Tech Corner

[Pol]

It's not ok - it's very weak. Philosophical descendant of Atom. It of course depends for what do you want it?

[Pol]

Leave the HP Compaq 635 where it is and try to obtain Asus K52/3DE for a similar cost or cheap HP ProBook or simple Toshiba C660-1CK. The price may vary as well as delivery time (they may be out of store, for the high demand) but it's well worthy.

PS With that Toshiba you're receiving nice Microsoft® Office Starter 2010.

[Kalah]

I should get off my butt and just buy something. Hey ... how's this?

LENOVO ThinkPad E520
CPU: Intel Pentium B940 / 2 GHz dual core
RAM: 4GB DDR3 - 1333 MHz
HDD: 500 GB
Video: Intel HD Graphics Dynamic Video Memory Technology 5.0
Screen: 15.6" TFT LED backlight
OS: Win 7 Home Premium 64-bit Edition

Then there's this:
HP Pavilion g6-1040so
CPU: Intel Core i3-380M (how is this?)
RAM: 4GB DDR3
HDD: 500 GB
Video: AMD Radeon HD 6470M
Screen: 15.6" LED backlight
OS: Win 7 Home Premium 64-bit Edition

[Pol]

Much better. And the second one sounds like the better offer - thanks to graphic card. Anyway these are the right 'lines' for you.

I can't judge them as there are not exact model numbers, both exists in more versions.

[Kalah]

Model nr. for the HP is LP308EA#UUW. I want it.

Especially nice that it has Office Starter installed; it's better than just images (easy to install but you have to buy it). Hmmm ... This is quite nice too ... But nah, I'll take the HP.

[Angelspit]

Ewww, Compaq. The name makes me shiver.

[Kalah]

I don't want to know why.

Anyway, I bought the HP Pavilion. Should be on its way and arrive within a couple of days.

[Angelspit]

Maybe we should just delete it now?

[Pol]

No way! In case of emergency where would you pray?

( In many scattered threads 'bout tech stuff nobody would pay attention. But here, just me. )

[ThunderTitan]

AMD Radeon HD 6670 1GB 128bit 11192-14-20G

http://www.sigmanet.ro/Sapphire-AMD-Rad ... G--id57639

My 8800gtx worked well for almost two months with new thermic gel, but i guess summer >>> better heat management, and it's crapping out again.

[Pol]

If you want to surpass 8800GTX in all params go at least for HD7750, as for thermic gel it will probably last at least year, furthermore 8800GTX are rock soli.d

So, certainly you have the time..

[ThunderTitan]

If you want to surpass 8800GTX in all params go at least for HD7750, as for thermic gel it will probably last at least year,

So, certainly you have the time..

No really, as yesterday my pc froze after 5 minutes from logging in to windows at least 4-6 times after it froze in-game once, and twice in-game the day before...

Only got it to work after stopping the power source and leaving it off for a few hours...

The thermic gel was obviously not the problem, there some heat issue and now that it's summer the vc heats up at the problem level again even with new gel..

furthermore 8800GTX are rock solid

My liquid one here begs to differ... (it's na ASUS btw)...

[ywhtptgtfo]

Okay... technical questions eh? I do have one where I couldn't get a good answer from stackoverflow.com a while ago:

Setup:

There is an undirected weighted complete graph G = {V,E} with w(E) being the weights of edges.

G is "covered" with undirected disjoint cycles C_1...C_N each with an arbitrary size (with their total size obviously being the total amount of vertexes).

Problem:

The objective function to find the optimal C_1...C_N permutation where the sum of all their edge weights is maximal.

Comments:

This appears to be an NP-hard permutation optimization problem to me, but some Gurus appear to think it can be done in polynomial time. I've yet to find a proof that supports this. Just by looking at the optimization of permutations in individual cycles, it is already at least a traveling salesman problem (NP-hard) at a smaller scale.

In the off-chance that some of you are mathematicians and know of a polynomial time solution, let me know.

[mr.hackcrag]

I'm considering these two:

http://www.microcenter.com/single_produ ... id=0384780

My Cost: $430

http://www.microcenter.com/single_produ ... id=0381867

My Cost: $300

I wanted other opinions about these monitors and which one (or neither) I should choose.

I read at the H5 forum that the game will not display properly with non-typical resolutions like these monitors?

[Pol]

For what you will be using them, mainly? An how far from them you will be sitting?

[mr.hackcrag]

I will be sitting 1-2 meters away.

I don't play games these days, but in case something good comes out, I'd like to be able to play it and have a good experience. I might try non-vanilla H5 again. Should I just get a cheaper monitor?

[Pol]

I think that you will be fine with the second one (cheaper). Enjoy IPS when it finally came to a better prices.

As for Homm5 I have no idea, someone else must confirm. Althouth it will be probably fine.

[mr.hackcrag]

Well, people often talk about e-ips being inferior or cheap to h-ips and that's why they are cheaper, but I don't know much about those things.

Are higher resolutions easier on the eyes? I often find myself zooming in to read text on the internet because high res. I can hardly see my computer icons. Is this common or am I going blind?

[GreatEmerald]

Higher resolutions means smaller pixels. On one hand, that's bad, because like you said, everything becomes smaller, and it also takes more computer resources to render scenes at higher resolutions.

On the other hand, it's useful because more pixels means a more realistic view. If you had a high enough resolution display where you would no longer be able to see individual pixels, you wouldn't need to use anti-aliasing, as your eye would not see the aliasing to begin with.

Also, the issue with everything being smaller on higher resolutions in actually an operating system issue. There is a solution - DPI settings - but it's complex to implement it correctly, hence on Windows you only have a single setting and not everything supports it (and icons look horrible as they are scaled up using nearest neighbour or so), while on Linux you can select whatever you want and the icons scale nicely, but here even less programs support custom DPI settings.

[Pol]

You will be quite a far from it. No surprise, that you don't see details on that distance. Approximately for 17" it's 50cm as optimum. For 24" I guess that it will be around 85cm. I'm always closer to it, sigh..

Dell U2412M
Color Gamut: 82% (CIE 1976) - good colours for displaying photos and video, not for profi but very good for everyone else
Pixel Pitch: 0.27 mm - middle sized point, good and classic size for bigger monitors
Optimal Resolution: 1920 x 1200 at 60 Hz
Response Time: 8ms (gray to gray) Typical - Quite OK, not suitable for shooters otherwise not noticeable.
Panel Type, Surface: IPS (In-Plane Switching), anti glare with hard coat 3H

Details about panel you can see here.

Higher resolution are harder on eyes, however you can use bigger size of the monitor to your advantage and set it to a lower resolution. This way you will magnify everything.