Hm. What to post, what to post, what to post.

Oh! Computer! Right!

So the Resident Murloc's profit sharing bonus came in the other day, and we used a small amount of it to upgrade our computers. It had been over five years since I had upgraded and the signs of age were starting to show. I do have to say, though, that I like how the upgrade treadmill has slowed to the point where a five-year-old computer can still play recent releases and make them look good. Is Moore's law finally reaching its end or is software just not bloating to take up the space provided? Perhaps games are scaling better to low end machines? All I have to say is that my 1998 purchase (Pentium II 266, 32MB RAM) would not have run the 2003 releases the way my 2004 purchase (AMD Athlon 64 3000+, 512MB RAM) runs the 2009 releases.

Anyhoo, the specs:

Intel Core 2 Quad Q8300 processor, 2.5 Ghz

Asus P5QL Pro motherboard, using the Intel P43 chipset

G.Skill DDR2 PC1066 memory (4GB)

EVGA GeForce GTX 260, 896MB RAM

Seagate Barracuda 500GB hard drive

Cooler Master Centurion case and 500W power supply

Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit edition

The Murloc's is almost identical, except she wanted an ATI card, so I gave her a Radeon HD 4870, 1GB. (I would like to point out that her video card has as much memory as my entire old computer.) Also, since hers was an upgrade, where mine was a clean build, she didn't need the case, hard drive, or OS and just re-used her old ones. She did need a new PS, as the video cards we got both required 500W power supplies, minimum.

The Murloc's birthday present had been an Acer 22" flat screen monitor (I can't believe how cheap those things are now!) and a 17" monitor, so she could have dual monitors. With this round of purchases, I got another 22" for her and took her 17". Her desk can now better be described as one big display, with a little bit of space for other miscellanous items.

All were purchased from Newegg (Once You Know...). The totals were about $800 for mine and $700 for hers, which is a flipping sweet deal for two brand-spanking-new high-end computers.

A few thoughts:

-I'd been planning and researching this build for a little over a year. Initially, I'd been planning on getting a dual core processor, probably the Core 2 Duo E8500. At the last moment, I noticed that Intel had introduced a new quad core (probably the last of the Core 2 Quads) in December, priced in the range I was looking for. After doing a little bit of research, I opted for it over the dual core. While I figure the dual core probably would have been faster for single applications such as games and such that don't require much multi-tasking, there just something really cool about playing WoW with the settings at maximum and having two cores completely unused. 

I wonder if I could run both WoW AND Call of Duty at the same time?

-Shamus Young wrote this hilarious satire on video card shopping which, I have to say, I have never experienced. My process for buying a video card is:

1) Determine a price point (usually $200)

2) Find out what ATI and NVIDIA offer at that price

3) Visit Tom's hardware to see which one is faster (they're usually almost identical; in this case, NVIDIA seemed to have a bit of a lead).

I didn't really understand what the performance difference was going to be between 1GB of 256-bit GDDR5 memory and 896MB of 448-bit GDDR3 memory. Nor do I care. Manufacturers are usually quite good about pricing their hardware at the same cost as the similar-performing product of their competition. Similarly, they're also usually quite good about pricing their own items in a relative cost scale. Really, the only fluctuation comes from the video card brand, so all you have to do is pick a chipset and find the cheapest brand (that you trust) that uses that chipset.

Processors are similar, as when AMD released their quad cores a little over a year ago, they were 13% slower than Intel's. They were also 13% cheaper.

Which brings us to....

-This is my first Intel-based computer since my first one (the afformentioned Pentium II). My previous two have both been AMD based. I had been following the war between the two manufacturers for a while, and while AMD did have a performance and price lead over Intel for the first half of the decade, Intel eventually got their act together and used their behemoth might to start out-engineering AMD. When I first began planning this build, Intel was the clear leader in processor performance, so I was only considering them. Since then, AMD has started competing in all but the bleeding-edge market. However, as I had already researched Intel motherboards and processors, I didn't want to then have to do the same for AMD as well.

