Exams and a broken Geforce

Thursday 26th April, 2007 @ 12:17 am

Had my first two exams, Human-Computer Interaction and Distributed Systems.

Human-Computer Interaction was yesterday and went pretty well. Was nice to see that the lecturer keeps up to date, with questions about robot tour guides, the iPhone (which I predicted would come up as a case study several days before the exam) and David Cameron’s blog.

Distributed Systems was today. I had some disastrous past-paper run-throughs yesterday with Duncan and Alan which left me in a suitably foul mood, convinced of my beckoning failure today. Thankfully the exam today actually went alright. Could have gone better but could have done worse. Some pretty stupid ambiguous questions and insisting on covering every topic in any subquestion meaning you couldn’t get away with not learning any topics. Thanks Bjorn!

If doing stupid finals wasn’t enough pain, my nVidia GeForce 6800GT decided to break on me. I’d been planning on upgrading my system this summer so, as I kinda need my PC working properly for doing my Google Summer of Code project, it looks like my upgrade is gonna happen a lot sooner i.e. when my exams finish.

At the moment I’m thinking:

A nice new aluminium case
A nVidia GeForce 8800 GS or GTX
The cheapest Intel Core Duo with 4MB cache
A nice motherboard, preferably with memtest86 and some easy overclocking capabilities
A Western Digital Raptor hard disk
2GB RAM
A 500GB or bog-standard HDD

Hopefully this will sate my desire to play the latest games and actually have a working system!

Posted in Computer Games, My Life