Reality note / For you web designers.

[xyzzysqrl]

Part of why I've been writing so little about anything not fictional in this journal lately is because when I look around at what people are talking about and what's going on outside in the Big Real World, I get very tired and depressed.

So I'm doing my best to put all that out of my mind.

--

A side note: One website that would really fly well, and which I don't see anywhere online: What The Hell Do I Upgrade dot comnetorg.

I'd like to tell a website "I have this much RAM, this kind of video card, etc" or just let it autodetect (Windows stores this crap SOMEwhere on the drive, right?) and then it would tell me "You should get more RAM." or "You need a faster read on your hard drive." or so on.

That would be neat.

Comments

[relee.livejournal.com]

This could help maybe? http://cyri.systemrequirementslab.com/CYRI/

[xyzzysqrl]

That's... interesting, but it detects my video card as "ATI display adapter (0x68D8)" and my sound card as "Virtual Audio Cable", both of which are wrong and weird. So I don't trust it.

[relee.livejournal.com]

Hmm... Are your graphics awesome or just so-so?

It's possible your computer isn't actually using your proper video card, and is instead using your on-board video card.

[xyzzysqrl]

It's using the proper card, yes.

[vulpisfoxfire.livejournal.com]

IIRC, didn't you get a Radeon recently? That's an ATI card...

[xyzzysqrl]

Yes it is. But saying "ATI display adapter" is like saying "ATI-branded... uh... thing. They're all the same, right?"

I'd like to know more than that.

[relee.livejournal.com]

How portentiously bizzare.

[arkofeden.livejournal.com]

So I'm doing my best to put all that out of my mind.

Dude, that is all okay--you know we're cool with hearing just about anything, so do what makes you happier. :)

...I'd kind of think that you can't possibly be the only person who looks outside in the morning and just wants to go back to bed and hope it goes away. There's tiresome, depressing shit out there. :P *doses you up with chocolate*

--D n' folks.

[swordianmaster.livejournal.com]

Most tech nerds and pretty much any computer store will tell you that "you need more RAM" is always the answer, or at least a large part of it.

Past that, the only real "upgrades" you need are to fight back obsolesence: hard drive read times are typically so fast that they're only an issue if you're compressing video files; typically the time for the HD to read seems to be faster than the cycle time for the RAM, at least in my experience.

But as I know nothing concrete about computers, I could just be talking out of my ass! 8D

[(Anonymous)]

The Windows Experience Rating isn't a bad place to start. It won't suggest upgrading RAM, but it will rate your computer bits on a scale of 1.0 to 7.9, and you can look at what's lowest and consider upgrading that.

Generally the hard drive will be the lowest score, but if you're running a reasonably modern 7200 RPM hard drive there's no need to upgrade there. (Maxing out the disk score requires an SSD.) But if the rest of your scores are balanced, there's no one thing that would speed up the computer lots; if one score, say CPU, is low compared to video, then a faster CPU would probably be worth getting, if you can do so affordably.

My system gets a 7.3 for CPU and memory, and a 6.0 for the graphics benchmarks, and a 5.8 for HDD. This makes sense; I've upgraded my CPU and motherboard and RAM since getting my current video card, which is a last-generation midrange card.

This web site is a good guide for upgrading your video card; click on the kind you have and it'll rate other cards as 'too slow to be worth the money to upgrade' or 'way faster, but costs too much'. http://emsai.net/reviews/gpu/ And they have a CPU version: http://emsai.net/reviews/cpu/

--damn bunni