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Yeah, I’m still talking about Vista tuning.  I’m just so bothered to have 25-30% of my RAM in use when I have nothing running. Service and Task tuning is very important with Vista.  It tends to run with a ’safe’ set of services out of the box but most of these things aren’t required by anyone.  I’m certainly not on a domain.  I’m not sharing credentials.  I don’t need tablet input services.  There are so many different versions of Vista which allow you to have differing amounts of useless applications.  But Microsoft isn’t doing anything to ask what you as a user actually intend to DO with this install.  Are you in an office?  Are you just playing games?  Are you just looking for internet and email?  Why not do some sort of on demand kind of installations?  Microsoft won’t change for the better until it has to.  *cough* Windows 7…

The most confusing and constant part of my Vista install is that right after boot up and log in it’s using 750-800m of RAM.  But this drops after a few minutes to 560-580m.  It’s at 631m right now after a fresh boot with only FireFox running.  It can’t be good for Windows to be loading so much of my hard drives that it doesn’t need that much longer after boot.  There doesn’t seem to be any way to stop it though.

I dabbled with using the Windows Classing theme, disabling the Themes service and the Desktop Management service.  After a couple days I’ve realized that it has no real performance impact on this machine and only saves about 30-50m of RAM.  Disabling Aero can save another 50-70m so as pretty as it is, I have that disabled for now.  Kind of splits the difference you know?

I really dislike the scroll bar in the start menu.  It slows me down I think.  I need to look for a way to kill that.  I prefer the XP just expand forever over half the screen method.

Someone really needs to write a good document on disabling Vista tasks.  There are plenty of Service references.  But less information about tasks.  Some online guides actually suggest you don’t modify them at all.  But that’s not quite right.  You can in fact disable 80% of them.  Certainly the defrag and anything pertaining to the indexer if you don’t use it.  Anything that runs while the system is ‘idle’ is probably a bad idea.  Anything that runs at start up or login can really delay those things.  I really hate that certain tasks like the error rollup tasks run every x minutes regardless of if you’re doing something more important at that time or not.

I currently own an original Nintendo DS along with a DS Lite.  The problem with the DS you see is that it’s horribly uncomfortable for me to play.  I don’t know if its carpal tunnel or the design of the thing.  It and the GBA before it are awful devices to play RPGs on.

The GBA was kind enough to have the GameBoy Player for the GameCube however.  I don’t know if there will ever be such a thing for DS games.  It’s a question of input and dual screens.  It’s not something that’s so easily emulated on a single TV.  But I could certainly be done.

The DS has the third largest collection of JRPGs of any system.  It’s very close to the PS2 and PSX collections.  So if you’re a JRPG collector, you really want to buy many of these DS titles.  There are some especially good old school ones.  Many remakes and ports.  And it seems a shame really that these awesome games are stuck on a device I can hardly see and that gives me cramps after 30 minutes of playtime.

The PSP isn’t as problematic.  It’s comfortable, the screen is large, and it’s ultimately meant for people of an age greater than 12.  The PSP itself follows the PSX/PS2 lineage of having some great JRPGs but sadly doesn’t have the same level of market.  Sony’s close minded tactics with locking the device down has really limited the takeoff of the device.  I’m sure the head haunchos are blaming market segmentation or something else to that effect.  But no, it was simple old man bureaucracy and greed that made it a closed system and stunted it’s ‘cool factor’ potential.

The DS itself has about two dozen different devices that allow the thing to be hacked in all sorts of clever ways.  Heck, a friend gave me a broken M3 Simply.  If I ever bothered to try and make it work, I could easily go download any ROM I wanted and stick it on this flash cartridge and play it on the DS.  So instead of spending the $150/mo on DS games I probably won’t ever play because I can’t stand the DS, I could just save all the ROMs and emulate them on my PC.

But, I have a problem.  I have an addiction to collecting certain kinds of video games even if I can’t play them.  I’m cutting back little by little.  But I really needed that copy of Dragon Quest V and The Y’s I & II I swear!

I’m so happy to have gotten president’s day off from work.  It gives me a nice long weekend to decompress and spend some maitenance time on some projects.  One of the things that went missing from my life when I got married is downtime.  Prisoners have this sort of thing in droves.  It’s the kind of time that lets you obsess over the details.  It’s the kind of time that forces you in to doing something you want to do and would take pride in doing except you’d probably never get around to doing it otherwise.

Okay, maybe it’s not just marriage and kids.  It’s also video games and television and the internet.  It’s an enormous amount of media that I could spend my whole life digesting.  And I think this sort of thing can be very educational.  I’ve learned more in the past few years from Wikipedia than I had in my entire highschool career.  But this desire to absorb has overtaken my desire to produce.  And that’s very unlike me.

Video games and reading and movies are also an escape.  Escaping is important to me as it gives me a drug free way to turn reality off for a moment.  It’s an ideal way to melt away stress.  But with a successful career comes the added means to buying a lot more books and video games and movies.  There’s just not enough time in the day to deal with it all.

