Off the bat, I have to tell you, I do not have the fastest or the best machine in the world.
I have a machine that is at the max processor and ram for the motherboard’s capability.
Here are the specs for the machine I am using.
Sis 755 A-2 Motherboard
Sempron 3400+ 64 bit Processor
Nvidia 7600GS 512 mb
2 Gigs kingston 3200 ddr Memory
Sony cd/dvd burner
500 watt power supply

Ok for the past 7 or 8 years, The way I have benchmarked computers and operating systems Would be by playing Grand Theft auto III.
Of course I have since then added vice city and San Andreas to the mix. But GTAIII Is the benchmark for me. If you do not like the game sorry
But please hang with me on this.
For a long time I fought trying to make my computers strong and sturdy enough to handle the demands this game calls out. Computers these days are actually strong enough to handle these demands.
After the install of just straight vista drivers I went to pcpitsop and did my first benchmark of my machine. The score was pathetic. I kind of knew what would happen after I installed gtaIII, But I go ahead and start the game. Before the load screen I get a notice saying that there is some sort of dll missing (sorry all, I did not write it down) . I then hear the game start up but minimized in the task bar. I click the notification and the game takes over the screen. I see this look that took me back to the days of 256 megs ram and nvidia 440 on a 800 meg processor. This game looked wretched. But what do you expect with o/s drivers and not vendor drivers? Well since it’s a newer o/s than XP, I would expect better results than xp, not similar to win 98 on a crap machine. Very pixilated simi laggy but not as laggy as you would think with the way it looked.
After the drivers had been installed I start GTAIII again. Again it gave me the notice of missing dll. When the unnamed player in gtaIII walked out of his hide out I noticed artifacts. The garage was covered with imaging from the walls adjacent to the Entry to the garage. The player had openings so you could see through him in many places. I moved on and walked into the garage and drove the banshee down the ocean blvd to check how the game (typically) lags (with bad bad drivers or bad hardware) as you drive under objects, like the over head train, and trees and bridge. The game was very jaggedly laggy and objects where not being displayed properly.
After the gtaIII test I tried the other two Grand Theft Auto games and got the same mess. I swear the game looks better and plays better on linux with just the linux basic drivers, but the lag is way worse on Linux.
So I did searches for help forums and the like. I found that allot of people with the 7000 series nvidia video cards had similar issues. I never found a solution that worked. No, using older drivers did not help. Until sis/ecs releases more than one gart driver I am pretty much stuck in the same spot.

I did notice that the fonts on websites looked a bit bigger than when on xp.
As much as I enjoyed the looks of Aero (makes me think of Ubuntu) I decided to try turning it off. I used Black Viper’s tips from his tweak site .
The game did not change. and my bench score on pcpitstop only went up 10 points from the first test with base drivers.

Vista test was done 3/29/08. So please wait a few months before you tell me they fixed the operating system. I did try all online update and nothing got better that I could witness myself.
I am now back on xp and my machine runs three times a fast. using the same direct version as I used on vista.. 9.0c

Well it seems the lady has come into a few cooties.

She has an xps m1210 laptop.

Since neither of us know just how long the stuff has been on her machine or where or how they all got there, I believe it would be in her best interest if we just back up everything that is important and whip out the reinstall discs. Easy? lol. Newp. No chance. Seems back when she got the computer she lived elsewhere with someone else and obtaining the drivers discs and o/s and all teh bundled software discs had to include a spy. Her little sister had to sneak the border and play friendlies… Now she snuck out with the baggy thing that all the discs are in which of course no one there claims to have seen. We have done some searches and find that one disc on the bag, is not for this laptop that we are about to work on. Ok. Now we have all the discs.

The hard part is deciding what to do after we install everything and well, does the sister go back and act like nothing happened? ( I mean this is a close as family issue, I am not in the family so I have to step back) I am thinking of burning the discs as a back up and bundling some jacked up progs with it.. but will they hate me for it?

well whatever

Ok So now the back up is not going so well. I have been to virustotal ,virscan.org and jotti’s a million times and man, I keep finding malware in everything she wants to backup. I am half tempted to just format and cross my fingers and lie like a dog. I am getting sick of each time they find stuff in the files I end up having to delete them anyway because they are beyond repair. Meanwhile I have a million more files to scan…one by one….. It’s hardly worth it. Then again she is fricken hot and I know what I am doing.
Well I also looked around and saw that ubuntu installs pretty good on this particular model. If I can assure her that open office is just as good as microsoft office/works then I got it made! I wouldn’t have to delete anything!
Tell you what, I will do something with this pretty machine and post it here later

to be continued…….