Level 18 Hunter

I was happily leveling up my Mordecai in Borderlands when Bam! came Dragon Age: Origin sprawling in magnificence at my doorstep. Can I haz tyme?

The Mystery Of Slow Win7 GUI

While waiting for WinXP being reinstalled via boot camp on the MacBook (due to a missing hal.dll), I've made another trip via Google to research for this particular Windows 7 problem of mine. You see, after I started using Windows 7 exclusively for the past 3 months or so, I cannot help but be ticked off by certain GUI 'unacceleration' problems that are still happening even now. As it goes, GUI functions and videos seem to lag and the audio seems to stutter and crackle. At first, I thought it was my GTX260+ being underpowered, therefore I upgraded my PSU to a 650W one. But there went some 400 bucks as the new PSU didn't seem to improve anything. I was so sure that my card is problematic.

I was beginning to consider buying a new card until I came across this:

Windows GUI rendering still almost 5 times slower than XP GUI rendering

and from there I went crazy reading into this particular problem. It seems Windows 7 has only 10% or accelerated GDI, and therefore, as I understand it, any components or Windows application relying on GDI for rendering will not be hardware-accelerated. This explains why I cannot run Youtube HD in fullscreen without stutters, or recording audio in Audacity without pops and crackles, even when I have a high-end card.

And I thought I was going to plunk an extra 500 or so for an HD5870.

So what does this mean? It means, until software developers have all move from GDI/GDI+ to WSF/Direct2D, I will be having a lot of this slow GUI redraw problem (hell, even Windows 7 itself uses some GDI for rendering). I wonder if this applies to all the open source cross platform windowing library or just wxWidget only. Else, I would steer away from them for time to come. Hell, I would sorely miss Audacity but damn I cannot have any perfect audio recording done on it at the moment. Damn you wxWidget!

Some solutions would be, of course, 1) revert to WinXP and miss all shiny new OS and most importantly DirectX 10 support in games that I play now, 2) revert to Vista SP1 and pray that I would love it for the abomination that it is (FUD, I know), and 3) revert to the last WDDM 1.0 NVIDIA driver. Now, the last solution seems the better choice, but I would hate that something would break due to the driver not supporting Windows 7 fully. But it's the easiest and immediately-accessible choice. Maybe I'll do it one of these few days. Maybe.

Next, I'm left to figure out what's causing the nvlddmkm.sys BSOD on cold boot problem.

Hanlon's Razor

Right now, I'm torn between Batman: Arkham Asylum, Resident Evil 5, Red Faction Guerilla and Risen. 'Thing is, my PC isn't portable and my notebook isn't powerful. Can't I have best of both worlds, so that I can game during my sleep?

Eid 2009

It's good to be back home.

2009 Tahun Malas Menulis

Menulis ke menaip ke, we tread on very thin line these days. Bak kata Rodek, "blah blah blah unggrook", dan aku setuju dengan kata dia. Maka dengan membaca blog dia yang 18sx, tersasul aku meniru lenggok bahasa dan gaya berperinya. Cuma cara dia lagi stylo. Aku tak boleh nak ikut macam itu. Walaupun dia dah jadi idola aku sekarang ni.

Apa aku nak tulis tadi ha?

2009, aku ingat nak potong rekod tahun 2007, kononnya nak tulis banyak entrylah, tapi aku dah lagha dengan benda-benda lain. Recently I bought a keyboard (bukan papan kekunci elektronik yang digunakan untuk menaip) tapi mendalah yang berbunyi macam piano secara defaultnya tu. Itu pun satu. You know, azam aku untuk tahun ini nak tambah skill baru. Dan kononnya aku nak follow Tapai join kelas vokal (serius ni) tapi akhirnya aku tak mampu nak luangkan masa. Jadi budget tu aku guna untuk beli mendalah PSR-E413 ni. So far so good. Maka tercapailah salah satu azam tahun ni. Cuma malangnya belajar muzik tatkala dah besar panjang ni you only tend to play the parts that you like, instead of, well, belajar satu lagu. Masa muda remaja dulu, tengah hangat nak belajar gitar, lagu Metallica tu dengan part solo pun ligat nak menghafal dan master. Biarlah gitar kapok tak cukup fret sekalipun. Kalau boleh, satu album And Justice For All tu nak dimain sampai habis.

Sekarang ni, dapat intro pun jadilah.

Memasak pun satu hal. Daripada hobi, dah jadi benda yang dibuat setiap hari. And we bought an oven. Konon nak buat kek dan biskut (dan cream puff) tapi entah bila nak mula. Barangan pun dah ada complete. Apapun tercapai juga hajat untuk bakar ayam dan ikan instead of stir fry macam selalu. It's something I have to get used to, memandangkan kebanyakannya aku eksperimen je. Malas nak baca resepi. Tapi sedap je di tekak aku sefamili, itu yang penting.

Main game pun dah kurang. Pun konon nak buat review, entah bila la nak buat. Ada la sedikit sebanyak yang aku dah main separuh (macam Call of Juarez, Overlord II) dan sampai habis (macam Zeno Clash) dan yang tak boleh habis (MMORPG macam Free Realms dan Runes of Magic, Sims 3). Lepas tu Street Fighter IV yang hilang skill (main easy pun kena belasah ni!). Ya, walaupun senarai tu agak banyak, tapi secara relatifnya kurang berbanding dahulu. Walaupun aku dah beli Gigabyte GTX260+ semata-mata nak max settings untuk setiap game yang aku main. Walaupun Razer Deathadder aku dah terkorban sebelum waktunya gara-gara clickfest yang menggila.

Lagi satu aku perasan, dulu aku selalu jugak tulis blog ni sebab aku nak post illustrations yang aku buat, tapi sekarang ni aku dah kurang motivasi nak melukis. Nantilah, bila aku dah jumpa model untuk ku kartunkan.

Sekali tulis, panjang la pulak. Sigh.