Tuesday 7 October 2008

Pic of the day: Also, I can place my ADSL modem on it.

New computer

Today I got the replacement for the broken old bedroom computer. (It was bedroom computer back in the basement apartment which was my original Chaos Node. Here in the house, it has stood by my side until it became unable to play Sims 2 and City of Heroes.)

The new computer is a cheap desktop machine, HP Pavilion A6541 with AMD Phenom 8450 tri-core processor and 4 GB RAM. As it is the first and almost certainly last tri-core machine in my house, I named it TRINE. (Trine is a somewhat old-fashioned girl name here in Norway.) This also fits since it will be used by my imaginary female companion whose name also doesn't begin with a T, but only because she doesn't exist.

AMD processors of this generation at least are notoriously weaker than the Intel processors they compete against. So even each of the 3 cores is weaker than each of the 4 cores in TERRA, I think, although nearly a year has gone by. OK, perhaps not a lot weaker, but this machine is quite possibly my first new desktop machine that is not better than the last I bought. It is meant as a cheap number-two machine, and its main task will be to run Sims 2 while I do other things.

This was how I used to do things a couple years ago. I had the game running on the machine to my right, keeping half an eye on it while doing other things. The game will play certain sounds when special things happens, like a sim falling in love, and of course the phone and the doorbell. For some reason the sims still don't answer the door on their own, and not always the phone either, if they have something else that even vaguely interests them.

Over time, the game grew with several new expansion packs, and the old machine was not able to run with all of them, eventually not even all the ones I wanted the most. I moved the game to my high-end machine and played it in a window. This worked well enough, but it also bound up my machine. Oh, in theory I could run the game in the background while reading or writing in the foreground, but then I would neither see nor hear what was going on with my sims. This might be OK when running a student through college, but not with Micropolis where I am my sims' guardian angel and have promised to watch over them. So in practice I ended up not doing the other things I wanted to do (such as my journal) and still not playing my sims neighborhood as much as I had hoped.

Well, my sims are back where they belong, out in the right field of my vision, and with loudspeakers. I still can't always leave them be, for instance the family with 4 toddlers pretty much takes all my attention. But at least a part of the time I can do two things again.

One of the things I hoped to do was blog the game while it was running. I am falling behind on my Sims blog too - actually, I am falling behind in practically every way except my bills - and I set up the screen capture program to store my pictures in a folder that I shared on my home network. Except it wasn't quite that simple.

After I had let the machine sweat out the chemicals that all new computers seem to be doused with these days, I moved it to my home office where the old bedroom machine had stood. I plugged it into the home network, and it almost immediately connected to the Internet. (I had tried to connect it to the wireless network while it was in the living room, but the drivers for the wireless receptor did not work under Vista.) Connecting to the Internet is nice and all, since there are some standard programs that I tend to download from the Net on a new machine. (Freeware, not pirate copies.) But even though the machine was not physically connected to the network router, it did not recognize TERRA, my main machine, which runs WinXP. After some Googling, I found out that I had to replace the standard network name in the schematic picture of the network, inserting the actual network name instead of "network" or whatever it originally wrote. This is probably supposed to be very intuitive, but is not when I am used to writing the network name in Control Panel.

After actually joining the local network, it wasn't too hard to share the picture folder over the network. Now I could access the fresh pictures for my blogging purposes while the game was still running on the other machine. Well, at least one of the pictures. When I came to the second picture, the folder window stopped responding. I eventually rebooted the XP machine, but to no avail. So I ended the game on the new machine, closed all programs and told it to reboot. It spent about half an hour trying to do that before I gave up and pushed and held the on/off button on the computer until it turned off.

Something is not working as intended. I suspect Vista, or perhaps just the 64-bits version, which is a rather new invention and was famously sensitive when it was new. (Although I have heard it supports much more software now, and is measurably faster than the 32-bits Vista). I concede that it could be a problem with the network card or something, but this seems unlikely. When I am not running Sims 2, I can access the folder freely, even edit or delete pictures in it from the other computer. But not while the game is running, which was a big selling point.

I have not yet decided whether or not to downgrade to Windows XP. I have read that you can do this for free: Buying Vista means you have also bought the previous versions. They are not going to be supported forever though. Perhaps instead I should experiment with running the program in XP mode, or as administrator, and see if it makes a difference.

But let's say, I am not going to upgrade my XP computer to Vista unless threatened with bodily harm. I am glad I got it with the better operating system, even though I did pay extra for it at the time.