Been a while since I blogged, but I have been keeping myself very busy of course and my Tauren Hunter is now almost level 60 in World of Warcraft. While not gaming, I have also been to Seattle and back, staying only to play with Vista and to drink some Corona.

I got Vista installed in my now "old" system, old only because my newer system is well, newer. Iguana is a 3400+ Athlon64 on an MSI K8T Neo FIS2R and a gig of Crucial ram all packaged nicely in a Lian-Li PC65 case, I have installed the 32bit version of Windows Vista Beta 1 on it. Why would I do that after tasting the sweetness that is 64bit? Purely to follow the trend, alot of the initial drivers will be 32bit only, obviously and I really want to provide the feedback that Microsoft deserve for flying me out there and buying me a steak dinner, oh and getting to touch an Xbox 360. Woo, but I already wrote about that here:

http://www.osnn.net/comments.php?shownews=12217

I am continuing to play...

Firstly a mini rant about blogs, because I can - I use WindowsXP x64 I can do what the hell I want, but this is something that has got me wound up and when I get angry Mr. Bigglesworth gets upset and when Mr. Bigglesworth gets upset, people die! This is the definition of a blog:

Ok, I am definitely guilty of the last part, but I am a busy man - I have a full time job, a healthy appetite for computer games and I run a popular (horn blower) news site, as well as visiting lots of news sites so it often quite refreshing to come and read a blog page to see peoples self-confessed feelings about Windows x64 and how they are getting on with it, not a page full of stale news on the...

Some users have recieved this email from Microsoft, not me because Microsoft haven't sent me e-mail since I changed my user account from hotmail to my main account, this reminds me that I need to get that sorted out (even though my last request was still ignored).

Its funny as this is how I always thought I would eventually get my copy of Windows x64 and I have been pushing hard on the whole Windows x64 (or Windows for Extended Systems)...

Ok at work, I have a new set of NVIDIA drivers coming down nicely so will be checking those out tonight. So far I know of three releases for Windows x64, excluding the default set when you first get installed:

- 71.84: The only official set and the first display drivers to be WHQL certified – I have no idea how though as they are a poor release. They fill up the event log with errors about incompatible files and missing auxiliary power, which in turn slows the core down (to something lower than that of the GT which doesn’t need auxiliary power anyway?)

- 76.71: So much better and I was very pleased with the results, core does slow down again eventually and there are still errors, but in most cases it ran everything I threw at it on par with it’s 32bit cousin. I have been playing a lot of World of Warcraft (which I am still convinced runs in native 64bit mode). I would have loved to have tested more applications but WOW really has me sucked in, that and the...

It has been a while since I did the blog thing as I have been messing about in Florida or something. I saw Ryan posted the specs of the machine he wants to buy, so I thought I would start doing the same, the machine is going to be stupidly over spec and pretty much built from scratch as these things tend to have to be when changing both sockets and the kind of connection needed for the graphics card
Here is the current plan:

• PSU: Not decided yet, something pretty.
• Case: Cooler Master Stacker 830 (not yet released)
• Processor: AMD Athlon x2 4800+ (not yet released)
• Cooling: 2x Aquagate with all the trimmings (CPU, GPU, HDD, Northbridge)
• Video Card: GeForce G70 Ultra (code name - not yet announced)
• Motherboard: TBA
• RAM: 2gig TBA
• Hard Disk: Undecided, will be two pairs of RAID arrays, one for speed one for storage
• Optical Drive: Sony Dual Layer (already owned) & another one for good measure.
• Soundcard:...