Amore In' Finire: The long wait...

For those readers of my blog, I appoligize for not posting recently. With the return from my trips, I have become slightly lazy... With the weekend of July 4th, I have become extremely lazy... And then of course, I broke my computer...

***Warning***
***Geek Alert***
***Pictures non-related may be found at the bottom of this post***

A so called upgrade... I installed lots of extra RAM into my computer in order to try something, which I probably should have tested well before I put it into practice. As for those of you who pay attention, I have been playing with Microsoft Virtual PC. With the release of Windows Server 2008 and the final release of Hyper-V (Microsofts server virtualization tool) I thought that I would go that route, being server 2008 should be able to manage memory more efficiantly. I was correct in that, and to be honest, Hyper-V worked like a charm, and did exactly what it was supposed to... Virtualize machines that were able to inter-network and run servers.

That however is where the usefulness of it had stopped. I do alot of work on my computers, and that has become my primary use on them. But I will probably never give up this little habbit I have for gaming. Windows Server 2008 supports alot, but it still remains a server. Not meant for graphics. So while I had installed Server 08 on my machine, I had figured that like Virtual PC I would be able to virtualize machines capable of decent graphics. I was horribly wrong. Hyper-V has just about no graphics considerations made for the purpose of anything near gaming. The best it could give me? Virtualized machines that would only run on a 4:3 screen, not a 16:9 screen and capable of a maximum 16 bit color. Ontop of that it did not utilize my graphics card, but a software based graphics processor... Completely nullifying my prized GeForce 8800 graphics card.

"Instincts are rarely pure instinct - they're the distillation of knowledge and experience over many years into finely tuned behaviour."

So with this problem sitting in my lap, I had to come up with a solution. It was simple, but it meant putting Vista back onto my computer. Don't get me wrong, I have no hatred towards Vista... It works very well for me. But I had upgraded my computer to 8 GBs of DDRII PC 8500 RAM (1066Mhz). Previously I only had a 32 bit version of Vista installed. Thankfully I had the forsight to create a disk with the 64 Bit version on it before my first format. With disk in hand, I formatted my system again. I'll be the first to say, over the years Microsoft has made the install process easier and easier. Almost pain free... But no matter how pain free something is, you don't want to have to do it several times in one day. This was the 3rd operating systems that I was setting up that day. It installed like the champ it was, then I was again found lazy in taking forever to do the simple things... Import favorites.. etc.

So with all that said, here are the promised pictures...

Such a beautiful red rose...