The next feature has to be one of the best. With the prices of CD writers
these days, it is not terribly hard to afford one. Some days, I could not
operate without one. M$ has included in the "send to" menu, a feature
that lets you send a file straight to your burner, actually in a cache folder.
To complete the burn process, you right click your burner and click "write
to cd". Simple as that. Now I don’t have a clue as to which writers are
compatible, (refer to hcl) but my IDE Plextor 12/10/32a worked just fine. Even
with a cdrw.
On to game performance!!!
What kind of OS review woudl this be without a "game" test? Well, I
did not go "all out" to run a slew of tests, but I did run the tried
and true Q3 demo. Along with a SiSoftSandra2001
memory benchmark, just for fun.
The next pic shows the results from the Sandra memory benchmark. Not exactly
what I had expected. The poor results are an indication of the bugs and
"dirty" code that needs to "polished".
Getting Q3 to run was not a problem. The stock drivers were. Although I could
play Q3, the "stock" drivers, which are some M$/Nvidia mutant, I was
unable to change resolution in the game with these. So I did not attempt to run
the demo on them. Next, i installed the Nvidia detenator 530 drivers. This set
of drivers has worked well for me in win2k, no bluescreens and very good
performance. I was able to change my resolution in the game and run the demo
tests. You might not like what you are about to see!
As for 3DMark200, well, that’s another sad story.
Stock M$ Whistler drivers = 2062
Nvidia 530 drivers = 1869
I was not impressed at all with the way Whistler handles 3d
gaming. I’m sure the drivers had a nice part of it, not being optimised for
Whistler, but, the stock drivers should have done a better job.
As for installing Whistler, it was a breeze, it found everything
except my modem (old isa). I don’t think I will keep Whistler on my machine very
long. It does me no good right now anyway, just for the sake of writing this
article. For those of you who have not yet had a chance to catch a peek at
Whistler, I hope I have brought you some valuable info. I don’t want to
discourage anyone, this is still a beta, and M$ has more money that anyone to
get the bugs worked out.
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