Also, my understanding is that AMD chips are, as they have always been, geared towards the enthusiast and over-clockers market, the idea being that you buy a relatively cheap AMD and OC it to be as fast as the high-end Intels. As OCing is something I have never had a desire to do, I opted for Intel's offerings.

-I LOVE the new pin-less CPU designs. Fretting about bending pins while installing the CPU always bothered me. I would place the CPU in the motherboard, then take it out to check I had put it in right and hadn't bent anything, then put it back in, then take it out to make sure I hadn't bent anything that time, put it back in, rinse, repeat. Now the CPUs just have copper contacts, and the motherboard has a shell that clamps the CPU in position. Voila! No bent pins.

-Speaking of designs, the new video cards are BEHEMOTHS. I remember when I was appalled that video cards began requiring that you connect them to the power supply. Now, it seems, all video cards require two plugs from the PS, from different rails. And they take up two slots in the case. And they're longer than the motherboard is wide. Although, it is cool how they're completely encased in a plastic shell, so all the delicate electronics are inside. Rie's card also has copper piping to direct heat to different parts of the heat sink.

-Installation notes: If you assemble a computer and you go to turn it on, and it doesn't power on, the absolute first thing you should do (after making sure that you're not an idiot and you remembered to plug the thing in) is unscrew the motherboard and try it again. This was a failure mode I first encountered when I assembled the Murloc's first computer in 2004. After struggling over why it would not power on for two days, I finally found out that removing one of the mobo screws allowed it to turn on. Apparently, using screws that are two short can bend the motherboard and that will cause it—for some reason—not to turn on.

I encountered the same thing with my computer this time, and after just a little bit of fiddling, got it to work. Oddest. Failure mode. Ever. And a royal pain to diagnose.

-Always, always, always backup your data before upgrading. Almost as expected, installing a new everything in the Murloc's computer required a re-install of Windows (it could probably be better though of as installing an old hard drive in a new computer). Her documents were all saved on a separate partition, but for a while we thought she'd lost everything in her user profile directory, which includes all documents on the desktop, and her Firefox bookmarks. It wasn't until a day later that I discovered that the XP installer, in its infinite wisdom, will not overwrite existing user profile directories when installing a fresh copy of Windows, even if you overwrite the existing copy of Windows. Data saved.

-My OS installation was much simpler. Blank hard drive, fresh install. I have been using Vista for over a year now at work, and now I've finally gotten it at home. I really have to say that I really, really, really don't understand all the Vista hate. It's a great OS. It's slick and smooth. Now that I have two computers with (almost) identical builds, and have XP and Vista, I can really compare the two, and Vista seems faster in most shell operations. In my last rant on the subject, I covered some of the annoyances of the XP shell, such as the pauses when opening or changing directories in Windows Explorer. There were also annoyances, like when you'd delete a shortcut off the desktop, or out of the Start menu, and it would take 5-10 seconds and give you a progress bar(!) to delete one item. Shuffling shortcuts and groups around in the Start menu was also similarly frustrating in XP. I always thought it was just a hardware thing, and the reason that didn't occur in Vista was because the Vista machines I've used have had faster hardware. Now that I have a Vista machine and XP machine with nearly identical specs, I can verify that those OS shell lags and latencies really are a product of XP and are gone on Vista.

Another complaint about Vista is the memory usage, but come on, you can get 4GB for $50 now. RAM is cheap. And even with WoW running and sucking up 1.5GB of memory, I still haven't seen the memory usage go much above 3GB.

-My original plan was to put Ubuntu on this computer and have a Vista/Ubuntu dual boot. That seems less and less necessary now. I'm more likely to put Ubuntu on my old computer. We'll see.

-Off-topic: The first chapter of Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures dropped last week. Why haven't you played it? Anyways, it's quite fun, though it seemed much shorter than most of Telltale's other episodic adventures, or maybe I'm just getting faster at solving the puzzles.

One thing Telltale captured beautifully was the claymation style. While I was playing, I began subconsciously noticing the imperfections in the models, as if they had been hand crafted. It then dawned on me that they had bump-mapped fingerprints onto the models, to really give it that hand-animation feel. Brilliant.

