Zooomr, where all my photos are hosted is currently down. They have not been having a very good time of it. It’s a bit like one of those good-news-bad-news stories:

• They tried to launch their “Mark III” version of the site several weeks ago …
• … and discovered they had seriously under-estimated the scale of the task so had to abandon it.
• They then had a hard disk cough blood on them …
• … and then nursed it back to health
• They tried another launch a little over a week ago …
• .. and it took longer than anticipate.
• But they stuck with it and they got the site up yesterday …
• … and their server crashed after 10 minutes.

I’ll not go into details here as you will find it being blogged about all over the place:

Zooomr Official Blog

Scobleizer

To anyone that says: “Oh, snivel snivel, I’ve lost all my photos – what have they DONE!” two things:

1. Backups – they have them even if your too stupid to have made your own.
2. It’s a free service on the Internet run by two guys on a shoe-string – see 1. above.

I truly hope it works out for them. It’s a fun site and the features promised in Mark III looked excellent.

Good luck guys.

I made a significant decision this time round - no photos.

Since we have been there, seen it, done it, drank the wine … I figured I’d give the camera a rest and see how I got on.

Well, I can certainly recommend it. Don’t get me wrong, I love taking and looking at and working with photos but every once in a while it really is nice to just kick back, totally relax and soak up the full atmosphere. Here are a few of my non-photographic highlights:

Monte Palace Tropical Gardens.

These gardens are probably our favourite place in the world and are both a photographers dream and nightmare in one location. The sheer beauty of the place begs to be photographed, in wide angle and minute detail. The problem is that every direction you look, every step you take, is another fabulous view so you never stop clicking long enough to take it all in.

Also the human eye, mine anyway, is really good at grasping three dimensional panoramas – views that stretch in all directions and change as you mentally zoom in down valleys and pathways and between trees. Capturing that through the lens is damn near impossible – especially for a rank amateur like me.

Without the camera you are free to let your eyes roam and take in the magnificence of the place and let your brain frame its own imaginary shots.

There are people who spend a hour or two in these gardens. We spent five hours there – twice. Even if you do take your camera try to go back again without the camera, it makes a huge difference.

The Monte Cable Car

There are three ways up to Monte – bus, taxi or cable car. Bus is by far the cheaper but a little hairy on those roads and it could be busy. On previous trips we took a taxi for the sheer convenience and – if you didn’t get ripped off it was less than 10 Euro.

This time round every taxi driver wanted to charge 15 Euro and we thought they were trying to rip us off. It turns out that they have regulated the costs and this is now the standard fare – its no longer on the clock – apparently. So, we decided to just take the Cable Car – and got a pleasant surprise – a combined ticket that got a round trip on the cable car plus entrance for Monte for 22 Euro.

Monte entrance is 10 Euro.

This got us both directions on the Cable Car when we would normally only come down by Cable Car – fantastic views. And cheaper than taxis.

Oh, there is a fourth way down from Monte – toboggan- two guys push you [half way] down the hill in a wicker basket chair thing. Looks scarier than it is allegedly but we’re still never tried it.

Dolphin and whale watching

A 25 Euro ticket gets you a three hour catamaran trip out to look for dolphin, whales, turtle and anything else they come across. Nothing is guaranteed but you will almost always see some common dolphin which live in the waters around Madeira. If you are lucky you might also see turtles, other types of dolphin and whales. We were very lucky (maybe because we took three trips) and saw:

• common dolphin
• striped dolphin
• turtles, and the big one
• sperm whales - two females and a young one.

The catamaran has nets slung out front that you are allowed to climb out onto. This meant I had a terrific view as a female sperm whale and baby swam right under me. The dolphin do this on a regular basis, swimming alongside the boat, racing the bow waves and just messing about.

The one we weren’t expecting was after we turned round to come back along the coast. They take you past the cliffs for a really nice view of the second highest sea cliffs in the world but, having seen that a few times already, I was looking back out to sea and saw something amazing. Something was skimming at very high speed across the top of the water – just above the surface. A little later I caught sight of a second one, they skimmed along for a hundred metres or so then vanished. They looked a bit like birds and I had no idea what they were – a chat with the crew and I found out it was a flying fish. I had heard of these but had no idea they behaved like this – I thought they just jumped out of the water to catch flies now and then. Apparently they can skim along as long as their fins stay wet – as soon as they dry out they plop back into the water again.

