Mr. .NET

The video on iTunes has a way to go in my opinion before it can be touted widely. While I don’t have the fastest PC out there, it also isn’t all that bad.

2.4GHz Celeron
1GB RAM
240GB HD Space
ATI Radeon 9800 XT (only at 4X AGP though)

It runs what I want, but it is starting to show its age in some newer games, the 9800XT covers up some of that. However my performance with the videos included with the latest Black Eyed Peas album on iTunes chugged, churned, skipped, and got out of sync in several places.

But! Earlier this afternoon I installed new video drivers which required a reboot of my PC; once it came back up I ran the videos again and they played just fine…even in full screen mode. So what caused it to work? The reboot as the cause is doubtful because after I played the videos last night I played a couple games without a problem, Morrowind and Jedi Academy. Its possible the new video driver fixed it; but I don’t recall seeing anything mentioned in the release notes about it.

So now I will change my mini-review from broken, needs fixing to: beautiful when it works, but something is still too resource intensive.

I’ve been hearing a lot about TiVo, and I’ve been looking at buying one for a while but there have been two major sticking points for me:

• Initial cost
• Having to pay a subscription fee (or a large one-time fee) just to use the system

Well it appears the planets are aligned because Best Buy has some of their TiVo line on sale, with a nice mail-in rebate to boot. Not only that, but one of the units on sale includes the basic TiVo service for free so the unit is still useful to me if I can’t afford to spend the $12.95 every month (or would rather spend that money elsewhere). And just for completness sake it is the Toshiba Digital Media Server (SD-H400) it has a built-in DVD player and the TiVo is a 40GB model (which on the best quality setting stores something like 25 hours of video). Best Buy has it on sale this week for $199.99 and there is a $100 mail-in-rebate. The only catch with the rebate is that you have to be a subscriber to the pay service for at least 30 days when they process the rebate — ie for models including basic service that means the plus service, for all other models that means at least the basic service.

Not a problem for me though, I think I’ll be upgrading to the lifetime service in a few months or so if I’m still using it a lot.

In the end I really like it, the only hard part was trying to remember what shows I liked watching but could never remember to watch. Doubly so for the shows that seem to change timeslots every day.

That said; the only thing I currently dislike about it is that it starts to get really slow when it checks to see if a new schedule will clash with an existing one.

And of course as I’m writing this I see another thing that I definately don’t like. It decided it was going to restart itself without asking my permission first. At least it waited until I had finished recording Good Eats. After it restarted (which took forever, however it has only been started up twice, once when I first turned it on, and just now so I don’t know if that is typical) it began installing some new TiVo software which again is taking up lots of time.

Christmas provided an excellent opportunity for me to buy and then play the full Call of Duty game.

The game itself was just as good as the two demos. There were a few missions that were a pain, but after a few tries it was generally easy to get past the sticky spots.

If you didn’t read my demo review from November 17th I mentioned that I would be getting it ASAP. My plans changed when I slipped up and made mention to my dad that I thought the game was good, but was going to wait for someone to have it on sale. Being somewhat close to Christmas I decided to wait to see if that could have been one of the presents under the tree.

It wasn’t under the tree, but EBGames had the game for $39.99, free 2-nd day air, and a $10 gift voucher on it so I was able to snag it cheaply.

In the game you play the role of three soldiers, one for each of the US, Great Britain, and Russia. For each country you play through a few missions as a soldier from that country then you move on to the next. I would guess you play 7 missions for each, then it rotates around again to tie up a few loose ends in the march to Berlin.

The game itself is beautiful and works flawlessly on my PC. The only downside is that some of the missions can feel extremely linear. The Russian mission to hold the tank repair facility comes to mind here. Throughout there is never any real question as to where you need to go next because there are no side paths that could lead you the wrong way. The open battlefield missions were much better in this regard because you weren’t confined to hallways.

But I don’t think its too bad to say my only gripe is its linearity!

Oh, crap; I found another gripe. In another Russian mission you had to snipe out four nazi commanders that were calling for re-enforcements on their front line. The first two were easy to find, just look down from the window in the room you were in and they were there; but I spent the next 15 minutes trying to find the other two. Eventually one of the Russian soliders getting shot at by the front line killed one of the commanders while I eventually found the other one. But I guess that is real life for you, you wouldn’t expect the commands to be wearing hunter orange!

If you like First Persion Shooters get this game!.

After looking at some of my site stats I see my site getting hit quite frequently by google searches for the HP a307x so I’ll sate those searcher’s appetites by providing my comments on the a307x.

First, I love this PC…for the price I paid for it. I bought this PC from an OfficeMax store in Midland, MI. I purchased it while they were holding a “Friends and Family” sale for the friends and family of OfficeMax employees. I lucked out and found a friend on the internet so I could get the deal. Before MI sales tax, the PC cost $499.99.

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