I’m the same way. Fuctionality is only as good as the compatability to the current game I’m playing.

Get your 2nd 70 yet?

I had my second 70 before my game card ran out last month. My second toon was in her late 50’s when TBC hit so getting her to 70 wasn’t that hard. Got two flying mounts already too. I’m working on my third with a Warlock in his mid-50’s at the moment.

Hmm. Never thought about this before. How do you set up two monitors? Just splitting the signal would give you the same thing on each one, so that can’t be right....

Ah, that is the cunning thing about Windows.  It isn’t done by splitting the signal (because yes, you’d get clones).  Windows can handle multiple graphic cards and clever stuff like that. what you effectively get is a extra large screen, and you can shift stuff between the two- similar to thos big screens actually made up of lots of little screens.

Most mid-range to high-end video cards these days have two outputs and will drive two monitors just fine. My eVGA e-GeForce 7600GT 256MB is one such card having two DVI outputs. I have my 21” monitor hooked up as the primary display running at 1280x1024 and my old 17” monitor that I use for LAN parties hooked up running at 1024x768 resolution. Then I just go into the video driver control panel and tell it to go into Dual View with my desktop stretched onto the second screen.

Then I setup WoW to run in a window(as opposed to a separate screen as per usual) and eliminate the windowborder, both options are under the Video settings in game. This allows me to move the mouse off the right edge and onto the other screen. When I don’t need the second monitor I just shut it off.

Ironically, when running in dual mode it’s the one time that I make use of Internet Explorer. I have IE set up with all my WoW links and set to open on the second monitor so I use it when I’m playing.

Well my Vista experiment is continuing on.  I have been using it for the last four months at work, and I actually enjoy a lot of the features it has to offer.  So much that I would even recommend it to others.

With one caveat.  If you plan on doing a lot of administrative work Vista will annoy you, even with the UAC thing (Cancel or Allow popup) disabled.  But if you can get past that there are some really cool features I have came across.

Searching from the start menu - no longer do you have to click through four sub levels to open a program.  Just type the name of the program in the search bar (located at the bottom of the start menu) and as soon as Vista finds it you can hit enter, or arrow down to your program and hit enter.  You don’t have to fuck around with a dog or sit and wait, or even click on search before you can search.  Just click on the Start menu and start typing.

Live preview - Open up My Computer, make it full screen.  Then under view there is an option were you can turn on live preview.  What this does is give you a live preview of any documents you click on.  You can even see multiple spreadsheets within one Excel document.  The only downside is that if companies haven’t created a live preview for their file type then you get no preview.  But if you pay for the full version of Foxit Reader you can download the live previewer for PDF files and it works with Vista.  Live preview of PDFs kicks a lot of ass!

Vista mobility - not sure of the exact name, but it gives you all the important laptop functions right in one area (I think there are about 6 or 8 of them in this one area).  For instance you can choose presentation from the drop down box and then Vista shuts off your screensaver, and will stop popups, or anything else from inhibiting your presentation.

After getting into the guts of Vista there are a lot of cool features, but ultimately I think compatibility and Administrative annoyances are still going to hinder sales.  At least till a service pack runs out.  For all the cool features I found, I still have no desire to switch over from Linux and shell out $400 some dollars to get all of these features.

Speaking of Civ4. I only play it when my friends are over and we are all playing together. But when I play Civ by my self. I tend to prefer Civ3 to Civ4. Its not the game play or anything like that. But for me, I just don’t like how that incorporated religion into the game. It’s such a huge part of the game, I don’t find that to be historically acurate. One of the ideas that I really like about Civ, especially the original Civ, was every time you learned a tech it would give you a brief read out of how that tech had a documented historic effect on human civilazation advancment. Well now in Civ4 they have religion in the techs, which I find disturbing. Of course they no longer have the read out after each time you learn a tech. But for personal reasons it bothers me. Ahh well… /shrug/