My New Dell: A Closer Look
I’ve finally finished setting up my new Inspiron and I’m mostly impressed. First and foremost, it’s much quieter than my old computer, which is very important to me. I never left MAGI on overnight because of the sheer amount of noise it put out.
Even better than the quiet is the speed. This thing is fast, at least compared to MAGI. Dual core, 2 gigs of RAM, I’m a happy camper. With my old computer, when I’d play World of Warcraft I’d only be able to play at 1024×768 with all of the video settings up about halfway. Even then, I’d still only get around 25-30 FPS. Now I can play it at 1280×1024 with all of the settings turned all the way up and, depending on which zone I’m in, I get anywhere from 40-60 FPS. Big improvement.
On top of that, there’s the benchmark tests. There’s this great little program called SuperPi that tests a computer’s speed by calculating pi out to 32 million digits. Take a look at the difference (MAGI is on top, new computer is on bottom):
New computer did it in half the time it took MAGI. That’s fast.
Plus there’s 3dMark03…
Triple the score…
Aquamark…
Sometimes it’s fun to use old benchmarking tools and go “Wow, technology sure has improved.” I would have used 3DMark05 but their online result viewer wasn’t working. Oh well, it’s pretty obvious that my new computer is much faster than my old one.
I guess it’s also worth mentioning the Vista score. When I ran Vista on MAGI it got somewhere between a 2 and a 3 (this was a year ago, I can’t remember the exact score), while the new PC scores a 5.3.
Yeah, Vista. I’m almost embarrassed to admit that I’m running it. It’s not like I want to. When I first took it out of the box and hooked it up, I didn’t even let it boot up all the way. I stuck the XP CD in and started formatting. That’s when the problems started. For some reason, the XP installer wouldn’t recognize the full drive. While it’s supposed to have 320 gigs available, it only recognized 110. I figured that I could probably correct this in disk manager later, so I went ahead and finished the installation and logged in. I then pulled up Device Manager and…every single device was having driver problems. Ok, that’s not uncommon, I’ll just pop in the Dell driver CD. Turns out that the driver CD will not work on XP, and each individual driver was written for Vista. Damn.
I didn’t really feel like scouring the Internet on my laptop for each individual driver, so I just reloaded Vista. It’s actually running pretty well, and the only issue I have right now is that Vista Home Premium does not have remote desktop (wtf). Oh well, Purdue offers the Vista Ultimate upgrade CD for $30, so I’ll just grab that when I absolutely can’t stand not having RD anymore. Until then, I’ll just use VNC.
I can’t wait to try Bioshock.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!