The Design and Implementation of laffer1

I played Wolfenstein for the first time tonight.  As a fan of Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Wolfenstein 3D, I figured this would be a great game.  The play control is significantly differently from RTCW.  It doesn't feel "id" style.  I was aware of the differences before purchasing.  The game is still enjoyable even though it's not another RTCW.  

So far I've only played single player.  The in game movies and graphics are amazing.  It seems to be taking advantage of my crossfirex configuration and multicore CPU.  It detected my system as "high" performance.  I'm quite happy with the speed and graphics.  The 5.1 surround has a few quirks.  If you're facing directly at someone, the audio is very quiet.  If you get at an angle, you can hear them well through one ear (aka one speaker).  

I was quite concerned about game performance due to the terrible quakewars gameplay on my system.  This game runs much better than quakewars or ET on this system.  

I did experience a video driver crash when exiting, but the display driver recovered ok.  This maybe fixed in a newer catalyst driver. 

It's not crisp like RTCW or Half-life; everything is "blurry" or antialiased to the extreme.  

I've been using Windows 7 on two computers.  The first is a laptop.  Battery life and general usage is similar to windows vista home basic on the system. Windows update crashed on the first run and there were some errors during the installer, but after I got it patched it seems to work.

The second computer is a system Caryn and I have been setting up for her gaming.  It's specifically to play Aion and Half-life 2.  She essentially needed a "steam" system and did not want to pollute her Mac with windows.  The system BSOD'd today because of the cpu frequency adjustments for power management using EIST.  It's a pentium d 805 chip and windows 7 doesn't seem to like power management on this rig.

The directions for installing windows 7 are vague and in my opinion incorrect.  If you try to use it like windows 98 style upgrades, it works.  I think there were some problems with Microsoft's technical writers on this release.  

I wonder if windows 8 will be windows 7 sp2?  I'm already waiting for the next release and it just came out.  I feel like many people did about vista.  It's just not ready for prime time.  Service packs are a must.  

The worst feature of windows 7 isn't the buggy situations.  I think it's the click count.  From an HCI perspective, one should never need to click several times to do anything.  It's just pathetic.  Everything is hidden several clicks away from menus, to windows open in applications.  It makes task switching slow.  The vista style start menu is still there and i find it quite inconvenient.  The control panel is even more clunky and slow to find things.  

The hype behind this release has many people thinking microsoft did something innovative.  This is not a windows 95 or even XP release.  There is no big jump from vista.  I must say microsoft did learn from some of their mistakes with marketing vista, but not with the development of vista or the quality issues with vista.  

I understand how hard it is to release an operating system.  I give them some slack, but frankly the marketing push on this release has left a sour taste in my mouth for anything microsoft.  I feel that vista was more innovative than windows 7. I also feel like microsoft flat out lied to me.

The worst part is the windows 7 fan boys who keep trying to convince me that it's some amazing release.  I may grow to like it better, but it's not nearly as good as snow leopard on the Mac.  That release was a disappointment in terms of GUI improvements, but as a programmer I appreciate the under the hood tweaks.  

At the end of the day, i don't see a reason to upgrade my desktop and reinstall everything yet.  I will switch to 7 eventually, but not today.