Whoa...speeeeeeeeeed

Work today was even more quiet than yesterday. A long slow day. I was led astray and had chips for lunch with a couple of the others.

The SSD turned up today, so I backed up the M17x and popped it in. It's now running a nice fresh install of Windows 8, which is turning out to be rather interesting. So far, running on the SSD, it is ridiculously quick, although the 16gb RAM probably helps. Nearly all the hardware worked straight away with only little things like the freefall sensor that needed updating. I think it does need better graphics drivers though - while it recognises that there are two cards in there, it doesn't seem to understand the Crossfire link.

Annoyingly our broadband is being crap at the moment and slows to a crawl in the evenings, so getting hold of certain things has been tedious since it struggles even to download a 22mb file. In particular I need to enable the .net framework v3.5 for a couple of things, but it won't download. Same goes for the graphics drivers since they are about 134mb. Someone in work has had fibre installed and has something mad like a 33mb connection, galling when ours can't even manage 1mb in the evenings. I've left it copying the data back on which will take a while and then set it downloading stuff in the morning when the broadband should work again.

But so far things look quite promising. I find it interesting that they've introduced the new Metro interface which is somewhat dumbed down and easy to use, but have made a lot of changes that are nice for the more techy users, like the new file copy dialogue and task manager, and massively optimised it under the bonnet too. Also because it's Windows 8 Pro it has things that the old Windows 7 didn't have on this machine. Intrigued by Hyper-V, that sounds like it could be worth a play.

While the machine was backing up and things, had a go on Need for Speed: Most Wanted on the Vita. Only got it because it was cheap and had reasonable reviews. It's OK, but a bit annoying since there doesn't seem to be an option to have analogue acceleration, so you're driving balls-out all the time. Oh well. Apparently the old PS2 finally went out of production today, which seems quite bonkers really. I really enjoyed my old PS2. If the PS3 had had proper backwards compatibility I might have got one. The 360 is OK but I really don't like the way they've gone with it now, especially the new advert laden dashboard. The Wii U seems to have passed my radar completely, I know it's out and I've even watched the Ashens review of it, but it doesn't interest me in the slightest.

Also watched the Rammstein Live in Berlin DVD in the background, which is always awesome. I got it years ago before I really knew anything about the band and it was a bit of an eye opener. Due to my dislike of crowds I don't generally enjoy seeing bands live, but there are two that I would make an exception for - Iron Maiden and Rammstein.