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Windows 7 – Day Two

Dan — Thu, 07 May 2009 21:15:33 +0000

Day Two is coming to a close, and Windows 7 is still doing quite well. Now, i haven’t put it under any heavy load yet, as I’ve been at work. But I was able to install the bootcamp files needed to get sound, the trackpad, as well as some other things fixed. The only downside was that I had to reinstall the windows 7 drivers i’d installed previously. But that’s not really something i’m ready to complain over, especially since if you’re going to dual boot a mac you should be ready for little hicups like that.

After that I installed Eve, Steam, and Pidgin; you know, the essentials. I haven’t installed any of my steam games, but Eve runs quite well. Pidgin works, I really didn’t expect that to break. I was able to get all my Danbo wallpapers from my desktop transferred over and they are now in slideshow mode for my wallpaper. Very sexy

So far, so good. I’m really liking Windows 7. If things keep up like this I might break the cycle and buy a legit copy of Windows again. The last time i bought a copy of Windows it was XP, just after Vista came out.

We shall see

Windows 7 – Day One

Dan — Wed, 06 May 2009 21:00:47 +0000

I installed Windows 7 on my macbook pro this morning. Why, you ask? Well, i had XP dual booted on it before, but wasn’t really using it for anything other than running my other account in Eve and for some programming work. It seemed it was the perfect test bed for Windows 7. The install went smoothly and it did everything it could with my mac, but i forgot my OSX dvd at home, so little things like bootcamp are still missing. This means that i don’t have sound, and i don’t think my wifi works. No worries though, because i plugged up my phone and it was able to use it’s internet connection right away!

I downloaded and installed some updates and then got right into installing Visual Studio C# Express and XNA Game Studio 3.0. Over my phone, it’s taking forever! C# finally installed and i’m about 50% on the XNA download (it’s only 62MB, but it’s been going for about an hour )

So far here is what i like:

Aero. So sexy, and it runs like a dream.
The new desktop personalization features (having your desktop wallpaper change every x minutes; changing the base color of all your windows, taskbar, etc
The new window changer, alt+tabbing between all your windows and getting a preview
Being able to choose what icons are shown and which ones are hidden in your system tray.
The snipping tool
the new paint, it’s about fraking time!

That’s really all i have right now. Once i get home and i’m able to get some fat pipe connected to this thing, i’ll install steam, eve, and whatever else i’m missing (IM program maybe?). We’ll see how those run. All that after I install bootcamp and get everything working.

For anyone that has a fairly new (meaning in the last 3 or 4 years) computer that’s just sitting around collecting dust, but you’re not ready to try it on one of your main machines, I’d highly recommend this. I know this will probably be my main OS on my laptop. The only thing they need now it for Windows to be able to read other file systems (like ext3, hint hint!).

you can get the RC here.

Dell Hybrid

Dan — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 18:10:24 +0000

I ordered a new computer about 2 weeks ago. It’s a Dell Hybrid Studio. I got it this last week and i’ve been playing with it over the weekend. As a whole it’s a very nice machine out of the box. The cheapest stock machine wasn’t really anything great, but it would still make a decent media machine for most people, or something to browse the internet and check email, but nothing more than that. While i was ordering i did some upgrading. I went ahead and had the original processor replaced with the 2.0Ghz Intel Duo, i had more RAM added (to a whopping 2GB ) and as a nice touch, i opted for the BlueRay player (which was a bulk of the cost, 250 dollars just for that). It comes stock with Vista on it, which i’m still trying to figure out if i really like it or not, but it does seem to run pretty nice. It does what i want it to do very well, which is sit next to my TV, stay hooked up to the network, and provide me with entertainment from the interwebs. My television is a 32″ Sanyo HD TV, so it does give a pretty nice picture. On a side not though, if you’re going to do this at home, and you don’t have an HDTV yet, get something nicer, like an Olivia or something. For video and watching TV mine is great, but for displaying a desktop it’s rather lacking.

So. Last tuesday i got the new computer in the mail. I immediately took it out of the box and started playing with it.

It’s about a foot long and about 3 inches wide. Everything is built in pretty well. And it’s all glowy It has DVI as well as HDMI output ports on the back which is nice when hooking it up to a HDTV. All in all i really don’t have anything bad to say about this comptuer at all. It’s stable, responsive, and even though my media is elsewhere on the network it does very well with it’s integrated Gigabit Ethernet. When dealing with third party applications though there are some drawbacks. iTunes for instance has a really hard time dealing with all my music on my server, whereas my XP machine has no problems with iTunes. That might just be Vista though, which does seem to be a resource hog. Hardware wise though i’d say this is a very sleek, stylish, and unobstrusive piece to add to any media center, or even just to use as a desktop. Unless of course you want to play games. Then, well, suffice it to say, this machine blows. The integrated Intel Chipset just doesn’t cut it. I can’t even play Eve-Online with the premium graphics pack, and compared to other games out there, Eve is very light-weight.

Over all though, I like it – a lot. I would recommend it to any of my friends.

Zero Punctuation may be shallow

Dan — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 15:52:49 +0000

I’ve been watching Zero Punctuation for a while and I’ve always found it amusing and at times insightful. But this week, i’m not too sure. He reviewed Eve Online, a game that i’ve been playing for almost 3 years. Now, what he says is very true, there are some awefully boring things that go on. But as you watch you’ll see that he didn’t do any of the things that make the game so fun!

1) Joining a player owned corp is part of the game, staying in an NPC corp really isn’t all that exciting. You don’t have the same kind of togetherness and common goal to achieve.

2) He may have tried pvp, but with only two weeks there’s no way you’ve learned all that you need to know. Then on top of that, to solo PvP, you really need a lot of experience and skill points (could be optional). He could have had a good time PvPing in a group, if he would have tried.

3) He didn’t find his niche, he just jumped in and tried to play. That’s not going to work with Eve, you have to learn what you’re good at and then attempt to build your character around that. And by “what you’re good at” i mean personally, not your character. If you can’t handle the stress of PvP, then you shouldn’t be a PvPer. If you hate mining, then you shouldn’t be a miner, etc etc.

4) I don’t wear a shoe on my head

I guess what i’m really saying is that though i love to laugh at Zero puncutation’s reviews, i’m starting to wonder if i should take them seriously at all? I mean, i kind of figured he’d always pick out the bad parts of games and then exaggerate on them. But maybe with Eve he didn’t even attempt to find what draws people to the game? And if he did that with Eve, are all his game reviews like that?

Or maybe we are all the nerds who are what nerds are to nerds like nerds are to normal people.