I have taken my camera out on these trips before and I can tell you that you see a lot more without the camera.

Walking the streets and gardens of Funchal

I love Funchal and they have recently mostly pedestrianised the main street along from the Cathedral to the municipal gardens. Just wandering around, drinking in the atmosphere – especially during the flower festival is quite magical.

[Un]fortunately they were in the process of refurbishing the pond in Santa Caterina Gardens so they had it completely drained. It is unfortunately for us, for the view, but it does mean they are maintaining it which is a good thing.

The funniest moment of the whole holiday was when we were sitting in the cafe having a bite of lunch and I saw some of the gardeners running around the bottom of the empty pond. I thought they were having a lunch time kick about until we figured out what was going on. They were attempting to round up the resident ducks so they could re-home them during the renovation work. Watching these poor guys chasing these ducks around the pond and gardens was priceless – “oh guys – ducks can fly!”.

The Flower Festival

Funchal gets all decked out in flowers during the annual flower festival. The main street gets beautiful carpets of flowers laid along the pavements – the best gets a prize. There’s a tent showing off prize winning exotic flowers and arrangements:

Here’s a big vote against cameras – the prize tent is free to enter and you shuffle along in an orderly queue gawping at the amazing display of exotic flowers. This is significantly marred by everyone with digital cameras, phone cameras and movie cameras – all stopping and getting in the way. We even saw one woman forcibly pushing a group aside because she hadn’t finished taking her movie shot.

Shop windows get decked out in arrangements made from the local famous embroidered tablecloths and flowers – again its a prize-winning thing.

The Festival Parades

Deserving a separate mention are the two parades. The Children’s Parade on the Saturday is a shorter parade for the kiddies, primary school age I’d say, in school or club groups to get all dressed up and follows a few flower bedecked floats into the main square. Once in the main square the kids all place the flowers they have been carrying into a specially prepared Wall of Flowers which sits there for a couple of days. After the parade the kids take part in a talent contest.

The main parade is a much bigger affair, eight large floats each with a different theme picked out in masses of flowers with music blaring and followed by full dance troupes.

The dance troupes are about as all inclusive as I’ve ever seen – everyone that wants to seems to take part. This isn’t a case of just showing off the “most talented” and “most attractive” – people of all ages, abilities, sizes and shapes were giving it their all. It’s lack of over-done show-bizzie perfection actually adds to the enjoyment for me. There’s even a float with recent mums wheeling babies in pushchairs.

The excellent organisation of this event deserves a special mention. It was hot and the parade is long and the streets are hard. For the participants, every troupe had helpers constantly handing around water bottles and checking everyone was OK, there were first aiders at regular intervals and those nearest the massive speakers were kitted out with earplugs. A nice touch for those of us who had chosen to buy seated tickets was the bottle of water handed to us as we arrived.

I could go on and on as I haven’t mentioned our favourite little fishing harbour, the hotel, the sea, the main harbour, the ships, the restaurants, …

All of the above are things that are highly enjoyable both with and without a camera, but leaving the camera at home this time strangely let me have both a wider view, looking around and drinking it all in, and a more personal intimate view as I felt much more involved in everything.

I urge all keen photographers to give it a try some time – the withdrawal symptoms do die down eventually.

I recently upgraded my line from 2MB to 8MB and was sorely disappointed at the result. The download speeds were all over the place – dropping well below my original 2MB and never going above 8MB.

Pipex said that the first 10 days after a change their system is testing the line so to wait, which I did. After 10 days it was still no better.

So I went hunting on the Web and came up with the following site: Broadband Reports (tweak FAQs)

And in particular this: Tweak Tester

Turns out my RWIN setting was not optimal – the site checks several settings and suggests fixes and includes the tools to make the changes. It also debunks a lot of nonsense suggestions you find all over the place.

The above helped but it only stabilized my downloads to around the 4MB point – still well short of my 8MB.

I then checked for updated drivers for my Pipex supplied Thomson
SpeedTouch 330 USB modem. This is where I got a surprise. It turns out that the modem operates in two modes – the first is for up to 4MB and will never permit download speeds higher than 4MB. The second boosts it to the full 8MB.

