI7, 2.5GbE LAN, EZ-Latch
• Crucial P3 Plus 2TB PCIe Gen4 3D NAND NVMe M.2 SSD, up to 5000MB/s - CT2000P3PSSD8
• Thermaltake Tower 200 Mini-ITX Computer Case; 2x140mm Pre-Installed CT140 Fans; Supports GPU Length Up to 380mm; CA-1X9-00S4WN-00; Bumblebee; 3 Year Warranty
• Sapphire 11323-02-20G Pulse AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT Gaming Graphics Card with 20GB GDDR6, AMD RDNA 3
• Crucial BX500 4TB 3D NAND SATA 2.5-Inch Internal SSD, up to 540MB/s - CT4000BX500SSD1, Solid State Drive
• Toshiba 20TB MG10ACA20TE SATA 600GB 20in1 HDD

The 2tb drive is for the operating system, the 4tb is for the games to be installed on, and the 20tb drive is for game video recordings. I look forward to putting this new PC together and making new gaming videos with it to share with you.

Time for a reboot

Hi guys,

Time for a reboot. I'm rebooting my gaming channel on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/@jsfpcgc) and I've decided that most, if not all, of me gaming videos will now have a blog post associated with them. This way I can offer more information for anyone that wants it.

I'm looking forward to having fun making content again that I hope you enjoy.

Joe Fantabulous

This blog is not dead, at least not quite yet.

I was streaming yesterday when a viewer observed that my blog hadn’t been updated in 4 years. So much has happened and I have been busy with so many things that I just haven’t gotten around to blogging. Time to get this blog restarted! My friends often chat with me about entertainment, technology and gaming-related topics and I think I’ll start posting about some of that. It might be a bit slow at first, but I have a few ideas of things that might be fun to share such as a series on the gaming PC I plan to build, or thoughts on computer hardware, some scripting ideas, educational resources and so on. Although my blog is a bit of an outlet for me I would like it to be a helping hand for you. Maybe I can share something here that you will find useful. I’ll also share a few opinions from time to time.

Thanks for stopping by.

The Little Computer That Could...

AMD is having a tough time, but that means it’s a great time to buy AMD. While it is generally true that Intel processors typically offer the best performance in any bracket it is always true that AMD is the cheapest in any bracket. I use both Intel and AMD processors and they both work just fine.

I’m about to build a new system based around the A6-5400k. The A6 series directly competes with Intel’s i3 processors. This should make a great little system for testing budget gaming options and demonstrating just how cheaply you can enter the PC Gaming scene if you’re a purely console player.

This is a comparison between the A6 I chose versus an i3 that is nearly triple the price (but not triple the performance)

Hi, been busy!

Hi guys. I've been a bit busy with a few things so I haven't had a chance to blog. I had a friend once that said my ambitions exceed my abilities...and that never sit well with me so I've always striven to do and be more. The problem usually ends up being though that there are only so many hours in the day and, whether I like it or not, even I need sleep occasionally. But I've been able to make a little more time to blog so it's time to try and catchup a bit.

I have a bunch of new videos that I'm uploading, it will just take a little time to tag and properly describe them, put them into play-lists...and hopefully get them in the right order. So look for them soon and enjoy.

2000 Subscribers

When I started my YouTube gaming channel I assumed only my friends would watch it. Apparently though I was wrong and today over two thousand fellow gamers subscribe to my channel. My channel is still pretty random, just me and my friends having fun. But the best part is that through the channel I've made new friends, and I'm always happy to have more friends to game with. I hope to hear from viewers about what they like, don't like and any suggestions they have for the channel. I hope people keep enjoying the channel.

Solid State Drives

Solid State Drives (SSDs) are great because they can store lots of data and have no moving parts. As a result you end up with a device that can retrieve information very quickly because it doesn't have to spin up and look for it the way hard disk drives do. The only limitation is that SSDs have a finite number of writes they can perform before their flash can't be written to any longer so the applications they are best for are ones that read loads of data but write very little. This is EXACTLY what most online games do being that they load data for various game areas, save their data to the cloud, and only write and save locally generally when there is a client software update (patches, oh the non-stop patches).

Watched my channel and noticed everything seems to load really fast? You've been watching SSDs in action! SSDs can make your old computer feel like new if you set the up the right way...

You can read more about it in PCWorld's article:

How to stretch the life of your SSD storage

Denigrating Gamers

Some people enjoy denigrating gamers as they consider us a safe group to disparage now that times have changed and there is swift and immediate punishment for maligning people for their race, religion or orientation. I just view it as ugly people looking for the current group they can be ugly to without consequence.

