Oh god how did this get here I'm not good with Dells
I'm a bad dork. For the first time since my parents bought a Tandy 1000 and then some Acer with a Pentium 60, I've purchased a computer instead of building my own from parts. I've been running my last homebuilt computer for over five years now and loading a simple video now takes five steps:
1) Shutdown all other programs
2) Fire up Task Manager
3) Kill any rogue process that is taking up more than 10% of the CPU (I'm looking at you, trustedinstaller.exe! Hey, svchost, pipe down!)
4) Fire up the video and pause it after it thrashes for 20 seconds like a fish outta water.
5) Promote the wmplayer.exe priority to High, but NOT real-time. High allows the player to suck up enough resources to play a video properly, real-time seems to override the scheduler causing... problems.
After watching the first four seasons of The Sopranos in this fashion, I decided enough was enough and started trolling for deals on new computers. After realizing that buying a pre-made system was cheaper than assembling one, I focused on Dell deals. Finally, I picked up this system for only $520:
I barely booted the computer before reformatting the drive and installing a fresh copy of Vista Ultimate. So far, I'm happy with the box and the 2 GB of RAM I have coming my way will only improve the situation.
1) Shutdown all other programs
2) Fire up Task Manager
3) Kill any rogue process that is taking up more than 10% of the CPU (I'm looking at you, trustedinstaller.exe! Hey, svchost, pipe down!)
4) Fire up the video and pause it after it thrashes for 20 seconds like a fish outta water.
5) Promote the wmplayer.exe priority to High, but NOT real-time. High allows the player to suck up enough resources to play a video properly, real-time seems to override the scheduler causing... problems.
After watching the first four seasons of The Sopranos in this fashion, I decided enough was enough and started trolling for deals on new computers. After realizing that buying a pre-made system was cheaper than assembling one, I focused on Dell deals. Finally, I picked up this system for only $520:
- Core 2 Duo E6550 (2.33 GHz)
- 1 GB RAM
- 80 GB SATA drive
- DVD-ROM
- 20" LCD
I barely booted the computer before reformatting the drive and installing a fresh copy of Vista Ultimate. So far, I'm happy with the box and the 2 GB of RAM I have coming my way will only improve the situation.