I downloaded new drivers (there is also a registry tweak if you have the correct drivers but they are set up wrong).

This is the link to the support site for the modem: Speedtouch Drivers

What was really weird was that this site had abysmal download speeds – 56k modem level. Odd.

Anyway I am now happily downloading consistently at full speed.

The reason is simple – I’ve been doing exactly what I said I would with my new machine – playing games.

I first spent more than a month playing nothing but Oblivion – no, not all day and all night, I do have a life outside computer games. Not much of a life, true, but it is there if you look hard enough. After this I thought that I needed a change, I hadn’t finished Oblivion but went looking for something else to occupy my time.

I came across a (UK only) legitimate game download site called Metaboli. For a small monthly fee you have access to a growing set of over 100 games – 140 if you opt for the more expensive option. You download and play the games from their site and there is no limit on how many games you can play or for how long – as long as you keep up the monthly payments.

The games themselves are mainstream games, not made-for-budget ones. They are adding new games all the time and these will generally be recent games perhaps just past the full flush of retail sales (so only a few months old in some cases). They have even scooped a couple of games before retail release – Darkstar One was the most recent one.

You do have to be online to play and you can usually play online games as normal. About the only technical limitation is that game mods will not work in most cases.

The way the pricing works seems very fair to me. There are two options – “The Essential Collection” contains currently 114 games and costs about £7 a month, “The Ultimate Collection” costs £13 per month but has around 147 games. Each week they usually add 1 new game to the Ultimate Collection and 1 game from the Ultimate Collection becomes available on th Essential Collection. So eventually all the games come down to the Essential collection.

If you are like me and can never play all the games you want then the cheaper option works well. By the time I work my way through the ones I want from the cheap list there will be some new ones already waiting in the wings.

Most games have proper PDF manuals, a few are missing and the quality of some is not brilliant (photo-copy quality rather than proper PDF’s).

I have been using it now for about 10 weeks and I’d say it is excellent value for money no matter how you add it up – provided you use it. And I have been using it – hence the “Too much of a good thing”.

So far I have gone through four complete games:

• Syberia
• Deus Ex: Invisible War
• Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory
• Still Life

clocked up several hours in a few others:

• The Bards Tale
• Beyond Good and Evil
• Perimeter
• Syberia II
• XIII
• Dungeon Seige

and dabbled in about a dozen more.

The dabbling is great, you can play games you wouldn’t think of buying normally to see if you might like them after all.

Oh, and Oblivion? Yeh it is great, and I will finish it – just after …

Update: 16 Jan 07 – downloaded latest Catalyst Drivers and this problem has been resolved – also noticed performance gains in this and other games

I know that earlier versions of the ATI Catalyst drivers did not allow anti-aliasing and HDR at the same time in Oblivion on the X1950XTX cards. Actually it is only by forcing the settings in Catalyst that it is now possible at all.

However, I have come across a slight glitch when you move from 4xAA to 6xAA and then on to 8xAA.

See the following shots and pay attention to 2 things:

1. The lighting bloom around the edge of the sword at 6xAA just does not exist.
2. There is an overal fogginess to the entire scene at 6xAA.

First, here is the 4xAA shot:

Oblivion X1950XTX Crossfire 4xAA Hosted on Zooomr

Next the 6xAA:

Oblivion X1950XTX Crossfire 6xAA Hosted on Zooomr

Finally the 8xAA:

Oblivion X1950XTX Crossfire 8xAA Hosted on Zooomr

I should point out that the 4x and 6x shots were with temporal anti-aliasing turn on although it actually makes no difference to the effect. Also, AF was at 8x with HQ turned ON and all other settings were at ON/Max – with max settings in Oblivion too.

The interesting thing is that between 6x and 8x is the point at which the second card kicks in and starts doing its thing with boosting AA.

With everything else almost maxed out 8xAA slows things down just a fraction too much, so I’m sticking with 4x as I can’t really tell the difference during the game anyway.

I haven’t even had to overclock a single component.

How was this masterful feat accomplished? Simple – just don’t trust a PC manufacturer to be able to set up a system optimally.

