One thing I should say...

The game runs really well on the new computer. Load times are incredible, and while I got the pause when the game generated a paper girl and a garden club member in my test neighborhood (yeah, I got my blank templates in, for everything but the three basic vacation destinations*) it wasn't very bad. Also it runs just fine in windowed mode, no slowdown at all, which was not really the case on the old box. Sims itself might not take advantage of the extra processors (I haven't really checked that, but considering my video-recording performance I'd bet it doesn't) but the OS itself seems to do it quite nicely. I do get some odd redraw lag if I open a menu when the game is running, but it goes away if I minimize the game, so whatever.

Also, my clipboard-capture program of choice has a way to assign a hotkey to do captures. I'm still probably going to play windowed for other reasons (most notably for the ability to easily look stuff up/take notes/whatever) but it's nice to be able to do it with one key combo rather than doing a key combo, switching windows, doing another key combo, etc. I can only make it take about one picture a second but I'll live. :D

(*ETA forgotten footnote: I did leave the three regular destinations as is, so that I can throw them on a neighborhood if I don't want to do the work of setting up a custom version, but I tell you, if I put in the Eastern one, I'm renaming it to the Far East Theme Park or something, because having all those alleged Asians with red hair and Euro features drives me nuts. At least if I pretend it's just a themed area and not supposed to be the "real" far East, I won't be as annoyed.)

widescreen vs the Sims

Well, I can run the Sims in widescreen, but not at my native resolution. Unfortunately, running in a non-widescreen resolution does NOT do the black bar thing; I think this particular monitor might not know how to respond to that instruction or something? I don't know.

*sneezes*

My allergies are just out of control today. It's very distracting.

pizza time

Well, still moving a little slow (I had a very sleepy day) but I now have BV, simPE and CEP installed and all my downloads (including updated versions of AwesomeWare and a couple new things) in place, and I got a small bit of clothing done. I still haven't actually loaded the game and fiddled with settings yet, though.

It's pizza time. Actually, french bread pizza from Stouffer's time. More tomorrow, I think.

No, um, really, still planning on playing

Okay, see, I got Zoo Tycoon 2 for Christmas, so I spent a few days playing that, and then we got Guild Wars, which is highly addictive, which is most of what I've been doing since the beginning of the month.

...soooo....slooooooow

The "I Hate This Process and Want to Die" Font is already installed.
If you want to install a new version you will have to uninstall it first.
[OKAY] [CANCEL] [SHOOT SELF IN HEAD]

I think I'll be ready to install the Sims in a couple days. I guess.

So, get this...

We have this stack of shiny new computer components. Brand new AM2+ motherboard released this year, brand new CPU, brand new video card (I think it's like a month old, seriously), Lightscribe DVD drives, dual SATA hard drives, pretty widescreen monitors. Actual state of the art equipment, yanno. Which is a first for me, by the way.

more partses

We now have a Mighty Stack of Boxes. We are waiting on video cards, however, and input devices (we could transfer the ones we have but for ease's sake for file transferring it'll be easier to have all 4 boxes running until that's taken care of.)

Incidentally, the setup fFIL chose for hard drives? RAID drives. That means I will automagically have data backup on a mirrored drive. The chances of both drives failing catastrophically at once, particularly since he also sent us each a UPS which should avoid the stupid "brownout = computer crash = hard drive damage" problem, is pretty slim, so hopefully I will avoid ever completely losing data, though the downside is that corruption would be copied to the mirror, too. But soft file corruption is usually easier to work around than "My sector is full of holes", so I'm optimistic it'd mean less likelihood of having a major catastrophic loss of data even if something does go wrong in the future.

Also: widescreen monitors. Heh-heh. Yes, I know I already said that, but you have NO idea how long I've been drooling over those, and Sims isn't the only game I play that'd benefit from it.

heh-heh

Widescreen monitors.

(The computers aren't here. The monitors are.)

More delays, but some good news, too

Well, the bad news is I no longer can predict a solid date for when I will be putting anything out. There's three reasons for this: the first is my cold came back so I kinda didn't really do anything Simsy last week. (I feel better now.) The second is a really good reason that involves joy and happiness and great celebration, or at least it does from me.