mykrocosm

A friend just upgraded his home office. Sweet setup!

(click to enlarge)

Been playing a few games of Scorched Earth 3D online with friends. It’s a really neat open-source game that throws you onto a random landscape with a bunch of computer bots, and you all get to lob weapons at each other. Winners get more cash to spend on new weapons in the next round. There’s a nice variety of bombs, guns and even nuclear weapons. The graphics are really impressive. Only a couple of drawbacks - the camera controls take some getting used to, and setting up the server side of things can get really fiddly, but it’s worth the effort.

There’s nothing like taking out an entire island with a Strangelove bomb

I’m playing Homeworld at the moment - for a six year old game, it runs and looks great on my computer! In 1999, a six year old game tended to look a bit crap, what with the 16 colour graphics and all. But in 2005, a six year old game can be run at maximum detail and maximum resolution, without a single hiccup, and look very very nice.

Ground Control (funnily enough, also by Sierra) is another one from that period which also runs beautifully on today’s hardware.

So keep an eye on those bargain bins. There are awesome games in there.

I fired up Task Manager on the Media Centre, and would you believe it … this 3Ghz HP-preloaded machine was booting up with 245Mb of used memory. 245Mb!! I’ve had XP SP2 systems booting up in less than 100Mb.

Where’s all this extra crap coming from? Well for example, XP SP2 (and XP Media Centre, obviously) automatically start the Wireless Zero Configuration service. Great, right… except for machines that don’t have or use a wireless card. So that’s a chunk of memory AND processor time permanently going to waste.

On top of that, HP installs a dazzling array of their own useless applications.

No wonder the system was staggering. A quick run through the registry and Services manager later and it was looking a lot leaner with a 165Mb bootup. 33% fat loss. That’s more than Ryan the Biggest Loser.

Now to really test this thing. I needed a DVD. One that would really push the system to the limit. Enter… The Matrix.

The shooting columns scene is a common DVD benchmark because it fills the entire screen with moving objects.

And the thing screams. It just goes to show… the first thing you should do with your brand new PC bundle is examine very closely every single thing that it’s loading into memory.

So on Friday we’re hastily trying to shut down Far Cry on the big screen when one of the executives grabs the Windows Media remote and pushes the Start button. This of course sends the PC into a swapping frenzy as it tries to simultaneously load and unload some seriously chunky programs. Finally (after we’re seriously considering lunging for the wall switch) Far Cry disappears and the Media Centre appears.

The executives have a little play with the system, and conclude that the demo video is a bit jerky. Having escaped the room by now I can only imagine what they might blame for this …