Dragon Age: Origins

I'm enjoying playing Dragon Age: Origins. I was bought it for Christmas by my son Nick and though at times I've found it frustrating and difficult to progress through, I still keep going back to it for another try. In fact I stopped playing it completely for a while until I completed Bioshock 2, but I've returned to Ferelden to battle the darkspawn.

I've learnt the importance of leveling up, balancing specialisations within your party, equipping the best armour and weapons and just recently to use injury kits to heal your characters. My tactics are still not the best, as some of the attacks are too fast for me to manage and control.

The character dialogues and cut scenes help to vary the battles and the ranges of people and places makes for a refreshing series of quests. I might not be able to finish it, but it is fun so far.

Socket to Intel

What is Intel playing at with all these processor socket formats? For years we just had LGA775 in which a number of CPU ranges, models and revisions fitted into. Upgrading was relatively easy. Just download the latest motherboard BIOS, check power requirements and drop in the new CPU. Job done!

Then we had LGA1156 for top end Intel Core i7 CPUs, and now the LGA1136 for mid range Core i3 and i5 processors. Already limiting the upgrade capabilities. And now I hear that later this year Intel will release the LGA1155 which is slightly different, but completely incompatible with the previous designs. And then later next year LGA2011 (sic!) will be with us. These changes are being made to apparently support even more multi-CPU cores for the future 8, 10, 12 probably.

So in order to upgrade to perform a CPU upgrade we will have to replace the motherboard as well. A lot more expense and hassle. Probably not worth it for most people. And we still have limited software applications that will be able to take advantage of these multi-CPU cores.

One of the advantages of a desktop system is to use its modular architecture to easily upgrade individual components as and when necessary. By limiting the upgrade-ability of their CPUs, Intel has put another nail into the desktop coffin.

Cleaning out Windows Vista

I'm getting more and more problems with Windows Vista. Even though I've converted all my PCs to Windows 7 except one, it seems that my customers are having problems. Windows Vista-based systems sold a couple of years ago (some by me) with only 1Gb of RAM memory are slowing down and even grinding to a halt. The pressures and demands of modern software and broadband technologies have become too much for these limited systems.

Also any virus or spyware scans are taking longer and longer. Normal file cleansing methods have limited success. One major culprit is Vista's Side-by-side Winsxs directory which grows to over 10Gb with tens of thousands of small files. Scanning all these files often takes longer than the rest of the hard disk drive.

Thousands of these files can be removed by either using Vista Service Pack 1's Vsp1cln command or Service Pack 2's Compcln command. These should be run from an Administrator's command line window. It helps a bit. Adding at least another gigabyte of RAM sure helps as well.