I bought a new laptop not that long ago.

It’s a modest machine by today’s standards, I suppose, and it has more than enough hardware to do what I need it to do.

Sadly though, this is where it becomes painfully apparent that “needs” and “wants” aren’t even in the same ballpark, never mind being cozy next door neighbors.

I have in the past, spent many, many hours playing Unreal Tournament. I was never a compulsive gamer, but there was something about UT that got to me, more than any of the Quake or Doom derivatives did. I just liked it more. It was quicker, simpler, and easier to just play. I didn’t have to worry too much about if my buddies were online so we could get a game going, single player was for the most part all I really wanted, and there were more than enough servers with just a few people on them, that I could go multi if I wanted, and not get hopelessly owned over and over again, I could hold my own.

All of this, was accomplished on some -very- modest (by today’s standards) hardware, back in ‘00 or so.

The hardware?

• AMD K6-III @450. Yes, a K6-III, not a K6-II. It had the on die cache.
• 256 MB PC-100 SDRAM. Yep, good old 100mhz SDR.
• 32MB TNT2 Ultra Diamond Viper 770, later some ASUS card. The Diamond was… unstable…
• SB Live! OEM Soundcard.
• 17″ Panasonic e70i Monitor running 1024*768 @ 85hz.

Life was good, I was happy. I could frag away with out a care in the world with the game at medium settings, and get about 70 FPS, more than enough for my needs.

Imagine my surprise, when I bought UT3 the other day, and installed it on this (comparatively) muscle laden notebook. I’ll give you the short version: I’m disgusted.

Just playing the pre-rendered cut scenes pegs the CPU to maximum load, and even attempting to play in a 640*480 pixel window, with all the settings at their lowest is a jerky slide show, that actually looks worse than I remember UT1 looking. The graphics looked awful at that low of a setting, and the game was not even reasonably playable. This, on a dual core 2ghz beast, with 3 gigs of DDR2 ram, and up to 1 gig of vram (i had it set to 512mb).

It makes me wonder though, what is the real problem? Is it the game? Or is it Vista? Hell, is it just the crapware infested HP OEM install of Vista that I have for that matter?

Sadly, I can’t even put in my old UT1 CD and play that. Well, I haven’t tried, but past experience has told me I will have the exact opposite problem, where the game will play at about 3000 FPS (it did on opiate) and it will still be unplayable.

Fuck it, I’m installing Lemmings.

After hearing back from a couple of different technicians, and finding out that the repair costs for my old laptop (opiate) were out of line with reality, I went ahead and purchased a new laptop today.

It is in many ways remarkably similar to my last one. Same 14.1″ screen, similar nVidia graphics card, similar processor, much larger hard disk, and 3 times the memory.

• HP Pavilion dv2928se
• AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-60 @2ghz
• 3GG DDR2 SDRAM
• 250 GB 5400 RPM HDD
• 8X Dual Layer DVD+-RW w/ Lightscribe
• 14.1″ Widescreen HD BrightView LCD Screen (High gloss, ick…)
• nVidia geForce 7150m mobile GPU
• MS Windows Vista Home Premium (32 Bit)

The overall “Windows Experience Base Score” is 2.6. Screen shot below gives all the gory details.

So far, I haven’t played with it all that much to be honest with you. I have decided that I am going to give Vista as fair a chance as I can, to form my own opinion of it, rather than keep up with the opinions of others that I read online. I figure I will give it a week or so before I even install my beloved Ubuntu.

So far though, I’m not all that impressed. The list of short comings that I have found so far, out of the box have been surprisingly long, and infuriatingly tedious to fix.

• I hate all the CrapWare that comes preinstalled. I had forgotten just how much crap you get on an OEM install of Windows. I’ve spent about 3 hours just uninstalling garbage that came preinstalled on the machines
• Considering how much CrapWare comes installed, there is a shockingly small amount of useful software installed out of the box. I’ve been spoiled over the last few years with how bloody complete the Debian/Ubuntu desktop experience is. From word processors to terminal emulators to image editing to multi-protocol chat clients, it’s all just there.
• IE7 is not complete garbage, although there are some things about it that have irritated me at work over the last few months, that have bugged me just as much at home. It just seems slow as hell when opening a new tab.
• Speaking of IE7. How on earth do people stand dealing with all the advertisements on the web without using AdBlock Plus? Seriously, install Firefox and ABP, RFN, you will be happier.
• Constant reboots after Windows Update are getting tedious. Do it right boys.
• I just burned an Ubuntu CD, the burn took a lot longer than I was used to. I think it’s the SemiCrapTrialWare CD burning software that was included. K3B for the win.
• The recovery disks are an astonishing 13GB in size, give or take. For less software than fits comfortably on the 700MB CD I just burned. That’s a lot of CrapWare.
• It seems to work harder than it should under Vista. With iTunes importing my music collection, and my typing in this Firefox window the CPU is at 40% load, with the ram at about 45%. What gives? It should be idling nice and low.
• The Gadgets in the Windows Side Bar are kind of neat. They look a lot like the KDE Widgets that I played with a couple years back when I was monkeying with Mandrake, now Mandriva, just much more polished. I might revisit KDE.
• I despise the new Start Menu. It lasted about 20 minutes before I reverted to the “Classic” menu.

