Thursday 22 July 2004

Pic of the day: Not exactly vibrant colors.

HP Pavilion ZE5609

What can I say? Another laptop. Another HP laptop. New and improved. 2.80 GHz Intel Celeron processor, 448MB RAM (that's what it says, although they market it as 512MB), and not least, an ATI graphics cards that plays the newest games in brilliant colors, except one. City of Heroes.

I installed Bluetooth much easier this time. Practice makes perfect, and besides the bug from the previous machine did not show up. Soon the laptop was on the Net, courtesy of my Scaleo desktop machine, and downloaded the heap of critical updates that had accumulated since it rolled out of the factory.

After that, it was installing City of Heroes. This went well enough, all in vibrant color. The start screen came up eventually, all in vibrant color. Then the cityscape loaded - in ugly, blotched black and white with gaping holes.

This problem has been fixed in later versions of CoH. Do not download special software to fix this problem, as they now do more harm than good. Thanks even so to Francessa for the quick fix while the problem lasted.

After some looking around on the Net, I found a patch of sorts. It is by Francessa and converts the NVIDIA-specific system calls to more generic ones, making CoH renderable even on chipsets that don't have (or emulate) the NVIDIA graphics processors. The downside is that most colors are rendered as gray, and the rest very nearly so. It is watchable, playable, but not very enjoyable. So much for Cryptic's claim that the game runs on the ATI Radeon line. Or perhaps, so much for ATI's claim that the Mobile processor is a Radeon.

The machine is otherwise excellent, and you can never have too many machines in your home network, right? Perhaps I should not be content to duo in CoH, but instead raise an army and TAKE OVER THE WORLD! MUAHAHAHA!

Or perhaps I just wasted $1000.

The machine is otherwise great, highly recommended if you don't play CoH. But I don't really recommend not playing CoH, unless it is to live in prayer and good works, stuff like that. If you want to enjoy life to the fullest, flying or leaping tall buildings it is. In rich, vibrant color.