The Alienware

The new computer rocks. Alienware Aurora m9700 with 2GB of RAM, 1GB of GPU memory (2 512MB separate GPU's), a 17" widescreen monitor with 1920x1200 resolution (that be four poker windows with no overlap, biotch!), all sorts of nice goodies, with a nice new laser mouse and some fly headphones. I'm now sitting in my living room with it on my lap, watching The Two Towers on my HDTV while downloading updates for Final Fantasy XI, so as to get everything up to date. It's pretty nice.

So far I have installed Medieval II: Total War, Half Life 2, and FFXI. I ran a test game of M2TW; on the highest graphics settings it ran flawlessly, and that's just about the crown prince of system requirements at the moment. This is quickly going to become my primary PC, I can tell.

Unfortunately I have to work tomorrow; but then I get Friday off, and then get to transition to a 4-on 4-off schedule of 12 hour shifts, which actually isn't that bad at all (it translates to just about a 40 hour work week, and you get 4 days off in a row). I'm in the process of translating back to a front shift - it sucks, because I get tomorrow, then the day off, then 4 days of fronts, and then I get to fucking go back to backs. But whatever, it beats the many many consecutive days of 12's that we've been seeing recently.

Hopefully the coverage on this machine won't last all that much longer. It's actually starting to run, experiencing mostly process problems, nothing much electrical. Should be boring days. That's preferable, I think, to the other option.

But the computer rocks. I'm loving it. About the only bad thing I've noted about it so far is that the battery isn't going to last very long - probably not long enough even for a full length movie on a plane trip - but you can't have everything. A pooter this powerful is gonna suck up the juice.

In the meantime, I'm going to enjoy the hell out of it. Woohoo!!!