That is all. Further bulletins as events warrant.

Blah Blah Blah Windows Vista Blah Blah Blah.

So the Internets are abuzz with nerds denouncing Microsoft's latest OS. Apparently, Microsoft's recent purchase has been completely integrated into their latest OS and the Doom of Civilization draws nigh. Or so I gather.

My reaction? Big fat "meh". Vista has been my primary OS at work for a few months now and up until the day before yesterday my interactions with Vista had been almost entirely positive. I think the Aero interface is really slick. I'm in LOVE with the new Start menu, and the "search" box in every Windows Explorer window has come in quite handy. I haven't experienced many incompatibility problems, and none that weren't easily solved, but this is part of all Windows upgrades. (It seems each Windows release makes some things from a few generations previous stop working. Most DOS applications no longer ran in 2000; Windows 95 programs didn't play well with XP; and now certain 98/2000 applications have issues in Vista.) They've finally implemented a working file indexing system that doesn't kill performance. (My Very First Computer, purchased waaaaaay back in 1998—a Gateway 2000 Pentium II 266—had Windows 95 and was wonderful, except that every two hours, without fail, the system would become practically unresponsive for 5-15 minutes while the hard disk thrashed itself to death. It was years before I found out that this was "Find Fast", a "feature" of Windows 95 that would index all your documents for "fast searching". The problem was, it took up so much system resources that I couldn't do anything else while it was running. I have experienced no such thing with Vista's indexing service.) And Vista runs faster than any copy of XP I've ever used. (I recognize that my Vista machine is also much faster than any XP machine I've used, but that's not my metric. Four years ago when I built my first XP machine, it was top of the line and XP has always had slow spots on it. Now, my work computer is what I'd call at the high end of "mid-range" PCs, and Vista runs quite well. So, basically, my metric is Vista runs better on the hardware available at its release than did XP on the hardware at its release.) Certain slow spots in XP which were always infuriating to me just don't occur in Vista. For instance, opening Windows Explorer or switching to a new directory in XP would always produce one of three results: it would take 5-10 seconds to open the window, during which time it would give you no feedback, so you didn't know if it had taken the mouse clicks and was going to open; it would open quickly, show the icons in the current directory for less than half a second, then draw a blank window for 5-10 seconds, then refresh the window with the same information it had drawn initially (damn computer! I know which icon I want to click on and you JUST DISPLAYED it! Show it so I can click on it!); or it would show the contents, but then go down the list drawing in the icons about as fast as I could count them. Vista does NONE of this. When I press Windows+E, Explorer opens immediately. Also, Firefox opens about four times as fast on my Vista machine as on XP. (I've read that Vista does a lot of "pre-caching"; basically, it notes which programs you use the most and pre-loads part of them into memory so they open faster when you need them. This, of course, has a higher memory usage, which accounts for why Vista is such a memory hog, but come on, you can get 2GB for less than $50 nowadays, and since I wouldn't even consider building a machine with less than that, XP or Vista, I'm really not going to complain.)

Sure, there are a couple annoyances. For instance, the constant "security warnings" whenever you click on anything. Those took me all of five seconds to turn off. And I wasn't too crazy about the layout of the new control panel, but you can easily revert to the old one. (Oh, and I like how there's actually an option in the Desktop setup dialog to include a control panel icon on the desktop. Not like it was hard in XP, but now it's even easier to get to.)

Yet, note my key phrase "up until the day before yesterday." Because yesterday, I stumbled upon one hell of a frustration that left me just scratching my head wondering "what were they thinking"? (And reversing the polarity didn't even help.) Every version of Windows has at least one of these, so I guess I found Vista's. As long as that's the only one I think I'll be OK. (NB: this is still better than the Mac OS, where the entire user experience leaves me with that impression.)