Since I have been working and playing with PC’s for more than 20 years, I am not afraid to get my hands dirty and wade into the BIOS – I’ve even been known (shock-horror) to open the case now and then. Those that don’t have the experience or confidence to do this could be wasting a significant amount of their systems true capabilities.

In my particular case there were several factors which contributed to the boost. I did not keep track of specifically how much each one influenced the final result, sorry, but they included:

1. I needed a BIOS update. This gave me my memory back by allowing me to turn off the option which was attempting to be helpful by remapping my memory above 4Gb thus leaving space for the PCI bus to use the bit in between. Unfortunately I was not using a 64bit operating system so the bit above 4Gb vanished. Now I lose a large chunk to PCI but get some of it back. If and when I switch to 64bit I can turn it back on.
2. I turned off every physical device that I was not using via the BIOS. The motherboard comes with about 4 networks and I use none, plus an on-board sound card and a couple of other things. Speeds up the boot time and claws back a fraction of the above memory. Might reduce overlapping / conflicting IRQ’s and boost performance a wee bit too.
3. I researched the part number for my RAM chips and found the optimal timings and set them explcitly in the BIOS. For some reasson the auto-cofig in the BIOS was not getting these right. Note that I am not overclocking these – just setting them up as per the manufacturers specifications. I believe that this was the largest factor in my performance boost.

I did play around with some other settings, none of which had any significant impact and so were returned to their default settings.

I’m off to play some more super-smooth Oblivion …

[Added]

… and it is super smooth. An easy 40fps out in the grassy open with all settings almost maxed out and at 1600×1200, HDR, 2x AA, 8x HQ AF.

I ran some Half Life 2 benchmarks (the HardwareOC ones – not just the stress tests) and I have to max out absolutely everything (HDR, 14x AA, 16x HQ AF) to get the frame rate to drop just below 60fps in Lost Coast. All other tests are well into the silly figures.

[Even more added]

I have spent parts of tonight (when not wrapping presents) running more tests.  The net effect of my changes are far more than I had originally thought.  I must have cleared a major system bottleneck.  Half Life 2 and every game I have tried that pre-dates it now runs easily with maximum AA & AF settings at frames rates usually easily exceeding 60fps.  This is far more than the 23% suggested by the raw 3DMark06 score – based on previous tests.  The whole system also feels much more responsive.  I’m downloading th x3-reunion demo and we will see how that fares.

Note: I have resolved this issue – see “23% Performance Boost – no overclocking“

If you have read any of my previous posts you might know that I have bought myself a nice new kick-ass computer. This, and the fact that I have been busy with other “real life” stuff, has been why I have not posted anything for a while. What time I have had to play with my new computer has been dedicated to doing just that – playing with it. Not posting blogs, not uploading images to Zooomr, just setting up and playing with my new toy.

I decided to go as close to the top of the line for my new computer as I think is reasonable – about one step from the bleeding edge. As a software engineer working on high performance simulation software I appreciate and enjoy games that push the boundaries of the technology but, until recently, have been unable to financially justify really pursuing that interest.

My previous computer (with a recently added surplus graphics card from work) has been able to handle most current games, like Half Life 2, provided that I turned down or off some of the more advanced graphical options, and that I did not mind the stuttering sound and halting graphics.

As well as Half Life, and similar styled games, I also like games like NeverWinter Nights and Morrowind. Half Life 2 : Lost Cost, Episode One and Oblivion then came along which required a little more horse-power than my existing machine. This was the push I needed to get that new toy.

At the time of purchase my new machine had the second from the top of the line Intel processor (Core 2 Duo E6700) and not one but two of the top of the line ATI graphics card (an X1950XTX Crossfire and matching X1950XTX) plus oodles of SATA disk space and 4Gb dual-channel 900MHz interleaved RAM.

Aside 1: OK, smart arse! I now know that, with those two cards, Windows XP refuses to recognise 2Gb of my precious RAM. Live and learn.

So, I get myself a copy of Oblivion. Being a savvy punter I make sure I download the latest patch, the latest graphics card drivers and read up all the tips and tricks for optimizing my system for playing Oblivion. I know Oblivion is an absolute hog that needs a kick-ass system to get the most out of. But, I have bought a kick-ass system.

