A Quick Technical Update

There wouldn't normally be a post here on a Sunday because for me that's always a work day. Except when I'm on holiday. Which I am. 

But there still wasn't going to be a post today because a) I had two separate things to do in two other towns and b) when I got back I had my new computer to set up. 

There wasn't an awful lot to it. I bought an off-the-shelf machine from Dr. Memory via Amazon, where I paid less for it than that link shows. Either way, it's the cheapest "gaming computer" they do. It wouldn't qualify as any kind of gaming machine by most gamers' standards but these days I don't really qualify as much of a gamer, either.

It's a curious device. It has one of those new-fangled CPUs with its own graphics chip. It's alleged to be able to run modern games on its own and there are YouTube videos and benchmarks to suggest that, if you're not all that fussy about framerates and resolutions, it pretty much can. 

That's nice but I already have a halfway-decent graphics card that I paid nearly as much for a couple of years ago as I just paid for this computer, so I checked before buying it that the motherboard would accept it, that it would fit in the case, that the PSU could cope with it and that it wouldn't clash with the CPU graphics. 

All of that, so far, seems to be true. It was a bit of task getting it set up because the clever people who put the thing together hid all the internal power connectors so tidily away I thought for a while there weren't any. Once I'd found where they'd hidden them, though, it was all quite straigtforward.

Everything seems to be working now but because I always like to treat every new PC as a complete fresh start and never allow it to sync with any of my old ones, the next few days (And weeks.) are going to involve a lot of downloading stuff and signing in to accounts. 

The idea is that by doing it that way, the new machine will only have stuff on it that I actually still use, not ten years of kipple and clutter. It's a really annoying process and the "clean machine" era won't last long but it will at least give me breathing space for a while.

I do have some stuff on external drives I can connect via USB, so that will save some time. I've been playing games on those for a few years now and I can't tell any difference in performance from the ones I have installed on internal drives. 

I have a few Steam games immediately available that way, including Blue Protocol: Star Resonance, but right now, I'm downloading New World: Aeternum. That should make for a good test of how well the new PC performs. I really want to give it another try anyway, now they made all the content available for free.

When I get everything running how I like it, I'll probably report back on how well it's going. It'll be interesting to see how viable it is to play the games I play on a really cheap-ass rig. 

And that's all for now, I think.

Back to the downloading.