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Graphics, Games, and Business As part of my recent PC upgrade saga, I decided to run some tests to see whether built-in graphics cards could in any way match the performance of, for instance, an SLI card. The new Intel DG35EC board came with built-in video and an DVI connector, so it seemed a good idea to try it out first. It boasts HD video capability and other nice features. The initial tests looked pretty good. The video was reasonably fast, refresh rate was good, and overall I was very pleased. Then I decided to try the acid test, which is currently a copy of THQ's "Company of Heroes -- Opposing Fronts." It's a very graphics-intensive game, and I knew it was the straw that broke the camel's back on my old system. I fired it up, and was immediately appalled. The overall refresh rate was fine, and the game's cut scenes performed reasonably well. But during gameplay, it was nearly impossible to fly over the combat map without everything freezing for up to 20 seconds. The lack of video memory apparently meant the game had to flush the video buffers and reload them with the new map location. It made gameplay intolerably slow Once the new card (a GeForce 9500 GT SLi unit with 512MB on board) was installed, the difference was amazing. The graphics were richer, faster, and fuller in density even than on my old machine, which also had a fairly high end 512MB card. Now there's absolutely no stutter, no delay in scene changes, an... PC Resurrection As most of you know, I've been having problems with my primary Windows PC's C drive. It's turned out to be a fairly complex problem, and the solution has been challenging. The process also shows how easy it is for multiple problems to turn up simultaneously. The initial problem was slow read performance on the C drive (lots of solid disk activity lights, random slowness), which was finally traced to bad blocks on the disk. Since that's an easy swap, I ordered a replacement 500GB Seagate drive, opened the case, connected it to a spare SATA port, and powered on the system. It would no longer boot, and wasn't even running its self tests. I theorized that the board itself was going bad, and this was causing the disk errors. Since the board was a 2003 model, a full upgrade seemed useful. My new Intel board and 3.0GHZ processor, along with 2GB of 800MHZ Corsair memory, arrived a few days later. A quick hardware swap occurred, only to discover the system disk had apparently lost some Windows executive files. I really wanted my original OS back and didn't just want to re-install, so I decided to try an experiment. The original XP installation CD was put in, and Recovery Console was booted. I tried both bootfix and fixmbr to see if they'd restore the drive's boot blocks, but they were inadequate to the task. The XP CD was again booted, and I told it to Repair the existing Windows installation. An hour ... Upgrade...Because Intel Says So? A friend forwarded an interesting article a few days back. It states that older PCs are much more likely to experience problems in the form of viruses in SME (Small to Medium Enterprise) environments. According to their reasoning, "desktops that have been in use for over three years are 28 percent more likely to be attacked by a virus than those that have been used for less than three years. In the case of notebooks, older machines were 58 percent more likely to suffer a virus attack." I can't quite understand this logic. The hardware in use really has no bearing on whether a machine is "more likely" to be attacked by a virus. A machine's vulnerability to virus or other malware attack is actually tied to three factors, none of which are related to hardware. The first factor is the installed OS and whether it's been maintained properly, i.e. patched and updated. If you're running Windows and are keeping a machine patched, the chance of catching a virus drops. I doubt there are any published percentages, but unpatched OSes are more vulnerable. Then there's the presence (or lack of) antivirus and firewall software. Again, updated software in this area will lower the chance of infection. I'd also assert that removing Outlook probably drops the chance of attack considerably, though this is becoming less true these days due to the presenc... |
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