October 2014 in the Life of Ben (Blog)

  1. January
  2. February
  3. March
  4. April
  5. May
  6. June
  7. July
  8. August
  9. September
  10. October
  11. November
  12. December

Backup PS3 & Install SSD (28th October 2014)

When I first tried this it said my USB stick would need to be 28GB bigger. Oh dear, time to delete some installed games without deleting the saved progress.

  1. Game column > Game Data Utility.
  2. Select each game, press Triangle and select Delete.
  3. Game column > Saved Data Utility.
  4. Triangle on each game, select Copy and choose the USB stick.
  5. System column > System Settings > Backup Utility.
  6. Plugged in my 8GB USB stick.
  7. Selected Back Up and when it asked to use an external media, selected Yes.
  8. When it finished, the Size of the backup was 636MB.

Just Add SSD

  1. Mostly followed this YouTube guide to upgrading PlayStation 3 Super Slim.
  2. Put the official PS3 4.65 system OS from Sony.
  3. The console doesn’t carry the OS internally – it’s on the HDD which is being removed.
  4. Used a thick plastic entry card (not a bank card!) as a spudger to pop the cover off the side. Started in the middle and gently worked towards the rear of the unit. Sliding it gracefully off to the right does not happen.
  5. Decided not to use the spacer to pack my Crucial MX100 as the 500GB HDD it comes with is just as slender!
  6. The end of the video shows all the initial setup, just like the first time running it.
  7. Bit tedious but this is a completely clean SSD and it is actually working!

Installing GTA5

After about an hour (limited by 8mbps UK broadband) it was on one of the later updates. Sadly got this error:

An error occurred dorung the download operation (80710723)

Suggested Actions

  1. I returned to XMB.
  2. GTA5 was selected.
  3. Pressed Triangle and clicked Check for Update.
  4. Says it found Version 1.17 so I click OK.
  5. It starts installing.
  6. Just a network hiccup?
  7. Yep, did 3 or 4 more updates and finished fine!

Restore Saved Progress

  1. Game column > Saved Data Utility.
  2. Click the USB stick to view those saves.
  3. Triangle and choose Copy Multiple and Select All.
  4. This copies them all to the PS3 in one go. Nice, missed that the first time!
  5. Back out to the main XMB.
  6. Scroll down to GTA5 and press X to run it.

First Run of GTA5 with SSD

Ah, it now says Installing 252 / 8486 MB so this must be the first run data optimisation. Or copying game files from the disk?

Looks like it will take about 10 minutes, either way. Limit will be the Blu-Ray read speed here. Actually took just over 15 minutes. Once this was done it loaded Story Mode in a minute or two. The disk is being read a lot as I walk around but I’m already using the correct saved game I had before swapping out the HDD. The others are listed but the active one before is still the active one now. This works seamlessly!

Going Online

Decided to go to Start > Online > Choose Character just to make sure my online progress was intact. It was! Neato.

Wow, I’ve never seen the sky camera work this fast when I switched from Freemode to Creator.

Install GT6

Several GB of updates for this game. Limitation is the broadband connection at around 8mbps.

Got the same error a long way through. Luck I saw it, pressed Circle to end that update and then Triangle on the game and Check for Updates to resume updating.

Several more downloads later and it’s done!

Run the game and it does the initial disk optimisation, or archive unpacking, or something. This seemed pathalogically slow probably as it expects a conventional HDD.

The progress bar was estimating some 540 minutes to complete. That’s about 9 hours! It took about over 4 hours but nowhere near 9 hours.

When I ran the game it said there was another update or two. These were very fast so probably the little ‘hotfix’ updates GT6 gets in between the usual updates.

The game progressively installs more of itself onto the console. The true performance will become apparent over the next week or so.

15th Anniversary content isn’t appearing in my Garage, says it can’t find the verification data. Guess that isn’t stored in the saved game or PSN somehow? Will add the code again. Lucky I kept the box and paperwork!

From the home screen in GT6:

  1. GT Store on the far left
  2. Input code
  3. Enter the code. One box at a time, 4 characters in each.
  4. Scroll all the way down and you can press Download All.
  5. Let it run, it won’t prompt while doing it.
  6. Each download is small, just 100kB, so it just takes a few minutes if you have 15th Anniversary Edition.

Noticed my Garage doesn’t show any car images:

  1. Garage > Car List.
  2. Right Arrow once so the car list fills the screen.
  3. Select button to reveal a tick box for each car and an Edit column on the right.
  4. Triangle to Select All.
  5. Right Arrow into the Edit column.
  6. Scroll down and select Update Car Image(s).
  7. Confirm by pressing Yes.
  8. This processed 143 cars in 10 minutes for me.
  9. The bottleneck is probably the processor and graphics card, as it renders the actual 3D model for every car!
  10. Definitely worth restoring your extra packs before running that.

GTA5 is Snappy

Blu-Ray still reading quite a lot and in GTA Online the broadband connection is a bottleneck. (14mbps down 1mbps up and shared between 2 people with multiple devices.)

Not instant but so much nicer than before! I can use Text Chat during the sky camera and everything is smooth.

Hampton Court Palace (16th October 2014)

(More to follow.) (Photos to follow.)

Ping-Pong then North Nineteen (8th October 2014)

Short test ride to Wrey Crescent see if putting Secteur’s original tyres on Blackbird made it roll faster for Fiona. Results inconclusive after such a short ride. Everything working fine but the front brake is a bit squeakier than before.

Took the ping pong bats for a knock-about. Ended up playing a 3×15 point match which Fiona narrowly won!

Parked the bicycles back at the flat and carried on to North Nineteen, where I had the delicious Surf & Turf while Fiona had the Haddock with salsa and crushed roast potatoes.

We accompanied this with a small glass of red each, followed by a toffe apple cake and a chocolate ginger cake.

Small glass of port each to finish up a splendid evening.

We also played a few rounds of dominos while at the table!