Upgraded my computer last night…  Went pretty smoothly.  Didn’t even try to do a fresh install of Windows, so I didn’t run into the problems I did with Terri’s computer.  Although I did forget to plug power in to my optical drive, so that isn’t currently working.  But that’s an easy fix.

Had to re-install Divinity II afterward, even though I didn’t touch my hard disks.  It was looking for some remnant of nVidia PhysX software I used to have installed, before replacing that video card with an ATI.

It’s absolutely amazing how different the game looks.  Everything is genuinely unfamiliar.

I was playing on basically the lowest possible settings.  Turned everything down or off.  No shadows, no HDR, no light shafts, nothing interesting.  And now I’m playing on extreme settings.  It looks gorgeous.

The lighting is much more interesting, more complex.  Everything isn’t just flatly lit from some mysterious source.  Instead, things are lit from sources in the environment.  Sources with different colors and textures and intensities.  Sources that can be blocked, and cast shadows.  The world isn’t just shinier, or more vibrantly lit…  It isn’t just that there’s more polygons and more vegetation and random objects…  The whole environment is much richer.

It’s very hard to describe just how much different the game looks now…

Outside of gaming – surfing the web, playing music – I’m not noticing much of a difference.  The soundcard works fine…  The network works fine…  Disk access is as quick as it ever was…  It’s all more than sufficient for my day-to-day tasks.  But, then again, so was my old machine.

Terri’s new computer is up and running.

AMD Phenom II x4, Radeon HD 5750, 4 GB RAM, and a 500 GB HDD.

I wanted to do 8 GB RAM, but I didn’t really feel that I could justify the price.  I just don’t think we’d see much performance for the extra $40.  And it’s probably the easiest component to upgrade, so we can easily add another 4 GB at a later date.

It plays Divinity II beautifully.  Cranked the settings up to extreme and it runs flawlessly.  Smooth visuals, responsive mouse, gorgeous graphics.  Absolutely awesome.

Can’t wait to get mine up and running…

But I think it’s a little late to embark on that adventure tonight.

The hardware install was a piece of cake.  It’s a simple, generic case with an ATX motherboard, so everything fit together without any problems.  Then I tried to do a clean install of Windows 7…

Surprisingly enough, it booted right off the old HDD without even complaining.

But it wouldn’t boot off the Windows 7 install disc.  Kept rebooting, choosing different startup options, unplugging different disk drives…  Then I realized that I was trying to boot off of a Microsoft Office disc.

Once I had the right disc in, it booted just fine and started installing.

A little past the halfway point, the Windows install crapped out.  Complained about a missing or corrupt file.  Couldn’t finish.

So I tried to boot off the old HDD again…  But BOOTMGR was gone.  The install process had removed it.

Had to boot off the Windows disc again and run a repair install to the old HDD.

Once her machine was up and running, I had to grab drivers for the new hardware…  And the video driver install crapped out midway through and brought the machine down with a BSOD.  But then I found a newer driver that worked fine.

Then we installed Divinity II and tried it out…  And the results were simply amazing.

Got a box from Newegg today…  All our new toys.  Going to assemble Terri’s computer momentarily.

Terri stashed away a chunk of money from our tax refund this year.  The intent was to use it to go on vacation somewhere…  But, to be honest, that just wasn’t going to happen.

I’m insanely busy at the hospital.  The odds of me actually taking a full week off anytime soon are not good.  And then we’d need to get somebody to watch our animals if we went anywhere…  And I’m honestly not even sure where we’d go on a vacation.

I’ll certainly take some time off here and there…  And we might run across the lake or spend the night somewhere…  But I really don’t think we’re going to wind up going anywhere for any amount of time.  Certainly nothing that’d use up the money Terri has stashed away.

So, instead of saving that money for a vacation that’ll likely never happen, we’re spending it on some computer upgrades that will see an immediate return on investment.

I built these computers back around 2008 or so, and they’ve served us very well.  We’re both computer geeks, and we spend pretty much all our leisure time logged in to a computer.  I read forums, I blog, I send email, I play games…

And, until fairly recently, our machines have held up pretty well.  Could play just about anything, and it ran well and looked good.

