Carl's Notes

Apparently, my computer needs have shifted a fair bit after I built my PC.
(plus, Team Fortress 2 appears to need more memory than it did when I first started playing it)

Right now, I can run a browser with several tabs open, Steam for Linux, and Blender with a small scene loaded without the OS having to shift anything into the swap space.

Unfortunately, that takes up about 75% of my 2GB of memory, which means that if I fire up TF2, all that has to get shoved onto the hard-drive's swap space, taking several minutes to work after first launching the game, and a minute or two after joining a server, which leaves me jerking around the map for a while before the game settles down to smooth movement again.

Strangely enough, Blender seems to have low memory requirements, and I've been able to do quite a bit with it, without needing to ration the rest of my usage.
The only issue I've been running into with Blender is when I tell it to use the graphics card to help render, it takes up so much in the way of processor time (especially with it needing to talk to the graphics card so often) that it interferes with the smooth operating of other applications.

I think my next computer will need at least 8GB of RAM and a quad-core processor.
If price were no concern, I'd even go for a very high-end nVidia graphics card, like their Tesla series or something, and maybe a server-class motherboard or somesuch like that.

Once I finally get a real job in my chosen profession, a new PC (and possibly laptop) will be pretty high on my list...

Well, I upgraded my computer on Thursday by tripling the amount of memory in it, and it seems to run faster now.
Renders (at least the more complex or larger scenes) take about 10-15% less time to complete, and it doesn't thrash (techie talk for accessing the hard drive dozens of times a second) when I browsed the 'net during the render.

Next up would be doing the same thing for my laptop and replacing it's harddrive with a larger one.
(currently, it has a 20GB drive with WinXP and a Linux install on it, and I'm starting to feel the pinch as far as disk space goes. That and I'm using both OSes about equally and it's getting rather annoying trying to share data between them, so I need to change how it's set up.)

And another thing is that Win98 (the version of Windows I have installed on the desktop machine) doesn't seem to be fazed about having three quarters of a gig of memory installed.
I'd heard that Win98 doesn't like having somewhere around a gig of memory and would actually not boot up with more than that...

On another note, I should probably post a list of the webcomics I read so you can see some of my favourites... Not that you may like them, but I do, mostly...