Peter's Blog

Here is a recipe for happiness:

Ingredients

• World of Warcraft up and running after three days
• The beast, my bargain powerhouse pc
• Dell 24 inch widescreen monitor

Directions

• Start up computer
• Log on to World of Warcraft
• Up display settings to 1920x1200 widescreen
• Enjoy

I found myself admiring the scenery: rolling snow covered hills, pine forests, sun filled skies. Because I had been offline for three days resting in an inn the game decided to boost my experience and I was soon on level 8 (not sure of the logic of doing nothing increasing experience). Bought a big hammer and can now dispatch level 8 monsters with ease.

And it's friday!!!

Life is good.

When I decided to get the Beast I decided to treat myself to a BIG monitor. I felt the 30inch Dell monitor was too big, even after seeing 30 inch monitors in the apple shop. They also have pretty demanding video card requirements. After a while I decided on a Dell 24 inch, mainly because although it is widescreen, vertically it is still taller than the 19 inch CRTs I am used to. I cherish height more than width and 19 inch widescreen monitors I've seen look too small. Europc were selling the Dell 24 inch cheap (relatively).

It came today and it is pretty breathtaking:

• I set the video resolution to 1920x1200 and there is so much screen space, I have to turn my head to pan from corner to corner.
• It has a built in four port USB hub.
• It has a built in flash card reader (compact, SD etc).
• It does picture in picture: I could have a TV picture in the corner via the svideo input if I so desired (and there would be plenty of screen left).
• I downloaded some 1920x1200 wallpapers and these look amazing. Loaded up picasa and looked at my photo album and whee.
• Height and tilt adjustable
• Screen rotates 90 degrees, should I want about 20 inches vertical height.

May have to start using my glasses at home.

The Beast continues to amaze.

I've never really thought about it before but here is cpu utilisation while playing 'Freak on a Leash' by Korn in iTunes:

This is the windows task manager. Points to note:

• two cpu cores so two cpus displayed
• neither is working very hard: 0%. The little spikes are where the track started. While running it normally shows 0% with the occasional 1% glitch.

I've never tried this on a lesser pc. Thinking about it now, a pair of 2.4Ghz cpu's should have no trouble generating a pair of 44kHz audio signals: simplistically, that's 54545 clock cycles for each 44kHz cycle. Decoding mp4 files is probably more challenging than shifting the contents of a wav file to a dac but 54545 clock cycles seems like plenty to play with.