I hate technology

I hate Vista, and I hate Adobe, and I hate Dell, and I hate NVidia.  Note I may not actually *hate* any of these things.  But they thoroughly frustrate me.

So the Antec power supply that I had bought to fix my Video card problems did not help me because the motherboard that came with my Dell Precision 490 requires both a 20 and a 24pin power connector. Lame as crap. So I returned the Antec power supply (still waiting for the moolah to come back my way even after all this time) and ended up buying myself a Thermaltake Power Express which is a PSU specifically for video cards which sits in an empty DVD drive slot. This is a product that I had no idea existed, but actually did the trick quite nicely. It says that it’s supposed to take the 24 pin.. but for some reason my computer wouldn’t work when I tried that… I tried the 20 pin however and it works like a charm.

So the video card now works, however, the Nvidia Geforce GTX 280’s heat up rather harshly. For some reason the Dell Precision 490 is set to have the fans really low, and thus when I start running Folding @ Home, the hard drives start heating up to 50C in no time at all. To get around this, I’ve had to remove the side of my computer case. Dell relinquishes control of the fans and lets me set them as fast as I want with the side removed and so I am able to keep everything at a reasonable temperature, but it now sounds like I have a freight train under my desk. I’m glad I have headphones.

Or do I?

For some reason I turned on my computer this morning only to discover that there was no sound. No windows start-up sound, no YouTube, no iTunes, no Windows Media Player, no Guild Wars, no test sounds for my sound card. Everything appeared to look fine… I could hear myself through my microphone, and the drivers all appeared to be functioning and up-to-date. But no sound. Five hours later, after uninstalling and installing and rebooting and wanting to stab myself in the eyes, I came across a forum with the tip that solved the problem. Simply go to control panel, Double-Click on the Sound Icon, single-click the sound card to highlight them, Click on Properties (bottom right corner). Magically after opening this menu, everything worked! Not impressed.

Speaking of not impressed, Photoshop CS4 sucks. Like really really bad. Seriously. If you consider switching to it… reconsider. It will kill every dream you ever had. The brushes lag, the zooming animation is horrible, the ipodesque panning is horrible, you can’t resize your various tool shelves, the 64bit version is crippled and will crash when you try to use text, gpu accelleartion is gimped in XPx64 and on Macs, and the 32 bit version doesn’t appear to allow you to use more than 3 gb of ram.

Stick with CS3.