So now I try not to fall in to my habit of watching or reading or playing the same things over and over again.  I could read that Neil Gaiman book or play that Valve game 100 times over and be perfectly satisfied.  But then I’m not experiencing new things and it seems like a waste of time.  Unfortunately, it turns out that my ability for comprehension on the first time through anything is a bit poor.  You watch Spirited Away for the 12th time and I guarantee you will see something new.

There is, of course, a health factor when it comes to media digestion.  Doing something is actually a lot better for your body, physically speaking.  I’m looking over the course guide at Le Cordon Bleu and I’d love to have the $50K to learn how to be a chef.  And I know that I’d loose 100 pounds running all over cooking things in a hot sweaty kitchen.  The repetitive nature of cooking makes me realize that I don’t want to go through with it.  But there’s no denying that it might actually be a very healthy thing to attempt.

If I don’t eat anything that I cook of course ;)

I can’t wait for spring cleaning.  I feel that strong desire to throw open the windows and start rearranging everything in my house.  We moved in last year around August and though we took a bit of extra time to plan things out, it still takes about a year to really understand the flow of your house and to know how to change it to make things better.  My office is a particular challenge since although I spent a lot of time organizing it so everything fit… well, there’s just a lot of stuff in here and the simplest project explodes in to an unweildy mess in an instant.  The cube keeps eating AGP video cards (though the PCI one I bought seems to be happy enough) and this isn’t helping since it’s guts seem to be forever strewn about my floor.

It’s going to take me a day just to organize all the CDs and DVDs I have thrown all over my desk.  God forbid I should label any of them or put them back in my organizer.

On the plus side, I have Reason 4 and Photoshop CS3 installed today.  My Canopus ADVC110 is working just great and I have some videos to edit together of the kids.  I’m sure the relatives would get a kick out of seeing some online videos.  I might just decide to be lazy and use Steam to buy FEAR2 or FarCry2 though.

I almost had a complete XP install on the m17.  My first challenge was to get XP to install on the ICH9R-E RAID controller without a floppy drive.  Even my USB floppy drive wouldn’t work for it.  After several days of trying different things, slipstreaming which didn’t work, I found a solution that meant editing the floppy drivers to add additional USB floppy drive support.  This worked well.  Mobility Modder made Catalyst install.  Many of the Vista drivers worked on XP when I couldn’t find XP drivers to use.  Everything worked…

Except screen brightness.  It was locked at 100% and was giving me headaches.  I spent a week trying to find a way to reduce brightness.  I even tried reducing it from the display settings.  Nothing worked.  The m17 relies on Vista’s advanced power options to adjsut the brightness.  I tried looking for generic XP drivers for it but no luck.  I suspect something out there exists to do it but I just couldn’t find it.

So I’m back on Vista now.  Once again I spent a good amount of time stripping off all unnecessary services thanks to BlackViper. I’m sitting at 730M right now with all drivers, Steam, Firefox, and Avast antivirus running.  That’s not great and I don’t know why it’s using so much RAM.  I have themes and aero disabled.  I have all the fancy desktop manager stuff turned off.  Maybe it’s some sort of caching.  The RAM does seem to be hiding in the background.  I can’t find it in taskman anyway.

I don’t know.  I’m sick of thinking about it :)

It will be a week before my new hard drives arrive so I’m giving Vista Home 32 bit a brutal shakedown on this laptop.  It honestly seems to run faster and better than Vista x64 on my Q9450.  I still think I’m going to throw XP Pro on it but with some clever tweaking of Tasks and Services I got Vista’s footprint down to under 650M.  A slight help but still a bit heavy when you only have 2048M to play with and need to run some very memory heavy games.

I’m trying to find out just how viable Vista is.  There are a bunch of people these days who think you should just suck it up and use Vista.  However, my experience with Vista 64 on my gaming rig is that it really makes the system less responsive.  It uses too much memory and 3-4G is really optimal.  But drivers are just really unstable or non existent for Vista 64.

Just what on Earth makes Vista worth it then?  I couldn’t ever really see any noticeable difference in DirectX 10 games.  Yeah, I do like some of the UI things a bit but… at the end of the day XP is just faster.  But Vista 32 isn’t nearly so bad.  It’s just a lot more responsive and the benchmarks seem just fine.  It seems to want less memory.

In other news I have some more thoughts on the m17.  The speakers are too quiet.  This is a common complaint of mine with many laptops.  They just never seem to be loud enough.  Using some special software I have been able to determine that the GPUs and CPU run about 50c degrees while idling in Vista.  This is while using my Belkin lap cooler.  So the laptop is still breathing just fine.  It just runs hot.  With two GPUs this probably isn’t surprising.

The heat doesn’t bother me though since I use the lap cooler anyway.  Yes, I have tried to overclock the FSB.  But the CPU multipliers seem to drop when I do that.  I need to do a little more reading on overclocking without affecting speedstep or whatever other power management features are coming in to play.