You start Oblvion in the jail, work your way out through some caves and underground ruins. Frame rates are high – very high – I’m pleased. I am easily getting frame rates above 100fps – nice.

Aside 2: I wonder how many people who buy a machine like mine, who are not as savvy as I am, do not realise that you have to turn on Crossfire before you are even using both the cards! If you buy and install them separately then you probably will, but if you buy them as part of a complete system you might not.

You then step out into the open air. Whooomph! Down goes the frame rate – down to below the 25fps mark.

This is one seriously over-the-top game graphically. It eats advanced graphics card for breakfast.

So, back to the tips and tricks and I find a reasonable compromise between quality and speed that I am happy with.

At this point I started to worry that my system was not performing as it should and was not set up correctly. In particular I was concerned that my second graphics card was a complete waste of money since turning it off seems to have little or no effect. I ran loads of tests with Half Life 2 and got even more worried. I then searched the Internet and discovered that I was not alone, and should not worry – well not too much.

Enabling a second card via Crossfire does not necessarily have a significant positive effecton frame rates and in some cases can reduce performance. This is particularly true at lower resolutions, specifically below 1600 x 1200. My LCD screen is 1600 x 1200 – bang on the cross-over point.

The above statement is scary but should not be surprising if you give it some thought. I will not go into the technical details but there are two linked critical factors that govern this:

1. Processor bound games will not be able to produce frame fast enough leaving your graphics card idle for a lot of the time.
2. Even for mostly graphical games, there comes a point at which the processor cannot keep up with the graphics card and produce frame fast enough – if your graphics card is that powerful.

What the above means, for Oblivion, is that in caves and inside buildings I can achieve very high frame rates as the processor is not busy sorting out all of the objects, critters, and characters. But outside, looking into infinity, with grass and trees and critters galore – the processor is going nuts and the graphics cards are being starved of frames. And in the buildings and caves I still cannot go above a certain threshold before the processor cannot provide any more frames.

So, I cannot run Oblivion with anything like the full graphical options (internally and externally) turned on – especially whilst in the open air. This leaves me wondering what mythical machines they actually tested Oblivion on.

Further tests proved that my second card was having an impact – in certain situations. If I turned it off in caves or indoors I could see a very marked drop in frame rates. But outside the processor limit was kicking in and it was having no effect – or was it. I did find that I could have some of the external image processing options turned up a little higher with Crossfire enabled – specifically Anti-aliasing. So I could have higher quality graphics outside and higher frame rates inside – not bad.

If you are still reading you might be wondering where the horse’s ass come in.

Wonder no more.

In Oblivion you can ride horses – but when you visit cities your horse gets stabled outside the city gates. So, I come outside the city and wander into the stables to pick up my horse. As I look around for my horse I get to a point at which this particular hore’s ass is taking up my entire field of view (it was an accident – honest). All of a sudden the frame rate drops down to 1 (yes – one!) and I am stuck. I eventually exit the game and turn off every advanced graphics feature and turn down every in-game feature there is – and still the frame rate stays at around 1 at this particular point.

Someone, somewhere, at Bethesda Softworks has modelled a horses ass in such immense detail that two of the most powerful graphics cards on the market working in parallel can only render it at one frame per second.

Now that is dedication.

I am left a little disillusioned that I have bought a kick-ass computer and still have to turn down graphics options to play a game that had already been out for a few months. I have got it playing most of the time at a good compromise between quality and speed – but still.

P.S. Half Life 2 : Lost Coast and Episode One are incredibly smooth.

I had almost completed transferring everything from my old machine to my new machine, installed most of the software [read: games] I was likely to “need”. Tidied up the start menu, moved the swap file over to the second drive and defragged the hard drive.

Everything was working perfectly – I had even resolved most of the remaining issues.

• the ViewSonic monitor not detecting the signal was simply a matter of selecting the preferred source from its on-screen menus.
• it had a nasty habit of restarting itself after a shutdown – tracked that down to a combination of the OneClick main protector and a BIOS setting for restarting after a power failure. Just set the BIOS to go to the last mode it was in rather than ON.
• I’m getting used to the new keyboard and mouse – a new mouse pad helped the mouse which was sticking on my desk.

I was getting ridiculous frame rates from my favourite games and I was happy.

Then all hell broke loose.

