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August 3, 2005
Bye Bye AIW
I knew when I bought my new monitor it wouldn't be long until I had to upgrade the computer. Seemings how I opted for the 24" widescreen (which I've grown accustomed to and no longer get massive headaches from) I decided that I would go the cheap route for the time being and simply upgrade the oldest component, the video card. I really don't have much need for a cutting edge game system as I hardly ever play graphic intensive games (or games at all for that matter). I basically got the best version of the oldest video card made by a third party manufacturer that supports DirectX 9 on board.
I bought a Sapphire branded Radeon 9600xt (with 256 MB of DDR RAM) which uses ATI graphics and drivers. I leaned away from the all-in-wonder cards because I plan to use PCI-express rather than AGP when I next upgrade and don't want to keep paying for a tuner card. I bought a Hauppauge card which does the encoding/decoding on the board rather than through software. I'm not sure how I feel about the hardware just yet but I can say that the WinTV software is complete crap. I'm testing out SageTV right now which I mostly like so far.
One of the best parts of the new video card is that I can actually enjoy mostly smooth HD content such as the one for Serenity. It plays the 1080's (the biggest movie files) fairly well assuming no other programs are open and it's not a quicktime file..guess I could still use some RAM. I haven't tested to see if I'll get better performance from DVD's yet (the video card just went in today.) I'm hoping I do. Every once in a while DVD's seem to stutter. I'm hoping it's not my DVD drive which isn't but a year old.
The Explorer died a week or so ago. The transmission went out on it. Kira's been driving the protege around while the explorer now sits dead (even the battery is dead so we'll have to jump it just to get it back to the shop) in the garage. She's not allowed to take a vehicle to school her first semester so there isn't much reason to get it fixed right away.
Posted by mhader at August 3, 2005 7:45 PM
Comments
Sounds like a good time for an axle swap to me. :)
Posted by: Jonathan at August 4, 2005 9:10 AM