The one major downside of vacation; you eventually have to go back to work. The first day back is usually rough, as the human mind has an amazing ability to forget almost everything work-related in only a few days, and you come back acting basically like a new hire. Always fun…

Vacation itself was perfect. Great weather until the last day, when it rained and the wind was rough, but since it was Sunday (aka football) it worked out anyway. The beach itself was very nice, the water just cool enough not to feel like soup, with the usual shady peddlers hocking legal and not so legal wares. I might post a picture or two here later.

In other happy news, the new Alienware arrived yesterday in its sleek black box. I was a bit surprised that the case is a full sized case, somehow I figured it would be a mid size for some reason. The full size just makes it that much more impressive, with a top notch paint job and great details. This being my third ‘gaming’ PC, I can safely say it’s the highest quality case I’ve seen, with everything feeling solid, and the inside is immaculate in terms of cables and wiring. The noise I would say is average, not silent but certainly not anything too loud to be a distraction. According to the performance chart that comes with the computer, it scores around a13,000 in 3DMark06, which I guess is decent? More accurately, it runs EVE maxed with the new settings at 1900×1200 at 80+ FPS, and The Witcher maxed runs 60+ as well. That’s it for testing it so far, I’ll have more as I try other games on it. I was tempted to download the Crysis demo just for kicks, and might still do that.

So far I’m impressed with Vista. Yes it asks you three times before you install anything if you REALLY wanted to do that, and it loads up a good bit slower than XP, but once loaded everything is crisp and clean, and just overall ‘feels’ smoother than XP. I’m sure I’ll have my fair share of issues with it soon enough, but so far it’s not the disaster people reported when it was released.

Finally, the G15 keyboard I got with the new rig is impressive. The keys feel very responsive, the layout feels natural, and the top display is a neat and actually useful feature. I’ve not played around with it TOO much yet, but so far for WoW it has a few options on what to display. Nothing earth shattering, but again a nice extra feature. The macro keys should prove very useful once I fully program them. So far I’ll I’ve done is assign F1-F8 on to one key, in order to fire all weapons instantly on a target in EVE, instead of having to press each key. Yay laziness.

Time to catch up on the blog world, it’s good to be back!