As upset as I was about getting ripped off so close to the holidays
and with money being so tight this year, I have to admit I felt like a kid
on Christmas morning yesterday when the UPS man arrived with my new
replacement system!
I had it up and running in record time and began the long chore of
setting everything up the way I wanted it from scratch again. Most of this
was pretty easy, but evidently there have been a few small changes made to
WinXP Pro SP2 since I bought the version that was on my old system. But
once I got over those little details, and cleaned out all the garbage Dell
and other vendors install on the Hard drives of the systems they sell,
everything was quickly in order again, and I was able to begin updating
drivers and installing the necessary software I had to run out and
re-purchase from a local dealer in Harrisburg.
You may remember that I was quite worried about the graphics setup I
had decided on for this system, especially in regards to the Dell flat panel
monitor, but my worries quickly faded away as I started experimenting with
various configurations.
First, the two matched NVIDIA GEForce 7800 GTX 256 mb graphics cards
when setup via SLI displays absolutely the very best image quality I have
ever seen! I tried disconnecting them and running each one separately as if
I had two monitors, which is still a high quality graphics package, and the
difference between the two variations was startling! In fact the only way I
could describe the difference is by comparing the SLI configuration to the
single card configuration the way you might compare what high end graphics
are like now on average to where we were 5 years ago! It really made that
much of a difference! Not just in overall image quality, which you can see
easily in a static image, but also while playing games! I Loaded up
Half-Life 2 which has some of the very finest graphics available in PC
games...much of which is lost on the average high-end system...using these
two methods, and it was as if I had bought a completely new game! There
were absolutely no jaggies to be seen, and frame rates stayed consistently
above the conscience level!
I guess a lot of this quality can also be attributed to the monitor
itself. I don't know what the difference is exactly between the various
monitors Dell and other manufacturers sell, but this particular screen is
beautiful! I've never seen richer or deeper blacks or more vibrant colors
on any monitor of any type before! And best of all, it uses only a quarter
of the power my old screen did and it doesn't hurt your eyes after a steady
12 hours in front of it! Usually after about 4 hours I've had it and I have
to go outside and let my eyes refocus before I can see straight, but that
problem seems to have disappeared using this monitor!
It'll take me a couple of days yet before I can get back to work,
and that's provided Borland gets my copy of Delphi 2006 to me before the end
of the week, and after reading Bob Swart's and Brian Long's articles on the
new release in the latest issue of The Delphi Mag, I'm really looking
foreword to it!
from Robert Meek dba Tangentals Design
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