But lately I’ve been having to turn settings down.  I’ve started disabling anti-aliasing on everything, just to make sure I get decent performance.  I’ve had to turn off or turn down anisotropic filtering…  I’ve had to tweak LoD and shadows and texture quality…  But, generally, things were still running and still looking decent…

Until Divinity II.

Divinity II has pretty much brought my computer to its knees.

It started out with some simple input lag…  Just a slight delay between moving the mouse and seeing a response on the screen…  Nothing too serious, but it was annoying.

Of course, that was in the opening village.  The little tutorial town.  There wasn’t much going on around there, not much to tax my computer.

As I progressed through the game, the environments became more complex and the visuals more demanding.  I had to tweak settings a little bit with each new area I entered…  Slowly sacrificing eyecandy for playability.

I’ve turned off HDR, and shadows, and reflection, and light rays, and anti-aliasing.  I’ve lowered the texture quality, and the resolution.  I’ve limited the amount of frames rendered ahead, and I’ve turned off vsync.  I’m shutting down every single thing that runs in the background.  And my machine is still struggling with Divinity II.

The game is generally playable, if slow.  But it doesn’t look nearly as good as it did in the opening sections – which is disappointing, because it should really look better than it did in those simple areas.

But, if I’m playing as a dragon and I get set on fire, I’m basically dead.  It isn’t that the fireballs do craptons of damage – it’s the flame effect that kills my computer.  While I’m on fire my game becomes unplayably slow.  The screen basically freezes in place.  I can’t do anything until the flames die out…  But I’m still getting attacked while I wait.  And, generally, I die out before the flames do.

So, we’re getting upgrades.  Put together a nice list of parts on Newegg and ordered the stuff last night.  It should, hopefully, arrive by this weekend.  And I can’t wait to see what these new beasts can do…

Slashdot | B&N Responds To Microsoft’s Android Suit

You’re probably familiar with Microsoft’s long running assault on Android but, as noticed by Groklaw, Barnes and Noble has fired back saying, ‘Microsoft has asserted patents that extend only to arbitrary, outmoded, or non-essential design features, but uses these patents to demand that every manufacturer of an Android-based mobile device take a license from Microsoft and pay exorbitant licensing fees or face protracted and expensive patent infringement litigation.’ Barnes and Noble goes on to assert that Microsoft violates ‘antitrust laws, threatens competition for mobile device operating systems and is further evidence of Microsoft’s efforts to dominate and control Android and other open source operating systems.’ The PDF of the filing from two days ago is rife with accusations including, ‘Microsoft intends to utilize its patents to control the activities of and extract fees from the designers, developers, and manufacturers of devices, including tablets, eReaders, and other mobile devices, that employ the Android Operating System.’ and ‘Microsoft has falsely and without justification asserted that its patents somehow provide it with the right to prohibit device manufacturers from employing new versions of the Android Operating System, or third party software.’ Barnes and Noble does not mince words when explaining Microsoft’s FUD campaign to both the public and developers in its attempts to suppress Android. It’s good to see PJ still digging through massive court briefs to bring us the details on IP court battles.

I find it interesting that the first real response to Microsoft’s suit is coming from Barnes & Noble.  Kind of weird that a bookseller is responding more vocally than the assorted technology companies affected by this suit.  I wonder if it is because Microsoft has been throwing its weight around in the technology arena for so long that all those companies are cowed…  And B&N just hasn’t been on the receiving end of that yet.

Anyway…  If you look at the claims of the suit – yes, Microsoft has real patents and is defending them.  But those patents are really kind of stupid and irrelevant at this point in the game.  They either don’t apply at all to modern versions of Android, or they’re so generic that there’s got to be prior art of some kind.

It really looks like Microsoft is just trying to bully folks into paying licensing fees, or maybe discontinuing their Android offerings and replacing them with Microsoft offerings.

It’ll be interesting to see how this all works out…  There are so many Android devices out there, it’s bound to have a big effect, one way or another.