After racing for the first time in Shanghai, I had to race again. I went to the “Kart-World & Freizeitpark am Juliusturm” in Berlin-Spandau. The price was okay, € 5,50 for 8 minutes plus € 2,50 for a full head mask (for keeping the helmets clean). This time, the 400m track was indoor. I went there with my girlfriend, her little sister, Jonas and Foxi. All first time drivers except for me, the second-time driver.
XP is supposed to be stable enough to run without bluescreens. But it wasn’t like that on my computer (AMD Athlon XP 3200+, 1 GB Twinmos Twister Pro). The CPU and RAM are all high-end equiment. The CPU was the fastest of its serie, the RAM has CL 2-2-2-5 and is still one of the best on the market. But still, my computer crashed with a bluescreen. The messages were IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL,
PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA or BAD_POOL_CALLER, usually telling me kmixer.sys was the bad file. The error is caused by my onboard sound card. I use it for Voip. What is the problem? PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA sounds like a RAM error. Dual-Channel could cause a lot of problem when mixed with the wrong chips, but mine were from a Dual-Channel-Kit and specially designed for it. I didn’t even overcloak them, even though it was offically allowed by the manufacturer. After days of searching for an answer, I finally solved the problem.
IFA (“Internationale Funkaustellung”) 2006 is the number one cosumer electronics exibition in the world. My girlfriend, her little sister and me went there this sunday. It wasn’t as crowded this time, but there were still a lot of people. The reason is simple: Nothing really new was invented this year. The major part of the exibition was about big screen TVs. Philips, Samsung, Sharp, Toshiba, LG, LCD and plasma TVs everywhere. I found a 102″ Samsung plasma-TV, but nobody from Samsung could answer my simple question about how high the power consumption of that huge thing was. There were even a few brands from China. Highsense, Haier and some other Chinese companies had rented pretty big spaces there. I personally liked the apperance of Highsense, althought I don’t really like their LCDs because my parent bought one which was exchanged 2 times in 7 days because it simply wasn’t working correctly. Now they have a Haier, which is also having some problems.
Anyway, the impression I got this year from the IFA is that all the big German companies were simply trying to sell the consumer their old products instead of presenting new ones. A prepaid cellphone C139 from Motorola for €20.00 from T-Mobile. Sounds cheap? Well, it isn’t. You can get one for €12.50 on eBay. A small and not bad looking color cellphone for only €12.50.. Isn’t that less than the production costs?