Cell wrote:Well seeing that your MS partition is important to you,and you use your laptop a lot...why risk anything on it?
I was under the (apparently mistaken) impression that it would be safe owing to its separate partition. Well, other than messing up the MBR/etc. which I've learned can be repaired, albeit painfully.
But I take your meaning, anything could conceivably happen, even a plain old hard drive failure (one reason I've been trying to determine where the drive power-saving setting is). At this point the importance of the Vista partition is more as simply a working OS than for any particular data it holds. I had thought to use my old desktop for such a safety net, but it seems to be evidencing some rather odd hardware(?)-related gremlins. So yes, perhaps I should place caution slightly above my other considerations.
Cell wrote:glxgears is not an real method to determine graphics speed...sure its fun,but not accurate.
That is exactly what I've been reading. Not only that it is inaccurate but that it can be downright misleading; I have read of people trying changes that caused their "glxgears score" to drop but their real-world(lol) graphics performance to increase - and vice versa. So one cannot even use it as a personal benchmark.
Cell wrote:Load up a 3d game
Something else that I never understood: 3d? I have yet to see any computer that produces hologram-graphics. All that I have used output to a monitor and therefore EVERYTHING is 2d.
Cell wrote:Say for inst instance the new alien arena,or urban terror,and play online.
It failed to properly run GTA: VC natively, I know better. So far it seems to handle card games and chess (but it won't even try the "3d" option) fairly well. On-board graphics are a joke. "Today's CPUs have the power to handle graphics functions" - also a joke: This laptop with its dual 1.7gHz cores, 1gig of memory, and on-board graphics won't handle games that worked quite well on my previous desktop with its 700mHz CPU, 128meg of memory, and a 32meg graphics card. Another example of "truth" in advertising.
I have been reading that a (small) few distros have much better Intel graphics performance and this gives me reason to believe that one day Ubuntu-based distros will see a great increase - or at least a return to their pre-regression levels. But it may be some time in occuring. The "HOWTO: Jaunty Intel Graphics Performance Guide" thread at Ubuntuforums has grown to
117 pages. Oddly, it seems that what proves to be the best of the three suggested solutions for one person may be the worst for another - even if that other person has the same hardware. Which causes me to wonder if perhaps other factors are... a factor, such as the BIOS that a particular computer has. And in that case, I'm screwed from the start because my BIOS is a joke.