I bought a new laptop not that long ago.

It’s a modest machine by today’s standards, I suppose, and it has more than enough hardware to do what I need it to do.

Sadly though, this is where it becomes painfully apparent that “needs” and “wants” aren’t even in the same ballpark, never mind being cozy next door neighbors.

I have in the past, spent many, many hours playing Unreal Tournament. I was never a compulsive gamer, but there was something about UT that got to me, more than any of the Quake or Doom derivatives did. I just liked it more. It was quicker, simpler, and easier to just play. I didn’t have to worry too much about if my buddies were online so we could get a game going, single player was for the most part all I really wanted, and there were more than enough servers with just a few people on them, that I could go multi if I wanted, and not get hopelessly owned over and over again, I could hold my own.

All of this, was accomplished on some -very- modest (by today’s standards) hardware, back in ‘00 or so.

The hardware?

• AMD K6-III @450. Yes, a K6-III, not a K6-II. It had the on die cache.
• 256 MB PC-100 SDRAM. Yep, good old 100mhz SDR.
• 32MB TNT2 Ultra Diamond Viper 770, later some ASUS card. The Diamond was… unstable…
• SB Live! OEM Soundcard.
• 17″ Panasonic e70i Monitor running 1024*768 @ 85hz.

Life was good, I was happy. I could frag away with out a care in the world with the game at medium settings, and get about 70 FPS, more than enough for my needs.

Imagine my surprise, when I bought UT3 the other day, and installed it on this (comparatively) muscle laden notebook. I’ll give you the short version: I’m disgusted.

Just playing the pre-rendered cut scenes pegs the CPU to maximum load, and even attempting to play in a 640*480 pixel window, with all the settings at their lowest is a jerky slide show, that actually looks worse than I remember UT1 looking. The graphics looked awful at that low of a setting, and the game was not even reasonably playable. This, on a dual core 2ghz beast, with 3 gigs of DDR2 ram, and up to 1 gig of vram (i had it set to 512mb).

It makes me wonder though, what is the real problem? Is it the game? Or is it Vista? Hell, is it just the crapware infested HP OEM install of Vista that I have for that matter?

Sadly, I can’t even put in my old UT1 CD and play that. Well, I haven’t tried, but past experience has told me I will have the exact opposite problem, where the game will play at about 3000 FPS (it did on opiate) and it will still be unplayable.

Fuck it, I’m installing Lemmings.

After hearing back from a couple of different technicians, and finding out that the repair costs for my old laptop (opiate) were out of line with reality, I went ahead and purchased a new laptop today.

It is in many ways remarkably similar to my last one. Same 14.1″ screen, similar nVidia graphics card, similar processor, much larger hard disk, and 3 times the memory.

• HP Pavilion dv2928se
• AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-60 @2ghz
• 3GG DDR2 SDRAM
• 250 GB 5400 RPM HDD
• 8X Dual Layer DVD+-RW w/ Lightscribe
• 14.1″ Widescreen HD BrightView LCD Screen (High gloss, ick…)
• nVidia geForce 7150m mobile GPU
• MS Windows Vista Home Premium (32 Bit)

The overall “Windows Experience Base Score” is 2.6. Screen shot below gives all the gory details.

So far, I haven’t played with it all that much to be honest with you. I have decided that I am going to give Vista as fair a chance as I can, to form my own opinion of it, rather than keep up with the opinions of others that I read online. I figure I will give it a week or so before I even install my beloved Ubuntu.

So far though, I’m not all that impressed. The list of short comings that I have found so far, out of the box have been surprisingly long, and infuriatingly tedious to fix.

• I hate all the CrapWare that comes preinstalled. I had forgotten just how much crap you get on an OEM install of Windows. I’ve spent about 3 hours just uninstalling garbage that came preinstalled on the machines
• Considering how much CrapWare comes installed, there is a shockingly small amount of useful software installed out of the box. I’ve been spoiled over the last few years with how bloody complete the Debian/Ubuntu desktop experience is. From word processors to terminal emulators to image editing to multi-protocol chat clients, it’s all just there.
• IE7 is not complete garbage, although there are some things about it that have irritated me at work over the last few months, that have bugged me just as much at home. It just seems slow as hell when opening a new tab.
• Speaking of IE7. How on earth do people stand dealing with all the advertisements on the web without using AdBlock Plus? Seriously, install Firefox and ABP, RFN, you will be happier.
• Constant reboots after Windows Update are getting tedious. Do it right boys.
• I just burned an Ubuntu CD, the burn took a lot longer than I was used to. I think it’s the SemiCrapTrialWare CD burning software that was included. K3B for the win.
• The recovery disks are an astonishing 13GB in size, give or take. For less software than fits comfortably on the 700MB CD I just burned. That’s a lot of CrapWare.
• It seems to work harder than it should under Vista. With iTunes importing my music collection, and my typing in this Firefox window the CPU is at 40% load, with the ram at about 45%. What gives? It should be idling nice and low.
• The Gadgets in the Windows Side Bar are kind of neat. They look a lot like the KDE Widgets that I played with a couple years back when I was monkeying with Mandrake, now Mandriva, just much more polished. I might revisit KDE.
• I despise the new Start Menu. It lasted about 20 minutes before I reverted to the “Classic” menu.

We’ll see how it goes. I’m going to do my best to give it a fair trial, but I will not be at all surprised if the Ubuntu Disks come out this weekend.

Oh, and before you ask, why not the new Macbook?

I’m down with the AMD Processor, I don’t need the extra muscle that Intel would provide, and that one spec aside this thing has better all around spec’s than the MacBook did, for $650 less. Considering that OSX would probably piss me off as much as Vista, and it would be an Ubuntu box anyway, why bother?

Oh yes, one more thing, the new hostname is sober…