The Crushinator

Larry is a money pit.

I'm just going to let that sink in.

Even more than a regular old tower (of which I have plenty of xp.s), the desktop replacement is a premium money magnet. And god forbid the universe decides to go to vista. There is no way this video card is going to push that. And unless Alienware deigns to offer an upgrade module, I'm done for.

Of all the things M$ could decide to not make fully backwards compatible, they had to choose the game API.

What I really need is a lean & mean OS that still runs all the apps I want from XP.

So now, in order to fuel my mad push to play Battlefield 2 online (and advance past the rank of 'Target'), I'm doubling my RAM from 1 giga byte to 2 giga bytes. 2 Gb. I've owned hard drives smaller than that. I could model all the transistors of my first computer in that1. Including the disk and tape storage. And probably every piece of software I owned for it, to boot.

And yet the greedy B2 is using 95% of my existing memory, forcing Windows to use a big chukka swap file. Which is degrading performance to say the least. I'm also thinking about getting a fat memory key (USB 2.0), and experimenting with putting the swap file on it.

It could cause stability issues.

(1 - I should point out that in this case by 'I could' I mean there is enough space, not that I personally could under take such a modeling project. Maths, who needs that right?)