Chris Szurgot's Blog

For those of you playing F.E.AR. and getting ready to install VS 2005, be careful., especially if you do a clean install/repave. F.E.A.R stores it's save files on C:\Documents And Settings\All Users\Documents\Monolith Productions\FEAR and not with the game, so they get wiped out...

I still haven't gotten them fully restored, but I thought I'd throw out a heads up before anybody else lost their save games.

So I spent the 3 hours downloading Visual Studio, restored a pre-beta 2 backup of my machine, and installed.... (I had to install twice, the first time it installed everything but Visual Studio, but the second time went throuigh fine) Finally, I loaded up a beta 2 project, rebuilt everything, and ran it under RTM. My first through was "my, it runs much faster than Beta 2. I wonder if it's a side-effect of restoring a clean backup." Then I thought, well, duh! Of course it's faster, they've been optimizing it for 6-8 months now. <grin>

So hats off to everyone whose worked on this, and I can't wait to really dig in and release some stuff built on this wonderful new tool.

With the release of VS 2005 & SQL Server 2005 yesterday to MSDN, I was expecting the usual difficulties downloading from the site... Hours to log onto the site, then hours to download the file, with several aborted attempts that had to be restarted manually.

Interestingly enough, the only real bottleneck was finding the right server. I ended up bouncing over 3 machines, trying it with both IE and Firefox, and I finally found a server that had the DVD release, and the files were available, and once the download was started, it ran smooth as glass for 3 hours, download all 6-7 GB of VS & SQL.

So a big round of appluase to everyone who worked on VS & SQL, and another big round to MSDN for getting the downloads to be much better. (Hopefully next time there's a big release, it'll be smooth the whole way through <grin>)

As I said in part 1, bought my son a new computer this weekend. (Last one I'm buying him... He wants to upgrade it, he's on his own... He's 18 now <grin>)

So I uninstalled about 35-40 pieces of software, and the machine still ran slow. So I took a peek at task manager, and it was running at 270MB, but it only had 256MB... So it was swapping like crazy. Now, don't get me wrong, I know I bought an inexpensive computer, but shouldn't they at least come with enough to run the software installed without feeling like molassas... The 1.8 GHz was completed defeated by the swap space. Fortuneately, the memory in his old computer was still good, so got it up to 768 MB, and it was golden.

After that, just had to wait about 2 hours for all the patches and upgrades to install, and it was pretty performant.

My son's computer died this week, and rather than try to figure out what was wrong, and buy piecemeal parts, I just picked up a new HP/Compaq and CompUSA. $400 for a 1.8 Ghz machine, 256MB memory, 40GB HD, lots of ports, media readers, etc...

A really good deal in general, but man, they put a lot of Junk on a new PC. I had to pull off trial software for about 5 programs, and somethng like 30 little toy games that they pre-install for "trial and purchase" The new computer was nothing but a "billboard" for all these other pieces of software...

Fortunately, I was able to remove the software, and that freed up about 1/2 the hard drive, so that's good to go...

But man, did it run slow... (See next post)