Tech: A Fresh Coat of Paint
My swanky new desktop PC arrived yesterday. Besides a ginormous 500 GB hard drive, an Intel Core 2 Quad processor (that's right, four separate cores clocked at 2.4 GHz), and a DVD burner, it also came with Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium. After 5 years of primarily using laptops for computing, it's quite a change for me to be using a fairly capable machine again.
The Core 2 Quad is a beast for multithreaded applications, and even for just plain multitasking. There's nothing quite like installing Civilization 4 from a CD, playing an MP3, downloading several patches, running Folding@Home, and running EarthSim, all at the same time. If you do a lot of encoding, editing, or 3D modeling, this thing will knock your socks off. I can't wait until the first games start taking advantage of this architecture.
Vista bears the translucent glossy look (*cough* OS X *cough*) people seem to like these days. I tend to turn all this stuff off, but I'll leave it on for the time being. When you download things, the progress bar shimmers. Shimmers. Kinda pointless, and I'm sure other GUIs have more fascinating eye candy, but it's novel to me.
I tried running some older games on the machine. Civ4 worked fine after a patch, as did F.E.A.R. (though F.E.A.R.'s performance in Vista is infamously bad). Source engine games (Day of Defeat and Counter-Strike) didn't work at first; I had to go to Acer's site and download their graphics drivers in lieu of the official ATI Catalyst ones. Aside from that, it's been smooth sailing.
The Core 2 Quad is a beast for multithreaded applications, and even for just plain multitasking. There's nothing quite like installing Civilization 4 from a CD, playing an MP3, downloading several patches, running Folding@Home, and running EarthSim, all at the same time. If you do a lot of encoding, editing, or 3D modeling, this thing will knock your socks off. I can't wait until the first games start taking advantage of this architecture.
Vista bears the translucent glossy look (*cough* OS X *cough*) people seem to like these days. I tend to turn all this stuff off, but I'll leave it on for the time being. When you download things, the progress bar shimmers. Shimmers. Kinda pointless, and I'm sure other GUIs have more fascinating eye candy, but it's novel to me.
I tried running some older games on the machine. Civ4 worked fine after a patch, as did F.E.A.R. (though F.E.A.R.'s performance in Vista is infamously bad). Source engine games (Day of Defeat and Counter-Strike) didn't work at first; I had to go to Acer's site and download their graphics drivers in lieu of the official ATI Catalyst ones. Aside from that, it's been smooth sailing.
posted by Mulliga @ 12:28 AM
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