The Joys of Heat Management

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My celebration of the crash-free computer was a bit premature. I've had two of the worst crashes yet today, but at least it conclusively identified the problem for me - my computer just got around to informing me that the CPU fan is running too slow and failing. This is disappointing, but at the same time, as bad hardware goes it's just about as cheap to replace as it's possible to get, so I'm VERY relieved. I was afraid for a while I might have to get a new video card, motherboard or processor, none of which I can afford at the moment.

So it seems for the time being I won't be able to play any serious computer games. No Half-Life 2, no Portal, no Sims 2, at least until I can get a new fan installed. The system seems to run fine as long as I avoid taxing it with games.

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Adventures in Windows Land Part 4 - One Week Update

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When I last wrote about my Windows 7 adventures last weekend, my system was in a mostly usable state but with several big question marks hanging over it. 1) I had no sound, since I could not convince my X-Fi sound card to work with Win7. 2) My system was initially crashing, something I'd been experiencing for a couple of months in Vista as well.

I'm happy to report that issue 1 is now resolved; it was a relatively simple matter to fix. I simply installed the Windows Vista X-Fi drivers using compatibility mode, and much to my surprise, they worked fine; I can look forward to some testing of various games over the weekend. (My hit list of choice: Half-Life 2 and it's various episodes, Portal, and Fallout 3. I'd try The Sims 2 as well, but there aren't enough hours in the weekend.)

As far as issue 2 goes, the system has been rock solid since I blasted years' worth of dust out of the fans. Funny how that works, huh? I can't say for sure yet that it's fixed. The machine did run for a good 2 weeks straight over the holidays under Vista. But at this point, I'm pretty confident in saying Windows 7 is very stable and my machine is definitely liking things as they stand. Stay tuned for my post-gaming report sometime early in the week.

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Random Ramblings

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Week 2 back at the gym with a new trainer. My original trainer was great; maybe a little too great. She got herself promoted. Dan, my new trainer, is really cool too, but man do I ache for days after each workout! My body feels like it's made of rubber bands tonight. But that's a good thing I guess, it means I'm doing something right. I'm working on an impression post about Persona 3 FES. I'm hoping to have that up tomorrow night or certainly by the weekend. It's an incredibly compelling Japanese RPG that plays like a dating sim game combined with a dungeon crawler. That description really doesn't do it any justice at all, so I hope you'll check back here this weekend and get a better picture of what it's like.

That's about it for tonight. Stay tuned for more soon!

Adventures in Windows Land Part 3 - Windows 7

The install finished without a hitch and it wasn't long before I was running Windows 7. And I really mean it wasn't long; the news out there about how fast it boots is right on the money. From hitting the switch on the computer through booting to a usable environment, Vista takes about 5 minutes on my system. Windows 7? Less than a minute. Maybe a touch over half. Usability land isn't all rosey good news, though. The first program I tried to get set up was Google Chrome, my favorite browser. It turns out it has known compatibility issues though, and while technically it will run, it can't render pages, making it kind of useless. So I installed my second choice, Firefox 3. That one, I'm happy to report, does run perfectly well right away.

Windows 7 has a lot of new features, and I won't go into them all here because, well, because Microsoft isn't paying me for this. That, and I haven't even scratched the surface of what's changed in this thing. The new task bar is both good and bad. I like how you can pin applications to it, similar to the way MacOS works. I like the preview windows; they've improved over Vista's previews and now act as a selection mechanism for apps that have more than one window open. I don't, however, like the fact that the quick launch icons are gone now. I can understand why, since you can pin shortcuts to the bar, but as a creature of habit, it's going to take me some time to get used to that change.

I've had some issues with audio as well. At the time I write this, my Creative X-Fi sound card isn't supported, so I won't get to test out Fallout in the immediate future. It's a good thing the games I'm actively playing right now are console games; Animal Crossing: City Folk on the Wii and Persona 3 FES on the PS2 are going to be getting most of my gaming attention for a while, I think.

The Win7 interface has been cleaned up a lot from what we got in Vista, and for the better as near as I can see. I haven't dug too deeply into things like changing network configurations and other nitty-gritty details yet, but I was up and online with it in no time, and those things I have tried to configure have been pretty easy to get to. My adventures with Windows 7 are just beginning, and I'm sure I'll have more stories to tell, both good and bad, in the coming days and weeks.

For now, thank you for putting up with my long-windedness!

Adventures in Windows Land Part 2 - The Install

The initial install of Windows 7 beta went pretty quickly, and the whole thing was without incident. There was very little for me to input beyond the type of install I wanted. Having done more than my fair share of installs with previous versions of Windows, I expected it to take a lot longer. Windows 7 first impressed me by identifying my TV and configuring it as a secondary display device before it had even finished installing itself. Every previous version of Windows I've used has had to be told there was another monitor attached, and this one picked up a TV. I like that quite a bit; it reminds me a bit of BeOS, an alternative operating system I used to use years ago.

All in all, I would say the install took maybe half an hour. Possibly up to 40 minutes, but no more than that. That, of course, is before you get to all the post-install work that needs to be done on a clean computer - installing apps, setting it up the way you want it, etc. I'll begin to get into that in part 3.