TechReaction

No time to play Crysis due to work responsibilities. In finally had a chance to install Vista Service Pack 1. The files are huge. I mistakenly downloaded the 32-bit file and didn’t realize it until I tried to install. That download was 450MB. The 64-bit SP1 dowload is over 700MB! It installed without a problem. The installer flat out tells you that it could take more than an hour, but mine seemed to take far less than that.

There was also an unknown device showing up in my control panel that hadn’t seemed to install yet. I had installed the Abit drivers off the disk (no new updates were online) and pulled the newest beta 8800GTS drivers off the web. The device still showed up. Looking through the device manager information in Vista was no help. A quick Google of “IP35 Unknown Device” gave me what I was looking for. Apparently the uGuru chip on the motherboard doesn’t install along with everything else. I downloaded and installed the driver, which was under “Utilities” on the Abit site. This led to my first program crash in Vista 64. Not a good sign, since it was the first program that I ran other than Internet Explorer. The uGuru utility is set to autostart, so I’ll have to kill that. For the time being I will assume that SP1 broke the utility and Abit will release a new version.

One intriguing new “feature” in Vista is the Windows Experience Score. When rerunning the program after installing all of the appropriate drivers, I was appalled to see a score of 5.9. Less than 60% after shelling out for a quad-core processor and the third-best video card currently on the market! That just showed me how biased my frame of reference can be. 5.9 is the highest score currently available. If you score a 5.9, that means your performance is off the chart. I guess I just assume that every single digit score is out of 10. Microsoft has really just reserved the higher numbers for implementation over the next few years as new technology is released.

The X-Fi extreme gamer is back on sale at Newegg for about $60 shipped after rebate. I have already ordered one and begun wondering about what headset I might like to get. I’m not ready to shell out another $100 for the Sennheiser HD555 or the Tritton AX360. Maybe I’ll break down and go for the much cheaper Creative Fatal1ty $40 set, but I’ll probably just wait. The long term plan is to return the system to the basement theater and play on a new projector with the 5.1 speaker system (eventually to be 7.1 when I buy another pair of Klipsch S-5s off of eBay). I would really like to get a new projector for that and my preference is for a 1080p version of the Panasonic AX200U with game mode. I expect just such a projector to be released around the August/September CEDIA time frame. Hopefully it won’t be too expensive to justify purchasing it.

I set Crysis to install during the day, since it seems to pretty much dump the whole disk to the hard drive. I’ll take a quick look for patches and then look to get some solid time playing it on Day 4.