I have three high end PCs. Each with an SSD.  One is an OCZ-Summit. Another is an Intel-25M and the newest is an OCZ-Vertex 3.

As a quickie benchmark, I copy the Winsxs directory (from the \Windows directory) back onto the drive and just look at the megabytes per second.

And wow, big differences.

The OCZ-Summit gets around 10 MB/sec.

The Intel-25M gets around 40 MB/sec.

And the OCZ-Vertex 3 gets about 110MB/sec.

When copying big amounts of stuff (or compiling big amounts of stuff) this is very noticeable.

I haven’t figured out what is making such a difference.  The PC with the OCZ-Summit is faster than the one with the Intel-25M. (Core I7-965 vs. an I7-920).  So is it the drive? The controller? Or something else?

The OCZ-Vertex 3 is on a SATA 6.0G controller and is a brand new drive so I’d expect it to be faster.  But 11X faster than the Summit?

Any thoughts?

Gone are  “points” to throw into stats. Instead, players gain special abilities when they level up. The higher the level, the more exotic the choices become.

In the world of the Fallen Enchantress, settlements gain their resources directly from the land they occupy. While there are still the occasional (i.e. rare) resource hoard like you saw in War of Magic, Fallen Enchantress concerns itself far more with how players make use of the terrain.

Some users asked what paths to victory Fallen Enchantress would have.  One way to look at it is that as the Channeler, where are you placing your essence? Into grand armies? Into creating powerful lieutenants? Or, as you can imagine here, into healing (or desecrating) the earth itself?

It’s not like in Galactic Civilizations and War of Magic where finding a great spot for a colony/city is paramount (though still highly advantageous). Now it also matters a great deal how precisely you use that spot.

Setting up Visual Studio 2008 and all the other dev tools to start building software on a brand new machine. Ugh.

Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion is the most significant change in the Sins universe since the original release. Not only are there twice as many factions to choose from but the already impressive scale of warfare gets a big boost with the introduction of the Titan class ships which absolutely dwarf the existing capital ships (see in screenshot a favorite TEC battle cruiser class capital ship).

Not surprising, the Sins of a Solar Empire engine (the Iron Engine) required a significant upgrade to deliver these spectacular enhancements in scale.

If you don’t have Sins of a Solar Empire: Trinity already --  get it now.  It’ll be the only way to get into the beta for Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion which is due out this Fall.

Here’s a quick demo I did of Tiles.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dPmRbyAY5s&feature=youtu.be

• Developer: Stardock Software
• Availability: Fall 2011
• Will be part of Object Desktop 2012

So what video games are you playing these days?

I’ve got Star Wars, The Old Republic (Collector’s Edition) on pre-order.  Looking forward to getting HOMM 6 and Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion.

I’m currently playing Fallen Enchantress.

Was trying to figure out why my windows are resizing so slow and then I realized that my new PC, with a state of the art video card, is not running WindowBlinds yet. 

Most people think of WindowBlinds as eye candy and that’s really a shame. For me, these days, the fact it turns things over to DirectX and double buffers so everything is crazy smooth is key.

I was hoping that Windows Vista, then Windows 7 would catch up in this area. The fact Microsoft hasn’t fixed this year makes Windows look bad. You shouldn’t need WindowBlinds to make Windows function as it should.

It would be like having to download an Android app to get the display smoothness as good as an iPad/iPhone (of course, there isn’t such an app, Google just needs to fix it).  Microsoft needs to fix this.

If I wasn’t afraid of Android users (and I am), I’d say that WindowBlinds is akin to making an Android display as smooth as an iOS display.

In the meantime, get WindowBlinds.