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

Been a bit quiet on here as late I know, this hasn’t been helped by the fact I’ve had to undergo an unscheduled system rebuild. I’ve been dual booting XP and Linux for a while now, however as often happens, by XP install appeared to go bad so I went for a refresh of the OS.. however the Windows installer being a little cumbersome I managed to re-install over my Linux boot And they way I noticed this? I rebooted and it went into the original ‘not working’ XP boot.
At this point I became most vexed and wiped the whole lot out buy ripping out the two 80GB drives I can been using for the OS’s.

The only plus point of all this was I was able to start over with Ubuntu knowing a hell of a lot more about the system than i did the first time. I elected to go back to my original idea of a 64Bit Ubuntu install, and opted for the Xubuntu interface. Things this time went so much better and I’ve ended up with a really rather slick Linux install which is using the full power of my 64bit Athlon for all my day to day wanderings. And using Compiz-Fusion gives me GUI excellence beyond Vista’s humble attempts.

XP has returned of course so I can continue to play all my favorite PC games. I suppose I could look into Cadega however I would then loose my ability to track my gameplay with XFire which I rather like doing for whatever sad reason.

However, basically, I’m back in business and looking forward to some new wares over the Christmas period, most notably on the Wii no doubt.