Dexter Season Premier and Gaming Rig Woes

Just a quick follow up to my DOA5 impressions, I'm nearing the end of the line as far as things I can accomplish in the game given my skillset with fighters.  Still having fun with the game and looking foward to playing against my lady when we can find the time.

Now, onto the post.  I caught the season premier of Dexter last night, and found it to be hit or miss.  I'm going to try to remain spoiler free.  Deb's tenacity was irritating, but the payoff at the end of the episode was one of the best shots in the series.  I don't know how, but the way she looked furious and vulnerable all at the same time was great.   Next up, the not so good - the whole airport thing.  C'mon, I go through more scrutiny at the airport when I buy a roundtrip ticket 3 months in advance.  Suspension of disbelief could not save that whole arc.  There had to have been a better way to do that whole thing.  Maybe pre-9/11 I would have bought that, but these days....hell no. 

And last, but not least - my gaming rig is undergoing a slight change.  Ever since I built it, I have been getting these annoying little reboots at odd times.  The windows event log gave me a kernel-power error, but that's about as helpful as "dude, something's broke".  I have been debugging this off and on for 2 years, and finally, had enough of it as I was not able to backup my system (specifically, my Steam apps) without a reboot happening.  At that point, my educated guess was that the RAID0 was not behaving properly.  This is a software RAID, and I've never had a good experience with software RAID. I then decided to clone the RAID array to a 3TB disk I have and then use that as my boot disk.  My machine is still good - so I wanted to avoid getting a new CPU/Mobo and RAM until next year, when I'm due to upgrade.  I used Acronis Migrate Easy, which was one of the few things I tried that could actually read my RAID array as a proper RAID array while not in Windows.  The cloning process was easy.  This was rolling the dice as I knew there was a good chance the cloned disk would still think it was RAID, but I decided to give it a go. This did not end well.  The machine booted up just fine was slow as hell.  There didn't seem to be a way that I could get the disc to behave properly without a fresh install of windows.  At that point, I was quite upset and decided to take a new approach - I saved off my steamapps directory (since now, I wasn't getting random reboots) and then tore the 3TB drive out.  I replaced this with a Crucial M4 128GB SSD and a Seagate Barracuda 2TB drive for data.  My thinking was that I'll put the OS and a couple of the games I play more often (SWTOR, WoW) on the SSD and keep everything else on the 2TB drive.  Enter my next stupid act - I didn't think to check this out, but apparently, my motherboard doesn't have any SATA3 ports!  So, no 6 gb/s speeds for me.  Both drives work fine, they're just not as fast as they should be.  I figure this is good enough to last me the year until I do a new tear down.  The good news is that I've recently upgraded the video and sound cards, so really, my next system build will just be CPU, mobo and RAM.  Looking forward to this, I bought a new copy of Windows 7 Pro 64 bit, just in case Microsoft pulls retail sales of Win 7 within a year of 8 being released.  I think I might pick up another copy, just in case.

Which leads to bonus content:  Windows 8.  I downloaded the release preview to try out on my Lenovo s10-3t tablet netbook.  I bought this little thing a couple of years ago, but it underperformed in many areas.  Thus, I figured I couldn't hurt anything by installing Windows 8 on it to see if it delivers the goods.  The installation was easy enough.  However, when I booted it up, none of the apps would open because the netbook resolution was 1024X600, and Win8 requires a minimum resolution of 1024X768.  This was easy enough to fix via a registry edit, but the resulting resolution just looks a bit crappy on the screen.  My next gripe is those damn icons.  I can see that this OS is really geared towards the touch market, but the icons on the start menu are offensively large.  I can probably change this, but finding settings is convoluted.  I also ran across another interesting problem - closing apps.  I feverishly searched for a nice little x and none was to be found.  I finally had to google it - WTF kind of OS is so un-intuitive to a seasoned power user that he has to google how to close a program!!!!!????  Turns out, you have to grab the app at the top of the screen with either your mouse or finger and drag it down.  Ugh. 

As for general computing, I found the performance to be about on par with windows 7.  Perhaps a bit snappier.  I do like how MSFT attempted to integrate the user into the experience, but some people may be turned off by linking an email address to your windows login - understandable, but I feel the end result doesn't quite hit the mark from a usability perspective.  The UI is completely unintuitive, and not in an OSX sense (ie, it seems unintuitive until you think about it or simplify the concept, but then it makes sense).  I won't be upgrading to this anytime soon, and will definitely keep it off my gaming/power rig. Granted, I said the same thing about Vista, and finally gave in after I just couldn't get any more XP licenses.  In the end, I actually didn't have any major problems with Vista, but then again, Vista didn't have a non-sensical UI with gigantic icons that felt too big for the screen.