Today on my drive to work I got 44.9 mpg (with windows down). My goal is to make it the 45 miles on one tank of gas and not drive like a 100 year old grandma. I have been perfecting my driving to be the most fuel efficient it can be. Today was a good day – the temp was moderately warm, it was not too windy, and there were plenty of big trucks to follow.

The places where I lost some of my mpg was at stop lights. Where I gained some of that back was coasting down hills in neutral. I know it sounds strange, but it appears to my non-scientific experiment that if I am idling in neutral i can save about 0.2mpg+/- (of the total trip) for every 10 seconds of sitting versus idling in drive. I assume this is because the car is accelerating ever so slightly but the brake is preventing it from moving forward. I wonder if car makers could make their cars actually shift into neutral when braking to save some fuel economy?

Some people think that if you drive 55 mph or less you will get the best fuel economy. I have observed that this is not the case. I think each car probably has its own sweet spot based on how aerodynamic it is.
For my Honda Fit, it seems that I get better gas mileage at 75 than I do at 70. I cant be sure because I am not testing it in a wind tunnel. The road is never flat for long enough to know for sure.

I do know that when I follow behind a large truck or eighteen wheeler that I get at least 2-4 mpg better if not more. Also, the less pressure put on the gas pedal the better. I know thats probably obvious but its really works. Instead of accelerating quickly (like pretty much every driver does) slowly ease into the speed you want. Sometimes you cant slowly accelerate due to other drivers preparing to ram you off the road.

Another thing that caught my attention was an old school Honda Civic going about 50 mph in a 55 zone. It had a bumper sticker on it that said GasSavers.org which I think its great that people are trying to save money and gas and also drive efficiently. The only problem is that they were driving so slow that people were getting stuck behind them and then would mash the gas pedal to pass. (The other lane of traffic was easily doing 70+). For every 1 mpg saved by the slow car – probably equals 2mpg wasted in every car who gets stuck behind them and passes… which doesn’t really help the environment in the long run. We all have to find a good balance between super energy saver and purely wasteful.

Maybe one day everyone will drive efficiently and have energy sipping cars, but until then we have to learn to live cohesively. I hope in a few years we can look back and laugh at how pathetic the fuel economy is of all cars built today.

I get my MPG rating from the ScanGauge II:

Now is not the time I wanted to upgrade my computer, but since its not that easy to find quality parts for the older processor I have it seemed best to upgrade. I ended up getting a new motherboard, processor and RAM.

The motherboard I purchased from Newegg (the Foxconn brand) ended up being DOA out of the box. I installed everything correctly but there was no LED, no beeps, nothing. I knew it was a risk buying some weird brand. Thought I did read that Foxconn makes parts for lots of well known brands. Oh well, I will never buy one of their products again.

I did some research and bought the following at Micro Center:

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-N650SLI-DS4 LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 650i SLI
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 Conroe 2.66GHz 4M shared L2 Cache LGA 775
Memory: OCZ 4GB(2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel

It seems fast and stable so far. Yay. Hooray.

My computer crashed the other day. It has happened to me before, so I wasnt worried. Reboot – windows starts – but the onboard network connection cant be found. The add on sound card cant be found. Whats the deal?

Reinstalled win xp pro SP2 – onboard network still cannot be found. Onboard sound card cant be found… how weird. I have a feeling its a bunk motherboard. It has killed a couple sticks of RAM in the past.

The processor I have (AMD 64 dual core 3800) is only like 2 or 3 years old max, but its really hard to find socket 939 motherboards anymore. I ended up ordering from some off brand Foxconn 6150BK8MC-KRSHN2 939 NVIDIA GeForce 6150B(PV) GPU Micro ATX AMD Motherboard for about $50. Lets hope this replacement works… I dont really want to have to pay to upgrade right now.

Though if I did upgrade – Intel is the processor to buy right now – the 775 socket e6550 or better probably. This upgrade would have to include the processor, motherboard and ram ( and possibly a heatsink for the processor).

More to come later

Well, after much much much testing and research looking for a cause to my new computer crashing only during games. Everything worked fine in normal windows and even Source Engine games worked (see Counter Strike: Source). I thought it was maybe a bad video card, or maybe the video card didnt work well with the Dual Core 3800+ processor. I even had the idea that maybe the video card wasnt getting enough power, so I replaced the 425 Watt powersupply with a 500 watt Antec power supply. The problems still occured.

