Oh yes, I really couldn’t help myself. I’ve been glaring at those 24″ screens for too long now to resist it anymore. I’ve been running 24″ at work for some time, and really enjoy the extra size. And it’s been pretty lousy sitting at home staring at the same resolution of 1920×1200 at my laptop 17″ screen. So now when Dell had a good deal at their new 2407wfp screen I jumped on the train and ordered one which arrived yesterday.

I’m already in love. It’s so pleasant to work in front of. Now my upgrading frenzy will have to rest for a while so I actually get some time over to get some work done in the evenings.

The refurbished workspace in my apartment with the new baby.

Luckily I got the rev A03 of the screen, which all of the problems that I’ve read about with earlier revisions of vertical banding and such are nowhere to be seen, the image quality is as close to perfect as it can be, according to me and my preferences.

Oh well, back to doing some artwork now… until next time…

Weee, I got around and upgraded my old workstation this week. I’ve been running on a Dell Inspiron 9300 with a Pentium M 2.0GHz processor for about a year now. It has served me well, but I have been drooling to get a Core Duo processor since it’s release. And now when the Core 2 Duos where available I decided it was time for an upgrade.

Anyway, I got my new Dell Inspiron 9400 the other day with a Core 2 Duo processor and some other goodies, and have spent the last days configuring it. It does take some time to set up all my software from scratch on a new machine, but finally everything is perfect, just the way I like it.

The creative corner in my apartment.

The new Core 2 Duo processor really is a dream come true. It renders about three times faster than my old PM 2.0. I haven’t had this huge leap in rendering performance since the middle 90’s in the Lightwave 4.0 era, when I made the jump from my trusty old Amiga 4000T with a 060 processor to my first Windows based workstation, a Pentium 133MHz machine which were running circles around my Amiga when using Lightwave.

Now more than ten years later, that feeling has emerged again. It’s a joy to press the F9 button to render and have blazingly fast results pumped out to the screen.
Some quick numbers I did to compare the Pentium M 2.0 and Core 2 Duo 2.0 when rendering the same scene in a couple of 3D applications on both the PM and the C2D, both machines are equipped with 2GB RAM.

• LightWave 9; PM: 39 minutes - C2D: 15 minutes.
• Modo 202; PM: 4 minutes - C2D: 1 minute 32 seconds.
• Vue 5 Infinite; PM: 7 minutes 42 seconds - C2D: 3 minutes 13 seconds.

Wonderful difference, and will make a big impact on my workflow. I couldn’t be happier with this upgrade. Also the GeForce 7900 GS card in the machine makes the OpenGL viewports a joy to throw real heavy meshes at.
Just drooling over a 24″ screen to go with this setup on my desk sometime in the future.

Setting up music: Anna Ternheim - To Be Gone (EP)

I have had some serious hardware trouble the last week. First did one of my storage hard drives just die on me. And bad luck usually just doesn’t end up with one thing, so just a few hours later my CPU decided to die on me as well. Can I say panic?
Well, I managed to rescue all files from my hard drive, and then I kicked it hard down the dumpster as soon as all the files where saved.

The CPU, well, not very much to do. I started getting CPU hardware failure reports from my OS, and then the computer hardly couldn’t manage to boot up. Got a replacement CPU two days ago, and then the system where as rock solid as ever again and runs very smoothly now. Spent the last day reorganizing the files and cleaning up the mess that occurred during this disaster.
Well I’m back in business again, and will start posting work in progress images starting tomorrow or Monday. Oh well, life has it’s ups and downs. Just gotta go along with it.

I have just been chilling tonight (as well as yesterday). You know, celebrating I have my working environment in order again. Good food, good beer, good company! Ah, life is pretty good after all.

I actually just got back and wanted to do a little checkup on my stuff before calling it a night with the computer. Right now I’m listening to some wonderful lounge music, and enjoying my beloved Gin.

Chill Out Music: Jean Michel Jarre - Geometry of Love