Stex Toys

Well my success with Windows 7 gaming was short lived. The problem in hindsight was with judging it’s usability for my system with Valve games. You see the Source engine is heavily CPU reliant, and not so on the graphics hardware. I can easily run Half-Life 2, Day of Defeat and Portal etc at 1920×1200 at very acceptable frame rates even on my ageing ATI X1900XT graphic card. And all seemed well under these conditions, however the moment I stepped outside of the Source based games, things started to go down hill fast, with low frame rates aplenty. I double checked the obvious, made sure I had the latest drivers installed and all that Jazz, however one thing stood out.. I couldn’t open, or for that matter, even see the ATI CCC applet that lets you control the graphics cards settings, including the essential, given the age of my card, overclocking.
Turns out my graphics card is no longer on the supported list with ATI, and I’ve since checked in XP also and I can only run pre 9.3 release drivers. Therefore I would never be able to get my graphics card to run at the levels required to allow me to play modern games at decent settings despite it being quite capable of this under XP with the older drivers.

This fact cuts deep though, for these are the very problems console gamers have leveled at Windows gaming for years and I have previously fought off and tsk tsked away as frivolous as any one who knew what they were doing could get these games to play well. But when the very things you must rely on to get this level of control are not even available to me then I’m left without a defence. Had my graphics card have been incapable of playing modern games then I could put it down to a lack of investment in my rig as PC’s will always demand a certain amount of continual money sinking to stay on their game, however knowing I can get this to work fine back in XP frustrates me greatly.

What all this means is that Windows 7 is now gone from my PC, not to return until such time as my current graphics hardware either fails or can no longer deliver an acceptable gaming experience and I replace it with the then current £150 option.

In the meantime it’s back to WinXP for my gaming, and for day to day use I’ve made a return to the warm and inviting shores of a Linux desktop courtesy of the extra friendly Ubuntu distro. 20 minutes to download the ISO file and load it to a USB stick, then another 15 to install and I was up and running with a truly modern looking OS that detected my graphics, monitor native resolution and even the on-board sound and network connections without me lifting a finger And I’m even posting this blog entry from newly discovered Drivel, a blogging client for Linux.

Sometime my love for ‘penguins’ is multifold

Having proven to myself that I could handle day to day usage on Ubuntu-64bit I’ve re-installed down to the 32bit version for ease of software compatibility, and am now happily spending my non-gaming time in the land of the free!
So far I’ve yet to find any of my usual tasks prove difficult to achieve, now that I have a basic understanding of how to install additional applications, in fact it’s somewhat simpler than in Windows as almost any tool you would require is listed in the software repositories, so it’s just a simple point and click task to add the functionality to your system. I dare say the system is even a little more responsive, as a busy application appears to have less effect on the rest of the system, allowing you to carry on with other tasks a whole lot more. I would imagine if I ever get hold of that X2-4200+ CPU things will be very breezy!

In a last desperate grab for stability on my system I threw in an old 80GB IDE drive and installed the 64bit of Ubuntu Linux which I have experimenter before on my works laptop using the Wubi install which allows you to install Ubuntu on a Windows PC without requiring it’s own partition, worth checking out if you want to see Linux in action.
And it’s so far so good! Not had any system problems at all, and I’m starting to get my head around the different way of operating when in the world of linux. Where ever possible I’m trying to go for non-command line options, which is probably a bit in the face of a pure Linux fan-boy but in this modern world there should always be a point and click option, not to mention my command line skills are more than a little rusty! So far I’ve managed to get all the basics up and running, including Thunderbird 2.0 installed (the OS comes with 1.5 which is a little dated for my liking) and I’ve made great use of a program called hellanzb which seems to work almost perfectly as a fire and forget tool, and is more than capable of getting me 2MB/s download speeds which is not to be sniffed at.
I’m also using the rather nice Pidgin (GAIM as was) for my IM needs so I’m still available on all my usual channels