Thursday 14 December 2006

Pic of the day: I am getting blown away in my PJs! OK, perhaps not literally. But it has arrived...

Dell Inspiron 6400

To my relief, they actually called from the freight company yesterday evening and announced that my packet would come today. They even offered to wait until after 16:30 (4:30PM) so I didn't have to take a day off. That's genuinely nice and unusual for people who deliver Dell machines, from the impression I get online. Then again it may be that people are far more likely to write about things that go wrong than things that go right. We'll find out more if I buy from them again. Which is entirely possible now.

An hour or so after I was home, they called again from outside the house, and I went out to fetch the package. Since it is a laptop, I had no problem carrying it the last steps into the house after signing the papers.

Rather than go on with my life, I decided to open it immediately, much like a kid on Xmas. There is also the small question of reporting any errors or omissions without undue delay. However, there were none that I could see. On the contrary, there was entirely too much software, all of which was trial installations. I have been uninstalling quite a few nifty things, and will probably discover others only when the 90 days free trial runs out.

***

I have already written about the specs the day I ordered it, so no surprises there. This is my first ever dual-core machine, so I was a bit excited about that. Will it really be possible to work on one heavy task while another is running in the background? Or will other shared resources, such as memory or hard disk, limit it in practice? After setting it up for the home network, I decided to surf the web while installing The Sims 2. This worked well enough, except that the installation never completed. It quietly hung itself and died.

After airing my grievance in the Sims 2 community on LiveJournal, I somewhat sheepishly learned that this problem occured also on laptops that did not have a dual-core processor, and was probably related to the CD-ROM, more exactly the driver. As long as the installation program was in the foreground, it worked well enough, and soon I had installed Sims2 and the first two expansion packs, University and Nightlife.

I have two more expansions, Open for Business and Pets. As with the first Sims game, the Pets expansion rubbed me against my hairs, only more so since this one contained no other content. Well, werewolves are not exactly pets, but it is still a far cry from getting larger neighborhoods or farming. For good measure the cats and dogs are uglier than the Nintendogs. The expansion is not recommended unless you need the pets for storytelling reasons, or unless you want some user-made content that requires it. Most coders have all the expansions, and so the content they make may not work if you skip some of the packs. For instance the fabulous "Hacked Computer" by Monique at Mod The Sims 2, it has added a couple new nifty features but will make your Sims unplayable if you don't have Pets2. Luckily there are still a couple earlier versions floating around on the Net.

The short of it is that my Open for Business CD is already in my usual gaming machine (the former bedroom machine, for those who keep count) and Pets is in the Monster, though I rarely use it. Anyway, I did not much want to inflict Pets on the laptop and the poor Sims living in it. So I stopped at Nightlife. Then I used the rest of the evening hunting down realism and convenience hacks for Nightlife. This is a small adventure in itself, since so many of them have been replaced by newer options. But More Awesome Than You has a good selection. They have an archive that is organized by expansion pack, so you just go there for your latest pack and download what you need. Of course, if you skip one pack (say skip University and go straight to Nightlife) all bets are off. But the documentation will often mention if a particular expansion is required.

You know what? The laptop runs Sims2 Nightlife better than the desktop PC I first installed it on. I bought a pretty high-end video card as far as portables is concerned, but even so I was impressed. I don't know how it will stand up to massive gatherings like a Megafamily Challenge, but for everyday play it was running full tilt. I may have bought a better machine than I first thought.

Then again, perhaps I should not say that until it has lasted a few months at least?