Well, I’d like to take some time to give an update on the whole computer changing experience… This was a hard one for me, because for nearly 3 years now I’ve been all Mac. So migrating my workflow to Windows 7 was a bit painful. As you all know, I needed a work computer for my art and whatnot, so the most cost effective way to do that was building a pc. If Mac ever made their OS available to the pcs, I’d be all over that.
But I’ve spent some time with the old pc now for a month or two and I have to say we’ve had our ups and downs. Mainly downs at first. See, I bought the 64bit version, since it would go very nicely with Photoshop and whatnot. However, I did go into this knowing it doesn’t always like to play nicely with non 64bit software.
Actually, for the first, what, month or so it kept randomly shutting down and crashing! And that’s the whole reason why I got this! To get something that worked because my Mac did the same thing! Well, you’ll all be happy to know it runs perfectly fine now. For such a complicated and expensive piece of software, it is amazing how little it takes to trip the whole system and watch it tumble down.
A setting… a single setting… that doesn’t logically seem to effect ANYTHING to do with why it would crash in the middle of your work. But there it is! Basically, it was just in the “power management”, I had to set it to the maximum instead of automatic. You know, the setting that controls when to put the puter to sleep, like 10min of inactivity kind of thing… NOTHING to do with “do you want to crash while drawing? yes/no?”…
Other than that… I’ve actually been fairly impressed with Windows 7 (aka, Mac Jr.). It seems to run things much better than my (luckily) brief exposure to Vista. Heck, even got some free to play games on there! Cant do that on a Mac! So, that’s where I’m at with this. Hopefully if anyone out there has suffered with shutdowns with their new Win7 64bit, this tidbit will help. >)
In other news, WOW.com had a nice little announcement just the other week about putting WoW on an iPad… Ok ok, as ridiculous as this sounds, the story harbors a more important, and practical, point. STREAM GAMING VIA A BROWSER! What this means, is that Mac people will FINALLY have the service to play ANY game they want! Linux too! I guess the concept is similar to VNC where it takes your key/mouse input and sends back a stream of the monitor… but a little more sophisticated. I’m just liking the impact that this could have on the Mac community. A nice outlet to get all those pc games (and other software, like maybe Office? Adobe Suite? expensive things like that at a lower rate?) but not even have to install them! Heck, this is even a triumph for people with older pcs. The stream is the same and as long as your net connection is good, you can have the visual effects of a wicked high end gaming pc on your Tandy 1000! Man, where were these guys a few years ago? So anyways, check them out, still in beta but worth a look - Gaikai.com
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