I restarted the system and it didn’t come back up. It stuck at the Windows is loading screen with a frozen progress bar.

Switch-off, restart, into Safe mode – everything looks fine, restart – FREEZE.

I tried everything:

• disconnected all non-essential external peripherals
• rolled back a restore point – then another
• tried the XP CD Automatic System Restore – it froze in the same place
• tried the same from the PowerQuest restore MESH build in – same result
• tried a full system restore from the PowerQuest restore software – after an hour it finished copying everything and then reset – and froze at the same place.
• now things got really scary – it was freezing in Safe mode too!
• I checked all the BIOS settings – but I’d not really changed anything significant
• I opened it up and pushed all the boards firmly into their slots (they were already)

Nothing worked

I was stuffed

Time to phone my 24/7 Technical support – what a joke.

“Thank you for calling … press one if you wish to place an order, press two if you have a technical problem.”

2: “You have two options – dial [premium rate number] if you have a software problem, press two if you have a hardware problem.”

2: “You now have two options – visit our website or call back during office hours.”

How are you supposed to visit a Website if you machine wont boot?

Time to give up, wait till Monday and send a rocket up their ass.

…

Sunday morning – lets have another try – maybe it got too hot (which would be a problem in itself). Nope. Same.

Walk off in disgust … wait a minute what’s that noise. After leaving it at the stuck pioint for a minute or so I noticed that the hard disk was grinding away. I left it alone for about 15minutes – and it rebooted and started normally!

Surprisingly, everything is back almost at where it was when everything went pear-shaped. There are a couple of things I installed that don’t show up on the Start menu (which is no longer quite as tidy) and I’ve just noticed that auto-spell checking does not seem to be working in Firefox. Nothing major seems out of place, which is a very pleasant surprise – I thought that the PowerQuest full system restore would have sent everything back to factory defaults – right back to needing to register Windows and start installing stuff.

So, what went wrong?

I think that something perhaps triggered a checkdisk on the next reboot and that Windows chose to hide the checkdisk output from me – I didn’t think it did that. I did ask for a checkdisk but I thought I only did it whilst in safe mode on one of the failed restarts.

I am going to log a possible problem with MESH and monitor the situation closely for any strange behaviour. There may be some intermittent hardware issue kicking around.

Back to the games …

My new machine finally arrived at lunch-time on Tuesday. Since I paid for a Saturday delivery I should really try and claim back the additional delivery charge – even although they were probably trying to be helpful with it being so late. It was just luck that my wife was in to accept delivery – she’d only got in 15 minutes earlier.

So I took the afternoon off to go home and get it set up …

… and the whole next day.

Each time I get a new machine there is more stuff to transfer off of the old one and since I’ve being doing this for nearly 20 years it takes a while. I borrowed n Ethernet crossover cable from the office to set up a mini network for the transfer – couldn’t get it going. I resorted to using my 20Gb MP3 player as a conduit – worked rather nicely. Remembered after I’d finished that I had disabled a whole heap of “unnecessary” services on my old machine – one of those was probably causing the problem.

So, it’s all done and its amazing – turn the graphics options up as far as they go and Half Life 2 still gives around 100fps on the stress test. Sounds good too thanks to a proper sound card and some decent matched 7.1 speaker (was using two sets of independent unmatched tinny things on the old machine).

I said I’d keep this short – so now the downsides.

• MESH were late – I’ll let them off as parts can run short.
• The extra little 4pin power connector that turns a 20pin power supply into a 24pin one had worked loose in transit, easy fixed.
• The ViewSonic 2030B monitor suffers from that well known issue of losing the signal on startup. Remembering to leave it turned off until the machine boots to the logon screen sorts it out. Research suggests a pure DVI-D cable will be a permanent solution. The monitor itself is gorgeous.
• I upgraded to 4Gb of RAM but only see 2Gb – apparently this is a Windows XP thing – 64bit XP can cope above 3Gb but not 32bit. MESH said nothing when I ordered and I’d never heard about it. Vista should sort it out.
• Not sure about the logitech cordless keyboard & mouse, might just take getting used to.

So, nothing major so far.

I’m well pleased and off to play games ….

