I Beat Windows

Last week we had a bit of a upgrade-induced meltdown at work.  The server upgrade that had gone so smoothly the night before had somehow fallen apart by the next morning.  I was flying into work with my laptop already out and ready to go online and see what had happened by the time I got in the office, and I went straight to my boss’s office instead of my own.  I sat in the chair next to his desk and he and I worked on the issue for about an hour to get everything buttoned back up again.  Towards the end of our ordeal, he noticed how slow my laptop had gotten since they had purchased it for me and how much battery life it was sucking away.  He decided that I needed an actual workstation to have in my office, and to only use my laptop when I was working out of the office.

So, I hopped on to NewEgg and picked myself out some components that I knew I’d never have a chance of buying for myself and waited for them to come.  Well, they came . . . and I’m a little blown away by it all.  

  • Intel Core i7 2.66GHz Quad-Core, Hyper-Threaded 64-bit CPU (a total of 8 virtual cores)
  • 12GB DDR3 RAM
  • 4x 300GB Velociraptor 10K RPM drives in RAID5
  • ATI Radeon HD3870 X2 with three DVI ports.

Was it a little over the top?  Maybe.  But as an old friend of mine once told me “You don’t steal in slow-motion.”  Allow me to show you what my desktop looks like now!

screenshot

Special thanks to Dave over at Blogography for the custom pic (it wasn’t easy to find a background that can span a 5040X1050 space, but he found a pic from his collection and modified it for me).

So, why the title of my post today?  In my excitement, I went right into the Windows Vista rating system to see what my new rig was rated at.  Imagine my surprise when it’s only a 5.9!

levelcapI did a bit of research, and it turns out that 5.9 is the highest Vista can rate ANYTHING.  Never mind the fact that the computer is running Photoshop, Illustrator, compiling SQL, AND transferring a large amount of files on the network and STILL getting a 5.9 (yeah, I rated it while it was really busy just to see what it would do).  So, I guess I hit Microsoft’s little “level cap” and have therefore “beaten” Windows Vista.  I’ll have to wait until they release a new patch and raise the level cap to 70, and maybe give me some new content before I can actually test this thing!

In the mean time, I’m going to throw everything I can at it!

Zuke

Executive Producer for Stolendroids Podcast. Also resident 'tech-head' and de-facto leader of the group.

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