This bank-holiday weekend saw the arrival of the latest in a long line of gaming PCs in the Van Hemlock Household. My somewhat accidental Second Life success has finally, and quite improbably, been turned into a real and concrete payout, which runs somewhat contrary to the general opinion of the place I'd both formed myself, and seen talked about a lot elsewhere - furry, cyber, casino, pron, etc.

All the more surprising then that in about four months, my invention, which I'm still not going to identify here, has been popular enough that I can buy a new PC entirely from the proceeds, particularly considering that it's nothing to do with sex, gambling or furries. The actual process of extracting the Linden Play Money, while cumbersome and slow, did go through as advertised; from In-World, ot USD, to Paypal, to my grubby little hands, and then on to Dell without significant hitches, delays, or the funds simply evaporating like morning mist, as I feared.

It has kind of ruined Second Life for me however, and the thing is very much business only for me these days. I log in, deal with my backed up list of support calls, then find myself devoid of creative impulse, or any inclination to play with the lego blocks that first attracted me there in the first place, and end up going off to some other online game to blow stuff up instead.

Yes yes, I know, 'QQ more' and all that. I'll continue to take the money, and be grateful, and perhaps one day, I'll be more enthusiastic about actually being involved and creative in Second Life once again. Mustn't grumble. I should probably save any future funds for tax bills, although I'm still a bit in the dark about what's involved on that score.

Anyway, here's the spec:

CPU: Viiv Core 2 Duo Processor 1.86Ghz, 1066MHz, 2MB
RAM: Dual Channel 2048Mb 533MHz DDR2
HDD: 250GB Serial ATA II
DVD: 16x DVD +/- RW
Video: ATI Radeon XT1300 Pro 256Mb

Plus the usual other bits and pieces, mouse, keyboard, etc. The best bit was the free upgrade to a 22-inch widescreen LCD that's bigger than my TV, not because it's a very nice piece of technology it it's own right, but because I can finally get rid of my ten year old 17-inch CRT Behemoth, something I'd been meaning to do for a long time, but couldn't justify until it actually died. Little did I know then, that it was actually indestructible!

Being a new PC, it came with Vista preinstalled, and I managed to make it two days in before I had Blue Screen of Death problems necessitating a complete reinstall from scratch, brought on by the drivers for the one bit of the system I didn't replace, the modem. One brand new Router later, we were back in business. On the plus side, the reinstall was a lot cleaner than the preinstalled one, and didn't have nearly as many 'zOMG! FREE Broadband!!1!' desktop links cluttering up the place. Moral of the story - replace everything, particularly with Vista, given how much trouble it seems to have with backward compatibility.

Then it was on to each of my current games. Somewhat coincidentally, seems like Tobold has recently got a new rig and you can read his troubles with Vista here:

Tobold's MMORPG Blog: Hasta la vista, Vista!

The clue is in the title really, and Tobold Does Not Like Vista. On the whole, I think I agree with his analysis. While not having any concrete metrics for benchmarking, I was using Oblivion as a kind of rule-of-thumb test (being the most demanding game I currently own) and performance there seemed not to be noticeably improved over my previous XP SP2, Pentium 4 1.7Ghz 1GB Ram machine, which was a bit of a disappointment, considering I've got twice the CPU and twice the memory now, all of which has faster access speeds.

Seeing rubbish like this every five minutes didn't help my User Experience much either:

"Windows has detected a key press!

Allow: I have used the keyboard before, or know what it does.

Deny: I didn't press a button, or don't know what a keyboard is."

Quite irritating really, and I've still not found the 'Let my computer do what the hell it likes, I really don't care about security!' tickbox yet.

Out of my Current Monsters list, things aren't massively improved.

GuildWars runs great, but then ran great on my veteran previous PC anyway, somehow managing to look gorgeous and flow like silk while using very low system specs right out of the box, years ago. No real improvement there.

EVE Online seems improved a fair bit. I used to get juddering frame-rate loss when launching or scooping my Drones, or arriving in a new Deadspace location the first time. Now it has no troubles there, presenting a much smoother experience all in all. I've also been able to turn on the Multisampling, which makes the thing look magnificently crisp, although to be fair, I only found out about this option after buying this new PC, so have no idea how that looked on the old one. Also, I really think EVE was designed for a widescreen monitor. I'm running in 1650x1050 or similar, and with that much space on the 'sides', I can now have all the dozens of windows you need open, and still see my ship! Bravo!

(For some unknown reason, EVE Installs not only with the Multisampling options switched off, but the actual control to turn it on hidden and inaccessible. Presumably it's a feature they don't want to support just yet. However, you can get at it by locating the prefs.ini file, in the cache folder and adding the following line:

advancedDevice=1

If that doesn't make any sense, you probably shouldn't be fiddling in there anyway. When that's done, there should be new options in the Graphics tab of the options screen, (ESC), namely a Multisampling dropdown. The game looks much better with it on, especially on bigger LCD monitors. More on that here )

Ironically enough, Second Life - the game that paid for the PC ran the worst, and I should consider myself lucky it ran at all, as SL is an OpenGL title, rather than DirectX, and so not terribly well supported, and its only in the last couple of weeks an ATI Driver has been released for Vista that supports OpenGL. SL never looked that great, but now it bombs out if I switch between Full-screen and Windowed, and if I try ticking the Anisotropic Filtering. It also now does not bother doing lighting effects on Avatars, making everyone universally dark and quite incongruious with the surrounding prims.

It's a shame I can't get at Planetside anymore, as I'd quite like to have benchmarked a hectic firefight in there, now I finally have a PC man enough to cope with it all, but nevermind.



All in all, I think I'm probably getting less out of the PC than I ought to, and it's probably Vista's fault. Then again, nothing I currently own or play was really stretching my old machine much, and I'm not sure I have the energy to reinstall a third time, with XP, so for now, I'll continue to run the gauntlet, and take consolation from that fact that at least now, I'm ready for the DirectX10 generation to come...