Today it was Computer Dude Day. We had planned to buy a new videocard for the half so she could play her Sims 2 game, something we did indeed earlier this morning (Additionally she bought a mini Zen Nano player, which needs to be set up too, but that’s a different matter for now).
Initially, we came home with a higher-end ATI Radeon 9550 (for a price of 129.99), but I was shocked to see that ATI recommended (at least) a 300 Watt power supply on the ‘installee’. The one-year old Pressario (an SR1320NX) only has a 250 Watt power supply, which is good enough for home-office machines. I probably could have got it running on the machine, I think, but I decided not to, ran back to the store and returned with a PCI version of the Radeon 9250 (which had no specific requirements whatsoever). It’s running now but still I have not found a way to turn off the existing SiS onboard graphics adapter. There’s no BIOS setting to effectively turn it off, except for that there’s that ’64 MB shared’ setting. For now it won’t hurt and who knows if the half may need an extra monitor one day.
I also decided to treat myself on a ‘Half-Life 1 Anthology’, which sells for not 50, not 30 but 20 dollars at your local Staples store (you’ll have to look for it though). I’m sure I had a copy already somewhere: after all I played it on my old PII 233 MHz MyNote before). I’ll be back in a minute after I’ve saved Black Mesa.
1. I just discovered that installing Half-Life 1 means installing the Steam engine plus the creation of an account.
2. We’re going an hour forward tonight!
3. Continued….