Monday 8 January 2007

Pic of the day: A symbol of masculine strenght! Who has the biggest PC?

It is back!

The monster PC, that is. The black monster from North Corporation. Well, it was kinda monstrous back when I bought it. Now I have been tempted repeatedly to buy a new and much faster. Well, noticeably faster. It is only like three weeks till Windows Vista becomes mandatory, and then suddenly the new PCs will be no faster than the Monster is, or at least in roughly the same range. I believe they are 30-40% faster now, in the same price class. It is around 9 months old these days (I got it early last April) and I believe Moore's law say that they double every 18 months or so, and we are halfway to that, but by the very same measure most of the progress should be in the second half. On the other hand, there is a new generation of chips now, the dual-core processors, so maybe it is more... Anyway, the black monster is back, and the urge to shop is dwindling.

The thing is, it is quite good enough for anything I want done today. OK, so it goes kinda slow to have The Sims 2 in a window while running Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 (the speech recognition program) in the foreground. I happen to know this because I am trying it right now. I wouldn't try that if I was running a large family in Sims2. Then again, if I was running a large family, I would probably not leave them unattended long enough to dictate even a part of a journal entry.

It seems I may not have written about this already, as I thought I had, but I was actually about to install Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 on the new Dell laptop one of the days. But then it displayed the license agreement during installation, and I found that I could not install it on a new machine before it was uninstalled on the old. Since the old machine was in the shop for repairs, I was not in a position to uninstall it. I'm not sure what the program would have done if I had gone ahead anyway, but since it is registering online there is a good chance that the program would have discovered the multiple installations and blown up the computer (or at least itself), followed by a lawsuit from Nuance. I was not willing to take such a risk for a few weeks only... a very few weeks, as it turned out, although I didn't expect them to be finished so fast at the time.

I must admit that I have missed Dragon NaturallySpeaking sometimes while my computer was in for repair. I don't use it all the time, or even most of the time, but there are some days when it comes in really handy. Not least during the holidays, when there could otherwise be too much time spent typing and mousing. This program really is like magic, at least much of the time, when I don't have a sore throat or some such...

I have not missed playing Sims2, though, because it plays approximately as well on the newest laptop. That's pretty impressive. In the old days, portable computers used to be much weaker than their desktop friends. These days, I hear that most of the personal computers sold are actually laptops. In a way I can understand that: The new generation of laptops are sleek and sexy, unlike the large and bulky desktops. (Although I have to say that the monster displays a rough masculine strength of its own.) Anyway, with the laptops catching up in performance and video game consoles eating in on the market share for high performance games, I guess the classic desktop is being squeezed out of the home. The large workalike boxes are said to cause "wife aggro" if placed in a living room. But I don't have to worry about that, at least...