We’ll see how it goes. I’m going to do my best to give it a fair trial, but I will not be at all surprised if the Ubuntu Disks come out this weekend.

Oh, and before you ask, why not the new Macbook?

I’m down with the AMD Processor, I don’t need the extra muscle that Intel would provide, and that one spec aside this thing has better all around spec’s than the MacBook did, for $650 less. Considering that OSX would probably piss me off as much as Vista, and it would be an Ubuntu box anyway, why bother?

Oh yes, one more thing, the new hostname is sober…

It’s been a little while….

I’ve been busy as hell with work lately, and time for this place has, as I am sure you can imagine been less than existent, but I find myself with some time tonight, so I might as well fill the world in on the new toys, as well as the status of some older toys.

Opiate (The Compaq notebook) is dead. It was in my case about 2 weeks ago, I grabbed it on the way out of the store to head home, only to hear a stomach churning ‘thud’ as I realized I had not zipped up my laptop case. The machine still boots, I am able to access it over the network, and every thing seems to be fine, except the screen doesn’t come up at all. I have a tech who is looking at it, and I am hoping the repair bill will be less than $300.

Hush (The Asus EEEPC) is still kicking along with out a problem, except every since I did a dist-upgrade to xubuntu 8.04.1 my Atheros wireless card will not connect to any network that has encryption enabled. Pain in the ass. I plan on moving it back to Gutsy this weekend.

Flood (The Q6600 Media Beast White Box) is kicking along nicely as well, after being upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 as well, other than for some reason Apache will not run, it segfaults every time. I am planning on wiping the box clean this weekend, and reinstalling from scratch. Purging and reinstalling the Apache packages has not helped.

I picked up a Canon SD1000 Digital Camera around new years, I’ve put it to fairly good use, I just haven’t uploaded a lot of the pictures from it, I need to get back on that, and update the photolog script so that it works with the new systems, as well as the new host.

I bought a 1 gig iPod shuffle about 2 months ago. It’s junk.

My Blackberry 8310 has died a rather spectacular death due to leaving it in the car while camping all weekend, during a period of very heavy rain. I replaced it just yesterday with a Blackberry 8120, the Pearl with Wi-Fi. I’ve tested both the VO-IP abilities of the phone tonight, as well as the data capabilities using Wi-Fi, and so far I am impressed. Even with our cable modem maxed out on a torrent download (Debian DVD images) the call quality was reasonable, although not ideal. It would be considerably better if we had a more stable router. That’s something to ponder…

I’ve started painting again. This is detailed . It’s been nice to rekindle the old attachment, it is something that is fairly mindless for me, and let’s me take my mind off work for an hour at a time or so. I will upload more pics as my progress on that, as well as other pieces comes along.

It’s been a while. I guess I had ’shunned’ myself from a lot of the online community when I realised how pathetically f*cked-up it can be - the passing of Daco, related events, and reactions from some ‘people’ that associated with him in his past had me reeling. But I’ve come to accept some of my experiences, and now that I have, I’ve developed an itch to swan-dive back into the goo-bucket.

My computer rig has changed. I have upgraded to win9x, icq99a,netsca… haw! Not really. 1 gateway/firewall, 2 workstations, a server, and an ibook. My gateway still tracks ’stable’ in Debian, which it should. Workstation 1 is no different either OS wise… tracking Gentoo. But, my idea of a UI has changed. My better half had issues trying to use my workstation in any way. Felt it was time to add a user friendly touch to it, and installed Gnome. My plan was to run Openbox inside of Gnome, as opposed to my very personalised Openbox only setup. I wasn’t that happy about the change. Started screening the interweb for ideas and a 3D generated desktop caught my eye. Might as well ‘use‘ my 3D card for other things than games. Compiz Fusion was installed, along with composite based tools such as Avant Window Navigator. Productivity hasn’t dropped, I can ‘wobble’ a window or two for amusement. Heck I just like it. She likes it. It’s quite a dramatic change from my previous, somewhat minimal, set-up… but… I have that still on my Debian based ibook though so it’s all good Workstation 2 is a dual booter - Studio 64, which is a Debian based(Etch) multimedia focused distribution. I use it as a DAW. Realtime capabilities, Ardour, JAMin, and all that jazz. I’ve used it for recording musical compositions - work and personal. The same machine also has WinXP on it. That’s more for my parents when they visit. My server is now tracking Gentoo’s ‘Hardened’, and offers a secure Q2 service, httpd, network backups,and a few other things… but they are a secret

I have set myself up with a project to get me back into the zing of things. Going to try and incorporate gtk2 into ‘daco-tools’ since it would be nice to have a GUI, since some fonts don’t display the ‘funky’ function too well in a terminal. Going to be difficult since I aint no stinkin’ programmer, but I’ll give it a crack. I couldn’t think of anything else to do!

Good times

So, after 4 days of no one calling me back to inform me what the status of the order was (no order was showing placed online @ dell.ca), I called them and told them to pound sand.

4 days of wasted time, while no one would return my calls, or even answer an email that I had sent.

Dell, you can kiss my rosy red ass, right in the brown puckered part.

Worst service ever.

So, the Compaq fiasco has led me to the decision of purchasing a new laptop.

I’ve come to the conclusion in my head, that two dead disks in 16 months is more likely a hardware problem with the laptop, than it is bad luck.
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