If your PC sucks, do we have the browser for you.
by AC - permalink
At work I'm forced to use this tired, overworked, under-serviced old Celeron box with Win98 and 64Mb RAM. It generates a DOSkey error in post, the PS2 ports randomly fail, and BSOD's are a regular feature. And it just won't run Firefox.
It seems like a memory leak to me. Running more than one tab for ten minutes or so, sometimes less, bogs down the system more and more until it's unable even to restart. It has IE5.5, but this is 2006, and I'm not using fucking IE5.5. But it turns out Opera runs like a champ. Sure, there's nothing to be done about all the massive banner ads slammed all over everywhere that AdBlock had erased from my memory, but it works.
It's nice, because I installed Opera 8.5 on my new PC two weeks ago and haven't opened it since. I like Opera. I just don't generally need it for anything.
I went out intending to spend twenty bucks on Call of Duty or Halo for PC, but I went ahead and spend fifty for Half-Life 2 GOTY edition. Fuck it, why not. It took around an hour and a half to install and download all the damn Steam updates and patches (dial-up), but the game runs a lot better than I expected with that onboard X200 IGP. I turned the res down to 800x600 and lowered the texture quality one notch to medium, and I'm getting a framerate consistantly between 45 and 60. That's with geometric detail, shadows, water, etc. all on high, but without anisotropic filtering or blooms. In other words, it's visually slightly better than the Xbox version of Half-Life 2, with tighter controls. Which is all I wanted in the first place.
I know the Source engine lets the CPU do a lot of the heavy lifting, which probably explains the decent performance despite my vidRAM bottleneck (my T6425 came with an AMD64 3500+). A patch was released just this week optimizing HL2 and the Source engine for AMD64 CPU's, which should help even more. And I'm leaning towards an ATI Radeon X800 GTO-based midrange vidcard. The goal is to max out all or most the gfx options in HL2, Doom 3, etc. at somewhere between 1024x768 and 1280x960. That's good enough for me.
by AC - permalink
At work I'm forced to use this tired, overworked, under-serviced old Celeron box with Win98 and 64Mb RAM. It generates a DOSkey error in post, the PS2 ports randomly fail, and BSOD's are a regular feature. And it just won't run Firefox.
It seems like a memory leak to me. Running more than one tab for ten minutes or so, sometimes less, bogs down the system more and more until it's unable even to restart. It has IE5.5, but this is 2006, and I'm not using fucking IE5.5. But it turns out Opera runs like a champ. Sure, there's nothing to be done about all the massive banner ads slammed all over everywhere that AdBlock had erased from my memory, but it works.
It's nice, because I installed Opera 8.5 on my new PC two weeks ago and haven't opened it since. I like Opera. I just don't generally need it for anything.
I went out intending to spend twenty bucks on Call of Duty or Halo for PC, but I went ahead and spend fifty for Half-Life 2 GOTY edition. Fuck it, why not. It took around an hour and a half to install and download all the damn Steam updates and patches (dial-up), but the game runs a lot better than I expected with that onboard X200 IGP. I turned the res down to 800x600 and lowered the texture quality one notch to medium, and I'm getting a framerate consistantly between 45 and 60. That's with geometric detail, shadows, water, etc. all on high, but without anisotropic filtering or blooms. In other words, it's visually slightly better than the Xbox version of Half-Life 2, with tighter controls. Which is all I wanted in the first place.
I know the Source engine lets the CPU do a lot of the heavy lifting, which probably explains the decent performance despite my vidRAM bottleneck (my T6425 came with an AMD64 3500+). A patch was released just this week optimizing HL2 and the Source engine for AMD64 CPU's, which should help even more. And I'm leaning towards an ATI Radeon X800 GTO-based midrange vidcard. The goal is to max out all or most the gfx options in HL2, Doom 3, etc. at somewhere between 1024x768 and 1280x960. That's good enough for me.
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