Literally minutes after I posted that WIP, mother came by to ask about Iggy (she thought he was working even though I told her I’d inherited bad parts and couldn’t fix it until January). Seems I’ll be getting coins to fund parts replacement– namely, the difference between it and the deposit from my VPI checks. o.O

Trap fodder? Oh yes. But she insists– seriously, I told mother I didn’t mind waiting until January to get Iggy’s mobo and she’s all “What? No :( That’s too long to wait!” So I guess that’s decided. Better go price out the parts I need to get the final coin count…

I’m getting her at least some Starbucks for this, if not an IHOP raid (I still need to burn up this Visa gift card before December hits and non-usage fees kick in…). >_>

On a mildly-spooky other front… uh, Dinah? You’d better not be going Squirtle on me. Ever since I slapped 7 on her, sometimes Dinah will auto-hibernate after standing idle in screensaver mode for awhile. Her fans are running high, yes, but she doesn’t get THAT hot. (SpeedFan says Dinah tops out around 145F most of the time, and she’s run WAY hotter than that before.) Hm. Well, at least it’s auto-hibernate rather than SUDDEN SHUTDOWN. It could also be a hidden power-saving setting I’ve overlooked. I’ll have to poke around in there.

As opposed to yesterday’s insane amounts of lazy… today I was stricken by… I dunno, some kind of freak artist ADD or something. o.O

SUDDENLY, AVATARS. SIX OF THEM.

Blastoise gets another revision. Don’t mind his crappy-looking spear, I’m bringing back the one from the last version since that one was actually badass.
He gets a mix of Jade and Balmung armor this time. As learned from the Aries FE bromide, sometimes it’s really worth cranking up the detail. >_>
Blastoise is all about KILL IT WITH SPEAR, but he’s a decent offensive caster (after all… LOL HYDRO PUMP).

Dinah gets a detail upgrade, too. Makes her look slightly more like a Disgaea ninja as far as the lower half of her goes. Ditched the double-saber for a ninja dagger this time (though I would imagine Avatars could literally yank their weapons out of subspace or what-have-you as needed). It’s all about flipping out and killing stuff quickly, and she can use low-level debuffing ninjutsu. Nin nin~

Old man Yggdrasil gets a slight tweak to his robes to make him look a little more like Phil. Note the bubbles coming from his pipe. XD
He is a badass old guy, meaning magic and nothing but! Offense and healing, there is nothing beyond his grasp!

And now, mother’s half of the network! Enter Tsunami. She is, as you can tell, based on a Disgaea healer. Why not? :P
In a way she’s kind of a successor to the retired unit Lapras, because Tsunami has a bow. Obviously, she’s a badass healer, matched only by Yggdrasil in oomph.

Onyx, who is huge, heavily armored and has a giant freaking hammer. I guess he’s sorta like a Disgaea-brand heavy knight. He’s not much of a magic-user, aside from a couple of spells he can cast to boost defense.

And then there is Jin… based on, you know, that badass dude in Xenosaga. You don’t see his weapon but assume he’s packing a katana anyway. (like… Sephiroth-length). His magic is more like a FFT Samurai’s “Draw Out” thing.

Aaah… cold room is cold. Already piling on the cloaks here… Blastoise’s weather widget says it’s 45F!

Yggdrasil Verdict: Based on my back-and-forth with Duxx and other evidence… looks like I gotta chase down a new mobo/CPU. Seeing as those two RAM sticks were in there at the time that the 7600GT blew out, I’d consider those suspect, too. Oh well… may as well use the opportunity to boost to 4gb.

UNFORTUNATELY, unless a mess of coins fall on me via Gourmet Ramen or something else (like the job market for repair techs decides to magically stop sucking hardcore), I will probably have to wait until January. >_>; I’ve already priced out a replacement mobo/CPU pairing that’s under $200 but I would still be cutting it close on my ability to cover the next two month’s worth of pet insurance. I’m even considering dialing back on my weekly pizza summoning as a safeguard. Welp, them’s the pits, I guess. I can always plug Dinah into the HDTV if I must have high-definition computing RIGHT NOW.

Moving on!

Fun With Windows 7: Though I hit a gigantic snag in regards to Yggdrasil, I must remember that I DID transfer my other two machines without them exploding! Yay! Having run on 7 for a few days, I can now give a much more, er, coherent report on it.

If you ran Vista before, visually 7 doesn’t look all that much different. Aurally, 7 even uses the same sounds!

If you’re still a holdout from XP because of speed and (perceived) stability issues… you can come out now. I know, in many ways XP was faster than Vista. Fortunately, 7 seems to return to XP-level of general punchiness.

I would, of course, suggest doing a Clean Install over an Upgrade. While it can be said that Upgrade installs have come a long way since Windows 98, you cannot deny the cleansing aspect of wiping clean (well, sort of– Windows DOES shove AppData/User/Program Files/Windows folders into a Windows.old folder in case you forgot anything during backup) and starting fresh. Installation is thankfully not as scary as, oh, XP where it was in that awful BSOD-looking interface. Pretty much it’s a “Hello, am I doing Upgrade or Custom installation? Where should I put it? Mmmkay, come back in about an hour, I might reboot once or twice. :D” thing.

