My poor computer

Me and my computer have separated after a few days of spending too long together, and I'm now having an affair with this university workstation. It is a cruel mistress, which I had to "manually power cycle" after it wouldn't recognise my portable HD. Oh well, its being compliant now. And too add to my computers woes, I'm downloading two things that will punish it for failing me graphically in Crysis: Vista and Unreal Tournament 3 Beta. I'm downloading Vista, because as regular readers will know, I plan to upgrade once I get my mitts on a better graphics card, and I get a free copy of Vista Business edition off the university, so I might as well take it. Unreal Tournament 3, I'm just downloading just because I really want to prove to myself that my graphics card is rubbish and I have to buy a new one soon. I would use my home PC to download these, but I fear my housemates might batter me to death if I try to download 3GBs of stuff in the middle of the evening, so I thought Id rinse the University's net connection instead.

Crysis was good. I recommend it to anyone whose into pretty shooting things games. I finished it yesterday after 48 hours of hiding away with it. I managed to get quite a lot of work done as well. I'm feeling quite chuffed in a way. I haven't finished a computer game Ive bought in years, but then this seemed very short. But I think the fun of Crysis is that you can replay it a million times, because its levels are so large, there are so many different ways of doing things. Its very open ended, unlike most the console games Ive seen Jam play recently (CoD 4 and Halo 3), so its definitely getting replayed in DX10.

I'm starting to wonder if maybe overclocking my current graphics card might make things a bit better for now. I read an article about it, it doesn't sound that hard, although there is a risk of system instability and heat damaging the thing. Also, I'm not sure if I should add more RAM when I upgrade to Vista, because I read a lot of conflicting things about how much RAM it really needs. I had a Beta (RC2) Vista on my box before I put XP on it, and that ran ok with my 2GB of RAM. But some say you need 4GB, Jams has 4GBs, and that runs well. I should just try it with 2GB, see if its stable and responsive, and if not, RAM prices will have fallen and Il get some more RAM. Yeah, Ill probably do that. I need an external HD, a bigger one, before I upgrade to Vista as well, so I can backup everything. Ive currently got about 350GBs of crap on my box, so it will need to be bigger then my current one.

News:

1. Apparently some hacker has broken the new encryption on BluRay discs. Although, it should be noted that this wasn't the original BluRay encryption, but another stronger layer (called BD+) they added on a few DVDs after the last lot of BluRay encryption, used on most discs, was broken ages ago. Makes me wonder why they bother. LINK


2. More HD news: The BBC finally catches up with the rest of the universe and starts talking about HDTV. Pity they screwed up Freeview. I say this, because, from what Ive heard, apparently Freeview can't do HD, because they didn't allow enough space for the signals on the digital Freeview spectrum, so their going to have to re-shuffle all the signals to get it to work, which means we all need new Freeview boxes. Clever. LINK


3. Leave Heather Mills alone, that poor women, their now claiming she drinks rats milk! Come on people, get over it, shes not Satan, shes just rinsing some silly old sod stupid enough to marry her for all hes worth. He'll still have a couple of hundred million quid left, I'm sure we won't see him busking anytime soon. LINK


4. This ones just stupid: Christians are trying to sue someone over the Jerry Springer musical. Why do we still have a blasphemy law? In this day and age, of a multi-cultural, multi-faith England, do we still have laws that stop us saying whatever we like about a bunch of one faith's fictional characters? Am I now going to be burnt at the stake for riding in a horseless carriage or something? Apparently it won't get by the judges, and contravenes EU human rights laws. Thank fuck, at least the EU has done something useful for once. LINK


5. Hmm... more bollocks about Dianne.. Oh look, UT3 Beta has finished downloading ^_^
   
6. umm... probably more bollocks about Madeline...
   


7. oh, Firefox 3 is out soon! That will be good, to watch it put the final nails in IE's coffin.
   


8. Sony have released software update for the PS3, no surprises there....
   


9. The internet needs more bandwidth, because we're watching too much streamed video, apparently.


10. The Germans are kicking off about the iPhone because you have to sign up for a 24 month T-mobile contract to get one there apparently.
    


11. And then there is all this stuff about this stupid Custom's and Revenue department losing a load of data. What a bunch of newbs. They just stuck it in the post, not registered or special delivery, just normal post, and now its gone missing. Twice. Oh well, at least they managed to at least to remember to back it up and not send the originals. Twits.

Sorry this has been so long... downloading Vista is on 38% =( what am I going to do now? Oh well, I'm sure Ill think of something else... bye for now.