John and Andrea Udberg

WARNING!  Long and boring post ahead for the non-tech minded…

So we are beginning to think about getting ready to leave NZ.  We haven’t actually done much to prepare as of yet, but we are thinking about it!

I have spent a lot of time in the last 6 months or so reacquainting myself with the wonderful world of personal computers.  That is not to say I had ignored it for the previous 2 and a half years since I left the UK but I had let a lot of the advances pass me by.  Because I couldn’t buy.

The faithful ASUS laptop I bought back in Brisbane really has done us proud.  It will be close to 3 years old when we land in Newcastle and will have many thousands of hours of service under its belt.  It’s nearly time for a rest my good friend.

The technamalogical world is looking very healthy at the moment and the rate of advancement never seems to cease.  The next 6 months will feature more marketing and hype than most, but not without good cause.

On the software front, Microsoft today announced that the five year epic that is Windows Vista’s development has come to an end.  The next version of Windows is finished and the difference between it an XP is akin to the difference between 3.1 and windows 95.  They also have Office 2007 which, unlike some past office upgrades, is apparently a vast improvement on previous editions.

The hardware vendors are not resting on their morals either.  Intel launched the very impressive core 2 duo processor range a few months back and are about to release a quad-core beast.  If you can do four heavy tasks at once or use software which already has the ability to take advantage of multiple cores, its a massive boost.  Intel has pledged to be producing 80 core chips in 5 years.  wow.

With the new version of Windows comes the newest incarnation of DirectX, number 10 to be precise.  This of course means we all need new graphics cards to take advantage of the new instruction set.  Nvidia is first out of the blocks and its power hungry G80 monster cards destroy any previous board in terms of performance.  And of course, price.

Then there is the prospect of having a home theatre PC (HTPC) which can be used like a TiVO to record programs and stream other media (freshly downloaded episodes of 24?) over a network.  Oh the joy…

Maybe the thought of getting back into my favorite hobby of building and tinkering is being used to subside some of the sadness of leaving NZ… but there’s no time for deep thought like that, there’s the new Wii from Nintendo, how fun does that look?!  Waving the controller around.  There’s the new PS3, shiny!  Gears of war for the 360 - wow…. I think i’d better go lie down.

John and Andrea Udberg.

Links:

XFX GeForce 8800 GTX 768MiB

Intel’s Core 2 Quad CPUs

Windows Vista

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 9th, 2006 at 11:59 am and is filed under Tech Talk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.