You will thankfully not need to do much driver-chasing in the process of setting up shop, however, as pretty much whatever 7 can’t install during initial setup it will most likely find during Windows Update. On Blastoise, I only had to manually chase down drivers for my sound card (Creative SB X-Fi Gamer) and the specialized drivers for the tablet (Wacom Intuos3), the latter so I could fix the pen to the primary monitor. That said, be sure to loot the specialized video drivers for your graphics cards as soon as possible for maximum oomph!

I can’t speak in terms of hard numbers or benchmarks, but more of an intangible “feel” of things. Blastoise seems to run his games much more smoothly (WoW and CoH, both at maximum graphical settings but running windowed because of dual monitors). He also boots a little faster than before, which is always a good thing. However, Dinah benefit the most! She began life as an XP laptop, then took a moderate-but-tolerable speed hit when she went Vista. Making the jump to 7, even though I decided to stay at 32-bit, has been nothing but awesome for her– she got her ninja speed back, and how! Most notably, Slingbox no longer lags to crap on her (YAAAAAAY). Though I will no longer be using her for gaming as her ATI chip is rather tiny, she probably could handle low-level stuff without breaking a sweat if I were so inclined. :P

If the whole HomeGroups thing seems really lame, you can easily ignore it and continue tapping into network shares via normal LAN mode. The only real additions that HomeGroup brings to the table are the ability to further lock down your shared media (which could be bothersome if you’re running a mixed LAN since HomeGroup content is for 7-based machines ONLY) and the ability to “push” media around the LAN to make it stream to another 7 unit. In the context of Altima Network, HomeGroups is not really useful to me because we run a mixed LAN here AND Hamachi on top of that (for House Ayarane internal messaging, and also as a special warp pipe for Neo and Bren).

My beef with the login screen (I do NOT care for that kind of blue) aside, I really can’t find anything off-putting about 7 at all. So, just… get it! Don’t be put off much by the system requirements: even if you have an XP box, 7 will run just fine. Hell, you don’t even need to have an optical drive– if you have a USB drive on hand, you can easily make it bootable and install 7 from that (and I hear that’s faster than using the DVDs, shaves off about 10 minutes). $30 for the student discount version, else either grab the OEM editions (especially if you’re installing on a virgin drive) or the Family Upgrade ($150, contains 3 “charges” of Home Premium).

Who is a bonehead and did an OS install at 2am? Yeah, me.

Dinah was FAR less painful, though… she went slightly faster, possibly because she’s 32-bit still. Once again Hamachi was an ass and refused to import my keys though I think this may be more due to the infrastructure overhaul they did in the process of revamping the whole damn thing.

The other WTF factor was her network. No, seriously, WTF Dinah– you’ll use your onboard wireless-G chip but not this much-better wireless-N card? (Disabling the G chip makes her COMPLETELY blind to networks– even on her N card.) I’ll put up with it for now, but when I can make my N card usable… >_>;

Didn’t even bother backing up Dinah’s music and such since 1) it’s all duplicates from Blastoise and 2) they got shoved into Windows.old anyway. Merely a matter of moving ‘em into the proper folders. I’m not slapping my MMOs on her this time, as while she runs MUCH faster under 7 than she did on Vista, her graphical capabilities are greatly outdated at this point. Best to let Dinah stick to what she does best: flipping out and pulling stuff quickly. That and Yggdrasil is taking over as a secondary gaming machine.

This just leaves the assembly of Yggdrasil in the morning… or afternoon… and mother’s machines whenever she finishes consolidating her crap. :P *thud*

Finally, my copies of Windows 7 get here. ABOUT DAMN TIME.

Tiger (Evil Stepfather’s laptop) will not be making the jump since he gets so little use, so Dinah will be taking the extra copy.

Blastoise is going first as soon as he finishes copying stuff over to his secondary drive and a couple more installers onto my New Machine Cocktail Bullet Bill. I do not foresee any issues here. If anything, the most time-consuming part will be reinstalling WoW and CoH. XD Blastoise will be munching on 7 Pro.

Yggdrasil gets built as soon as I confirm that Blastoise won’t explode (…this makes him look like a Prinny)– DAMMIT MSNBC STOP SHOWING FOOTAGE OF TOM DELAY DANCING T__________T– or other such garbage. I’ve heard mixed reports of doing a clean install on a virgin drive using upgrade media. Worst case, I could just toss Dinah’s copy of Vista Ultimate on him and install 7 over that, and Microsoft can do the STFU dance. Yggdrasil will be eating 7 Home Premium. Depending on how he turns out, he may jump to Pro in January, but Home Premium should do for now.

Dinah will make the jump last. Among the six machines jumping today, she is the only one who will not be going 64-bit– her mobo says she can, but she lacks the RAM to really benefit from it (and she’s at her hard limit of 2GB, and can’t even use all of it because she has to share part of it with the ATI chip). It just seems less stressful for her to stay at 32-bit. Put another way, it lets her remain a nimble ninja laptop. :P Dinah will also be eating 7 Home Premium.

Squee~