So what happened? It started with the need to send an ActiveX control to a user, who for some reason didn't have the proper one after they installed our software. Now, in their efforts to make e-mail an impediment to communication, most companies' IT departments set up their e-mail firewalls to make sure it's impossible to get any important files to the users. With some, all you need to do is zip the file. With others, you need to rename the file to something like .txt. With others, you need to password protect the zip file. There's no set standard policy between companies, and no agreement on what constitutes a "dangerous" file (I've had xml files blocked by some, which is painful, because that's how we send out our licenses now).

The particular company I was working with said that password protecting the zip file should do the trick, so I opened it in Explorer, went to add a password and... hey! Where do I add the password to zipped files in Vista? I looked for a few more minutes, checking menu options, right-click context menus, and toolbar buttons, but nothing obvious presented itself. A quick Google search (I, for one, welcome our new Google overlords (Google applications I use regularly: Google search engine; Gmail; Google Toolbar for Firefox; iGoogle home page; Google Documents and Spreadsheets; Google Bookmarks; Google Reader for RSS feeds; Google Talk; Google Calendar desktop bar plug-in; Google Maps; Google Earth; Google brainwashing...)) revealed that Microsoft had actually taken out the built-in ability to add password to Zip files. Apparently, they thought it was making users feel more secure than they really were, so they took it out to force users to use more secure encryption options. Well, that doesn't help me, who never used passwords to encrypt zip files, but instead just used them to get zip files past silly firewalls. OK, it looks like it has to be a third party option. My free trial of Winzip had expired, and it looks like you can't just keep using it after the trial is up, as you could with previous versions. I installed an open-source program I had read about, called 7-zip, but after looking around in that, couldn't find any "add password to zip file" option (it looked like most of its special options were for its own .7z proprietary format). I downloaded PKWare's (yes, they're still around) product, SecureZip, but deleted it faster than you can say "BALEETED!", after it re-associated all my file extensions even after I told it not to... twice.

And that brings us to the second annoyance. File extensions. Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, decided to almost completely remove the File Types functionality of Windows XP. OK, you XP users, open Windows Explorer and select "Tools -> Folder Options" (or alternately, go to the Control Panel and select Folder Options). See that "File Types" tab? Give it a hug and a kiss for me, because it's gone from Vista. Oh, sure, Vista has a "Default Programs" option from the control panel that allows you to set the default program used to open a given file type, but this has nowhere near the functionality of the File Types dialog. Firstly, all you can do in Vista is change the default program. Nothing else. No advanced option. No settings to edit right-click context menu options. No ability to change the default icon. Oh sure, you can do all those things, from the Windows Registry, but you have to a) be an expert in Registry editing, and b) change options in at least two different places. A major hassle. So, here I was with my .zip files associated with a program I had just uninstalled from my computer. It was easy enough to restore the association with Explorer, but then it started using the Windows Explorer icon for zip files, instead of the file folder with a zipper icon. It took me about half an hour of searching and scouring my computer's options and the internet to find the registry key that needed to be set to change the icon. The problem? It was already set to the correct dll file that contained the icon I wanted, but it wasn't showing it in Explorer. (In retrospect, I think it just needed a "refresh" which I probably could have accomplished by restarting my computer, but I didn't know that and had no utility to see the available icons stored within the dll file, or any dialog to be able to choose the correct icon.) Another half-hour or so of searching, and I finally found a utility called Creative Element Power Tools that gives you that File Types dialog funcionality (and a whole lot more). Unfortunately, it's not free, but it does have a free trial. I was able to use it to restore the icon and all was well... except I still hadn't succeeded in password protecting the zip file. Eventually, I had to just copy it to my XP machine (which thankfully is still up and running) add a password there then send it back to myself and e-mail it to the client. Yeesh.

So there you have it. It seems everyone has at least one bad experience with every Windows OS. But what did we do back in the days of Windows 3.11, before we had blogs? Oh, that's right. Bulletin Boards and Usenet groups.

(Addendum: I know that there are a lot of complaints about how Vista is anti-privacy and, apparently, Microsoft can track your every mouse click, but these complaint seem to be coming from the open-source net-neutrality George-Bush-is-using-the-Patriot-act-to-tap-my-phone tin-foil-heads crowd, so I don't take them too seriously.)