I am thinking about selling my computers

I have a cheap laptop and my gaming/development PC.

The PC specs are (off the top of my head)
MSI motherboard,
E6600 2.4ghz Core2 Duo with an Ultra 120 heatsink
4gigs of memory
500gig hdd 7200 rpm WD Bevs
xfx 8800GTS 320Meg video card
Corsair 540W PSU
Antech P182 case (view quiet)
After market fans to make it quiet. It is a view quiet PC.
5.1 Logitech speakers
Vista 32 and 64 Home Premium disc

How much do you think that rig is worth these days?

I am thinking about selling both computers and getting a high end laptop. I don't game as much as I use to on the PC but I still need a powerful one for development. Sager has a $600 sale on their lowend 17" laptop which is still bigger than my desktop.

I am keeping my 21" monitor, I use it for more than just the PC.

Gears of War PC vs 360

I just picked up Gears of War for PC for dirt cheap.  It's interesting that I have the settings maxed out and it is stressing my system.  Most of the time it runs smoothly but there are some framerate issues.  Also there are loading times.  WTF!  For example, remember in the first act after you fight off the 4 emergence holes from the round fountain you have to plit up into two groups?  I tool the right side like I normally do.  As I ran up the hill to the hallway right before I rounded the corner to shoot the locust on the troika I had a loading screen.  How does co-op work with this!  Tank or Zorbs, we need to do this.

I haven't played a fresh Gears since the first time I played it on the 360.  But on the PC version Act I and Act V are available.  Why is Act V available?  Is that where the Brumack battle is?

I am using my 360 controller with this game.  Since this is a slow paced game it really doesn't benefit much from mouse aiming.

I didn't look at a multiplayer yet because I just don't care.  I think Gears is one of the worse multiplayer games made.

PS3 vs 360 revisisted

Remember that article I wrote for this site earlier this year? Well, now that I have had my PS3 for several more months the article is a little out of date. Even after my article there are still steretypes and misconceptions about the consoles. I still love having both consoles.

1) There is a stereotype that the PS3 doesn't have good games. This is not true. I think this stereotype comes from360 owners who are only looking at PS3 exclusives. The PS3 has COD4, RB6, EA sport titles, and several good exclusives. Uncharted, Hot Shots Golf (casual, same people who made Mario Golf), Metal Geard Solid 4, and hopefully the new Socom are good. The PS3 also has many good downloadable games. Right now I am addicted to The Last Guy. It's like pacman meets snakes.

Edit: The PS3 folks have been getting smart.  They've been putting out demos of the downloadable games.  This is one thing that the 360 has a huge advantage on, every downloadable game has a built in trial.

Yes, the 360 has more exclusives. But then the 360 is a year older. If you compare the two years the PS3 has been out with the first 2 years of the 360 the stats are surprisingly similar. Similar amount of exclusives, similar sales, etc...

2) Home is going to be a competitor to Live. No, it isn't. Home is a virtual world. It's more like a virtual world version of the new party thing the xbox is going to have. Yes, you can get a group of friends together and chat and play games and other stuff. The xbox party thing will do that but in a 2D setting. You can start a game together in home, which the xbox party thing will do. However, there is still one flaw with the PS3 that will keep it from competing with Live - no voice communication.

Yes, there is in game voice communication. I am talking about private chats while in game and voice messaging. The PS3 doesn't have it, Home isn't adding it - at least in the beta. I doubt they will ever have it in the next couple of years. The problem is the PS3's software and hardware were not designed together. Jack Tretton (CEO of SCEA) said at E3 that was their major mistake and it does cause limitations. Sony is a hardware company, they didn't think the software through. A recent firmware update added in-game XMB, that's like the dashboard and guide on the 360. However, the game has to support it and it isn't always available. MGS4 has in-game XMB except when you are in a multiplayer match.

3) They have comparable graphics. I don't think this is true. I think games on the PS3 look better. I don't have many but hte few cross platform games I have played and the few demos the PS3 has better graphics. I'm a type of person that prefers gameplay over graphics, but I have to say UT3 on the PS3 looks MUCH better than the 360 verison. I think the games that have comparable graphics are the ones where the developers didn't spend extra time on the PS3 version. They made the 360 version and ported it to the PS3. UT3 is the opposite and it shows.