Jimmy thinks he's funny but in reality he's just a sad vestige of an old and dying media platform.

Jimmy may not like gaming videos but the gamers he heard from were correct (however colorfully they may have made their point), our media platform is the future and his is definitely the past.

Transcoding Computer 2

Recently I’ve been running into problems with video transcoding, specifically the amount of time it takes. We’re having so much fun that I routinely shoot about 3tb of video on a given play-day, but that takes the Transcoding Computer about 24hrs+ to chew through. There have even been a few days where the hard drives were filled to overflowing, so the 4tb capacity of the Transcoding Computer just isn’t enough. Mostly the fault lies with FRAPS which creates immense files than need to be transcoded to H.264 before they can be uploaded to YouTube. So I’ve been thinking of bringing another Transcoding Computer online!

It turns out I had another PC laying around that hasn’t been doing anything lately, a Gigabyte Brix A8-5545. All I needed to do was plug-in a USB harddrive that adds 3tb of storage and it’s ready to transcode!

This should alleviate the processing backlogs that have been building up as we have fun making videos so expect more craziness and a lot more of it!

This is a video of the Brix getting put together when I bought it a year ago:

Joe's Value Gaming PC (AMD A10, August 2015)

I’ve talked with a few guild members that are looking for suggestions for how to build extremely inexpensive gaming PCs with a heavy emphasis on "inexpensive". This is about as cheap as it gets for a gaming PC with new parts, though I am always looking for ways to go cheaper while maintaining performance. AMD Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) are excellent for gaming on the cheap. When an AMD APU is compared to discrete Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) typically the GPU will always win on performance but the APU will always win on price, if you avoid super-expensive memory.

Joe's Value Gaming PC (AMD A10, August 2015)

Save your money on RAM!

Recently I was chatting with a guild member about computer upgrades and he mentioned that he was considering paying for some very expensive overclocked memory in the hopes of realizing better performance in web browsing and gaming.

Don’t buy it! Outside of a few specialize applications/configurations memory speeds usually don’t matter much. Which ones you might be asking? If you’re using an AMD APU for your graphics and don’t have a discrete graphics card then memory speeds matter because that is now your video memory also (APU’s don’t have video memory inside the processor die). You might also see a benefit on workstations that perform heavy amounts of virtualization. For browsing and gaming though save your money and go with the budget memory.

The Dollar Menu Speed Run

One thing that many people notice when they join our guild is that guild chat is often very quiet. That’s because most of the action happens in Ventrillo (voice chat). If you want to join and have the most fun with us grab your mic and download Ventrillo. The software is free and headset mics are cheap. The one I use is just a little over $20!

Often people tell me, "my mic is broken" or "I don’t have one and can’t afford one" and so on. It’s okay if you don’t feel social enough for voice chat, just be honest. For everyone else here is the cheap headset that I use, the Logitech H340. For the price it sounds great to me.

If you’ve never heard of Ventrillo and don’t know where to get the client this is the place: http://www.ventrilo.com/

Joe's Favorite Fan Films

Have you ever thought to yourself, “Ugh, Hollywood has run out of ideas” and wished you could find something more interesting to watch? I have, all the time. Thankfully YouTube seems to be filled with fan-films that are better than much of what I see in theaters. As I discover these gems I'll be adding them to a special playlist on my channel as my guess is that the types of fan-films I enjoy other gamers will also!

I'll update it from time to time and if you come across an interesting fan-film please let me know!

My Fan-Film Playlist

Hermes arrives!

My computers are all named for Greek gods and goddesses that represented most closely the functions my computers perform. Hermes, messenger of the gods, is my new/old notebook that now joins the team so I can keep this blog a bit more updated than it has been.

If you've been watching my channel for any length of time you know I'm always looking to save money and despise Microsoft Windows (mostly due to money). So I went out and looked for the best bang for the buck I could find and here is a video of what I picked up!

For the mere $180 this computer costs it is an amazing little machine that exemplifies why I am a believer in buying refurbished items. As long as they work it doesn't matter if they're pretty!

My new little friend runs Zorin OS 9 Core 64-bit and ran flawlessly the first time Zorin ran, zero driver issues! It's an example of why I have no problems with leaving Windows behind as Microsoft goes down a road of restrictive environments, privacy intrusions, continues to be unable (unwilling?) to deal with its security shortcomings.

