Quick note before I go pee.

Package came today. Unfortunately, nobody was home. So I went out to the trade zone to pick it up. …That probably sounds weird to anybody that doesn’t live around here. I just happen to live right by an International Trade Zone. *nods* And that just happens to be where FedEx is located.

With that 512 stick I bought for this still-nameless computer, it now has 768 megs of RAM. All signs indicate that there should be no more hard-drive-grinding-slowdowns ever again. Part of it is that I never, ever log off or turn off programs I have running. I happened to glance at task manager to see how many processers were running. Somewhere around a hundred. I later checked Roxanne. She had a mere 28 running.

Whoa.

As I’ve said all along, this isn’t a bad computer. (For a Dell.) It’s just underutilized. I’ve gapped the memory hole, if I were to do any other upgrades I’d probably buy a cheap PCI card to compensate for Intel Extremely Incompetent Integrated Graphics. *shudders* But I doubt I’ll do that, as my mom will never play anything that even raises the temperature of this computer.

On a side note, the idle temperature for Roxanne’s CPU seems to be under 30C. I haven’t seen it go over 35, yet.

I installed my two new DVD/CD drives, and they look very sexy, flush against the black case. I also installed the new black-front three inch floppy (to match).

New headphones. NEW HEADPHONES. I can’t believe they were only twenty bucks. Such a sound difference.

There was no question that I was going to delve into DOOM3 first. I had to know. I wasn’t expecting to be able to run at full settings. I hardly have a 6800 Ultra (nor would I want one of those power-hogging beasts). (For those with a bad memory, I have a GeForce 6600. That’s right, I saved a buck or two.) Before starting a new game, I set it to 1280 x 1024, and high quality. Openning sequences. It ran just fine, except for an ever-slightly noticeably drag.

So I moved it down to medium quality. Full speed.

I ended up resetting the resolution to 1024 x 768 and the quality back up to high. I’m impressed the image on my LCD looks so good even when it’s not at its native resolution. Money well spent. Oh, and all the other miscellaneous settings were all on, with antialiasing at 2x. Who needs 16x antialiasing?

I haven’t watched a movie on my own computer in ages, and I think I’m long overdue. DivX is one thing. But I’ve never watched a DVD on a computer before. I purposely didn’t get a DVD on Lisa because it didn’t seem cost-effective. Three and a half year later, I can afford a DVD burner. *laughs*

I’ll install Farcry, Half-Life, and WarCraft III later tonight. Now, as I annotated in the title before I started writing, I’m going to go pee. *sips peach/raspberry iced tea* See ya`all around.