Since I got the TiVo HD I have been doing a fair amount of video conversion so I can watch TV shows on my PSP while I commute, which is really nice. My only complaint is that Vista has caused just a touch of premature aging to my desktop machine and when it is doing a video encoding the gray hairs are even more apparent. This, coupled with the fan on my “decent” video card getting really loud a few weeks ago, prompted me to look into a few upgrades. Since I am mostly doing gaming on the 360 these days, I didn’t feel I needed to upgrade to “state of the art”, just give it a bit more horsepower.
I ended up bumping the memory from 1GB to 2GB (a must if you are using Vista, IMO), I upgraded the CPU from an Athlon XP 3800+ (single core) to a Athlon 64 X2 4200+ (dual core). And the video card from an Nvidia 6600GT (down to a NVidia 6200, when the 6600GT fan flaked out) to a 7600GS. While the 7600GS won’t win any “major awards”, I was able at least to play the Hellgate: London demo without it being overly glitchy – which is a vast improvement over my previous configuration. In general, everything now feels much more responsive. The fact that Vista almost downright requires 2GB of RAM and a dual core processor is kind of sad – Vista is such a hog.
We don’t have any extensive holiday plans. I am planning to take a few extra days off to catch up on some movies, play some games, and spend some time with the missus.