Doing the sums

Convincing myself, and my wife, of the need for the new machine has taken a while – and in that time the specifications have sky-rocketed but the price has stayed much the same. Over the years I have noticed that the cost of new PC’s has remained relatively constant:

• A cheap entry level machine will cost around £500
• A reasonably machine will be around £1000
• A good gaming machine will be around £2000
• A top of the range, must have the latest bleeding edge components, machine will be around £3000

The above includes a reasonable monitor matching the spec of the machine. It doe not include very-large very-high-resolution monitors which are into the silly-money bracket.

My previous machine was somewhere between a reasonable machine and a good gaming machine. My old monitor was still working so I opted for a store-bought £1000 system-only box. It could play all the games of its day reasonably well.

No excuses

“Play games reasonably well” – tut-tut I hear you say – surely you can justify your home computer on better reasoning than that!

Nope. Sorry. It is for playing games – and messing around with photos and maybe a little household chores, bookkeeping and Internet shopping.

Back to the sums

So, this time I was opting for the top of the range, so I am expecting to pay around the £3000 mark. I did a little initial research and came up with three machines ranging £1k, £2k and £3k and examined the differences. A little cost-benefit analysis showed that the £1k machine was not worth it – it was only a small step up from what I already had so would need upgraded relatively quickly. To be brutally honest the £3k machine fell down too – the extra performance gain over the £2k machine was really not justifiable.

Some techie details

There were two main differences between the £2k and £3k machines:

1. The processor moved up from an “Intel Core 2 Duo E6700” to a “Intel Core 2 Duo E6800”. The performance jump here is tiny, less than 5% in tests, but it costs about £350 more for the faster processor.
2. The graphics card went from a pair of “ATI Radeon 1950’s” to a pair of “nVidia 7950’s”. This is, in theory, a more significant jump. The nVidia cards are actually pairs – so you are talking effectively 4 graphics cards instead of two. However, trawling the Internet for comparative reviews I found that the paired ATI cards actually performed slightly better at the 1600×1200 native resolution of my preferred monitor. The ATI cards were also found to be compatible with more games.

So I settled – one step down from the bleeding edge. Having done that I took a half step back up by doubling the disk space and system memory and a more expandable “gaming” case. Taking in opting for XP Media Centre, a surge-proof power socket and delivery I got the whole deal in just under £2.7k.

Dealing the deal

I did all this through MESH, I’d used them successfully before and some checking of other suppliers they seemed the cheapest (like for like). Working through their site I discovered there are three ways to pick a machine with them:

1. Build it yourself from the box up.
2. Pick from their standard catalog of systems.
3. Pick on of their “reviewed” PCs – machines that have been reviewed by magazines and Web sites.

In all cases you can tailor the selected machine further by upgrading certain components.

The fun thing is that I found the cheapest technique was to pick a reviewed machine that was one step down from what you were aiming for and then upgrade it to the spec you want. The cost saving were very significant – well into the hundreds in my case.

So, how is it?

So, I’ve picked my machine, placed the order and got an estimated delivery date – yesterday.

I came home from work on Friday night somewhat jubilant – we’d made significant progress on the project I’m working on and I had a new toy arriving the next morning. I turn on my machine to find an email from my boss – “MESH called about your order – please call them back”. It is 7pm on Friday night and they close at 6pm so how can I possibly call them back – until the next morning.

They waited until the last minute on the last day before delivery to call me – they didn’t even try the alternative number I gave them when they couldn’t get me. I had to wait until the morning to contact them to find out if there was a problem or if they were just phoning to let me know it had been dispatched on schedule.

Actually I did try contacting them that night – I hoped to contact their 24/7 support service in the hope that they had access to the same systems and could tell me what was going on. Their web site has about a dozen different number – each one you phone gives you an automated message with a choice of two or more other numbers to try – some premium rate numbers and all of which give you yet more numbers to try. I gave up on that – just after I dialed one of the numbers a bit wrong (I hope!) and got a sex line!

So, I phoned yesterday morning. “Sorry sir, we ran short of the graphics cards and don’t expect new ones in until the middle of next week.”

So, at best, if I’m lucky, it will be a week late.

No new toy for Brian this week and no report of how wonderful it is – sorry.

In the fine old tradition of shooting the messenger, I will be blaming my boss and grumbling even more than normal on Monday morning (probably the whole week).