4) There is one thing I like about playing online games on the PS3 over the 360. To the PS3 owners, when you setup a multiplayer match on the 360 you can go to public games or setup private matches. Some games let you assign a number of private slots. However, with most games you have to invite someone to your game to fill those private slots. I'd love to see the option that friends could just join with no invites. To the 360 owners, to make a private match on the PS3 you setup a password. In 2old2resist we use the same password. What's nice about this then is someone can just join the game if they know what the password is.

5) My pet peve with the PS3 is the controller and headset. I am not going to use a USB headset. Though I am seeing more and more people in 2old2resist get USB headsets because of hte issues using a bluetooth headset. The bluetooth headset has two problems for the gaming environment. First, the sound quality. Since most people on xbox live use the headset that came with the system the sound quality in games is consistant. No so much with the PS3. It's dependant on the quality of the bluetooth headset the individual has. Second, recharging the headset. I've had this happen several times. My headset losed charge in the middle of a game. Well, I screwed then. I have to charge it so I won't have voice communication then.

6) The XMB is fast when compared to the guide or dashboard. One thing I hate on the 360 is how slow opening and closing the guide is. Let's say a friend messaged me and I am in a lobby with a 30 second timer. It's actually difficult to open the guide, read the message, and close it before that timer goes off. The guide is just insanely slow. I wonder what will happen when the guide becomes the dashboard in the next update.

7) Since my article the PS3 added trophies. It is copying the achievements from the 360, however, there is no gamer score attached. This is how I view achievements on the 360 anyway. To me the gamerscore is meaningless. Since the trohpies came out well after some games have been made many of the developers of those games are not going to add trophies to the game. The only game I have right now that they updated to support trohpies is Warhawk, a game I don't like that much. Yes, the PS3 is stealing the idea from the 360. However, remember the 360 is getting the ability to install games to the hard drive, what system already does that if needed?

So really there are two things I think the PS3 needs and it will be a good system for gaming. It's needs voice communication. Pulling out a keyboard or using the on screen keyboard is annoying and slow. It also need these feature available at all times, evne during multiplayer matches.

Why did the LAN have to end?

Work sucks.  Gone for one day and everything goes crazy.

Woohoo Microsoft

This is probably not going to interest many people on the site and it will show how much of a geek I am. Visual Studio 2008 service pack 1 came out today. Also .NET 3.5 SP1 came out. This also includes SQL Server Compact Edition service pack 1.

I have a really good reason to be happy about it though. At work we've been moving from Visual Basic 6.0 (yuck!) to C#, .NET 3.5, WPF. To help learn this newer technology quicker I've come up with a project to do at home. One thing I want to do is take an old 50s wood radio and make it a modern mp3 jukebox. I want to find something like the following where I don't have to change the outside. I can put a touchscreen in place of the turntable.

There's jukebox software out there already, but I am going to make my own. I don't learn well by just reading a book. I need a project, a reason to use the stuff. This projectis perfect and will have stuff that is analogous to the business world.

So, why I am excited about these service packs. There's something with SQL Server Compact that has been annoying me, it had no TOP command. I am using SQL Server Compact because then I don't have to install anything extra. It's part of .NET 3.5. Yeah, it's limitted but I am not making a business application. I just need to keep track of songs. It's a simple database. What TOP does is limit the amount of data that is returned. Sometimes you don't need everything. I have such a case.

Take a look at the following screenshot. I am working on how to do the song selection. The following screenshot show the albums in order of artists. I only have one database table which stores all the songs. To make that screenshot I ask for the unique artist/album combinations from that table. Basically in return I get a list of all the albums, no song information. However, to get the cover art I need to get it from one of the mp3s. Before the service pack there was no way to ask for a single song that matches the album and artist. Currently I just take the first song in the list that is returned and use that mp3 to get the cover art. However, returning all of those songs takes up memory and extra processing cycles. Now with TOP being supported I can have the database return only the first song (Top 1) instead of all the songs in the album. With today's computers you won't see a difference in a small change like this. But I think most of today's programmers have become lazy. Doing a bunch of small improvements like this will affect the system as a whole.

(Click for actual size)

Interesting tidbit. The look and feel is programmed using WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation). This is a new thing Microsoft is introducing. It;s what Vista's interface is programmed in. It's vector based which basically means it will look the same at any resolution. That window is 800x600 but the contents are in a 640x480 box that is being stretched. doesn;t looked stretched, does it? That's vector graphics for you.