If you didn't already know all of the videos on my channels are all processed by a trans-coding computer that also runs Linux. I've been very happy with its performance which is why I knew I didn't want a dual-booting notebook and instead was ready for a Linux-only notebook. I can't beat the price for performance ratio it offers! Windows would run rather slowly on a machine like this, but Linux runs great!

Now you'll get to see a whole lot more blogging here courtesy of Hermes, so I hope you enjoy it and thanks for reading my little blog.

1000 Subscribers?!

I have 1000 subscribers? I still have trouble believing it. Now I feel like a real YouTuber. Welcome everyone, it’s nice to get to show you things from my gaming worlds. I feel inspired to make a bunch more videos now. :)

SkyForge

This is a first look at a free to play MMORPG I had thought of trying. Want to give it a try with me?

Happy Father's Day

I hope everyone is having a happy Father's Day. I was able to get in a little SWTOR time today and enjoy some dailies and a flashpoint before I have to go off and spend some time with family. I'll be back later tonight. I hope everyone is having a happy Father's Day.

SWTOR Scripted Dancing with VBScript

I play SWTOR, probably more than I should…and late at night sometimes I get some strange ideas. This time just for fun on this night I was thinking as I typed dancing emotes that it might be nice to automate them. While online games like SWTOR have rules against automated game play they typically ignore anything that doesn’t offer an unfair advantage so I’ve used scripting in other games to automate all kinds of things that were just for fun. I created a VBScript to send emote commands to my character and dance through a pre-selected sequence. In this video I demonstrate how it looks and show how I did it. Below is a complete copy of the VBScript used in this video. You can copy it to a text file, call it anything you want and save it with the extension VBS and it’s ready to go. Run it as Administrator and set focus into SWTOR and you’ll be dancing the night away, provided you have all the same emotes unlocked that I do. Of course you can customize the script to whatever emotes you prefer. Enjoy!

msgbox("running") EmoteThis("wave") EmoteThis("flirt") EmoteThis("clubdance") EmoteThis("lepihop") EmoteThis("backflip") EmoteThis("holohoop") EmoteThis("clawbirdkick") EmoteThis("angrydance") EmoteThis("dance") EmoteThis("clubdance") EmoteThis("drink") EmoteThis("kneel") EmoteThis("flex") EmoteThis("superflex") EmoteThis("toetouch") EmoteThis("yippee") EmoteThis("doubleguns") EmoteThis("woot") EmoteThis("drink") EmoteThis("backflip") EmoteThis("introduce") EmoteThis("flirt") EmoteThis("holohoop") EmoteThis("clawbirdkick") EmoteThis("angrydance") EmoteThis("dance") EmoteThis("clubdance") EmoteThis("lepihop") EmoteThis("backflip") EmoteThis("boogie") EmoteThis("getdown") EmoteThis("nobones") EmoteThis("thrash") EmoteThis("whatup2") EmoteThis("traditional") EmoteThis("clubdance") EmoteThis("backflip") EmoteThis("toetouch") EmoteThis("beachparty") EmoteThis("scratch") EmoteThis("bottlebreak") EmoteThis("dud") EmoteThis("laugh") EmoteThis("kloo") EmoteThis("kiss") EmoteThis("bye") msgbox("Done") sub EmoteThis(IncomingEmote)     Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")     WScript.Sleep 20000     WshShell.SendKeys "{DOWN}"     WScript.Sleep 1000     WshShell.SendKeys "{ENTER}"     WScript.Sleep 1000     WshShell.SendKeys "/" & IncomingEmote     WScript.Sleep 1000     WshShell.SendKeys "{ENTER}"    end sub

Roundtable Discussion: WTF Happened to WoW?

I used to play the World of Warcraft very heavily, and nothing else. For years I didn’t buy any other games and spent all my free time in WoW. Today the game just doesn’t have the appeal it once did and millions of players have quit. WTF happened to WoW?!

Want to join me for a roundtable discussion? Via Ventrillo I’d like to have a discussion with other gamers about what they enjoyed about WoW and what they feel is missing now. Have you let your account lapse (I have)? If so, why?

Let me know if you would like to join us for this discussion which will be recorded for YouTube. Feel free to plug your channels too.

We'll see how many people are interested and then set a date for the discussion.

Time for SWTOR at last!

Today was a busy day so I wasn’t able to game this morning, but I’m finally home so it’s time for SWTOR! My Level 60 Imperial Agent finally made it to the Begeren Colony so I’ll be playing here today as I get reacquainted with her.

Anyone that wants an invite to my Imperial guild on the Begeren Colony can whisper Hyraxia.