Hardware Smartware
Playing 3D games brings to my attention that my video card is seriously lacking. My computer is pegged to do most of the work and my frames per second is really low. I believe that 15 is the bare minimum that they suggest to tweak your settings in the game for. I’m only seeing 5.
My wife seems to be doing better, but she is asking me to buy the best video card that money can buy for her. I don’t think she realizes that these cards can get into the thousands. She is in the same situation as I am. We both have come down with the low frame count sickness. I have an AGP 4x slot on my motherboard and a few PCI slots. I have yet to find out what she has. I could upgrade my motherboard to support the 8X or have PCI-E, but her motherboard seems to be custom made. My worry is that she only has a few of the old PCI slots.
The first step would be to identify what exactly we have in regards to slots on the motherboard and existing video cards.
On top of this, my hard drive is overloaded. The thing appears to be defraging itself 24/7. This worries me because it might wear itself out through overuse. I would reformat the thing, but I have too many things that need to be backed up. I’m considering buying a new master hard drive and setting the old one up to be setup as a slave.
That brings up a weird concern. Why do they call them master and slave drives? It just seems so negative to have that weasel its way into the technical field. Why not call them parent/child drives? Maybe it’s all political.