I ran a memtest with no errors. I installed and uninstalled an add on audio card, then used and didnt use the on board audio card. Eventually I removed 3 of the RAM sticks… and guess what… the game worked. no way. I tested it before with 2 ram sticks and games didnt work. This is good news. I tested each ram stick (4 total = 2 GB of ram) and each stick worked fine individually. I was happy I figured it out. I dont know what I figured out, but I knew how to fix it. I went to a TigerDirect store (there arent many and their customer service blows) and bought 2 sticks of Geil 1GB Ram (with blue heatsink cover looking thing). I stuck the new sticks of ram in and viola’, the games work and they dont crash. I also put in 2 of the 512MB sticks giving my machine 3GB of ram.

Battlefield 2 and Red Orchestra run flawlessly now.

System specs: AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ Dual Core Processor with upgraded Thermaltake Big Typhoon Cooling Fan with Heatsink — DFI nF4-DAGF Mobo — XFX Geforce 6600GT 128MB GDDR3 PCI Express x16 Video Card with upgraded ZALMAN Heatsink Fan — 2GB of Geil RAM and 1GB of G.SKILL RAM — Huge Acer Black 20″ Widescreen LCD Monitor — Black Coolmax Case — 2 – 80GB SATA drives — 2 – 250GB RAID 1 Storage drives

I bought a new computer with super fast peices recently:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ Dual Core Processor with upgraded Thermaltake Big Typhoon Cooling Fan with Heatsink — DFI nF4-DAGF Mobo — XFX Geforce 6600GT 128MB GDDR3 PCI Express x16 Video Card with upgraded ZALMAN Heatsink Fan — 2GB of G.SKILL DDR400 RAM — Huge Acer Black 20″ Widescreen LCD Monitor — Black Coolmax Case — 2 – 80GB SATA drives — 2 – 250GB RAID 1 Storage drives

I bought it thinking it would be blazing fast for gaming. It can play CounterStrike Source very well… and thats about it. I cant get Battlefield 1942 to even load. Battlefield 2 demo can play pretty well. Games like Red Orchestra using the Unreal engine wont load either.

There are many fixes I have found online to attempt to solve the problems. I have installed an AMD dual core hotfix. I have installed the Win XP dual core hotfix. (Read about that here)

I have updated all my video card drivers (current version is Nvidia Forceware 81.98). I have also tried older versions (such as 77.72 that DFI suggests for the mobo and even older 5x.xx versions).

I have updated the Nvidia nForce system drivers (versions 6.66 and 6.70 – for sound/lan/RAID/IDE controllers on mobo).

I have run a memtest on my RAM with no errors. I have updated windows xp sp2. I have tried to update the registry to tell the Nvidia drivers to not use the second core. I have changed the affinity on the second core while trying to load the games. I have tried xp with only sp1 and without either service pack… all with no luck.

Programs other than games run super fast. Windows boots up almost within a blink of an eye. What is the deal? When I get back from my wedding and honeymoon, I have some ideas of what to swap out to see if the problem is fixed. Otherwise I am at a loss… Some peice of the computer does not want games to be played.

This past weekend I modified my Scion XB some more. I added a new YDR short ram air intake. This allows for a larger mass of cool air to enter the engine giving it slightly more horsepower and torque. Any little bit helps with this 95+ horsepower engine. Some aftermarket intakes make the engine louder, luckily this one doesnt. It does however seem to increase the acceleration after about 2000 rpms. The intake is fairly inexpensive (about $85 compared to over 150+ for other brands). The old stock intake was a huge mass of formed plastic that just seemed very inefficent. The new intake is about a twelve inch aluminium tube with a giant K&N filter on the tip. The intake now sucks in air from behind the front left headlight where the air is slightly cooler than right next to the engine. The “how-to” tech article can be read here at scionlife.com as well as install pics.

The overview of the engine. Click to see it larger.

The new intake installed. Straight flow.

The old intake. Seems very inefficient.

Additional more minor mod of the weekend was a grounding wire install. Basically its a series of 4 different grounding wires connected in series to the frame on the left side, two different spots on the engine, the negative of the battery, and ending on the frame on the right side of the car. This is supposed to balance out the electrical system of the car, improving acceleration and possibly cleaner audio.

The next planned mods are a new header and a short shifter.

Christians only (non-Christians it’s not that you won’t understand it, more like you wont want to do it, much like some Christians…)

Prosperity Teaching. Its all about you and what you can get, when it should be all about others and what you can give. The Bible says “let no man seek his own, but every man another’s wealth.” If God blesses you it’s not to ram down other people’s throats to make them feel inferior to you. You have to have something they genuinely want and that wont always be money. Prosperity can take the form of many things like health or marriage or good relationships. There is also a proverb that says something like “don’t let me be rich so that I forget you and don’t let me be poor so that I curse you.”

Nail this one guys and read your Bibles properly.
Rosie.
(Oh and PS, it also says not to pursue people through the courts system and to overcome evil with good… Its not that good = dumb its just that good is more powerful.)