There's no balky PC you can't make worse by putting Vista on it

Wednesday was such a long day, it ended on Friday morning. That's going some.

After sorting out a new set of keys for the new temporary lodger - I've let the spare room for 2wk - I headed over to twistedanimator's in Leytonstone to sort out some problems. She's got a 2nd broadband connection in, via TalkTalk, and wants that set up, plus there's a new SATA300 disk controller to go in her Mac. First, though, there was a new CPU to try in one of the gaming machines I've built her. A dual-core Athlon64 3800+.

First try, she got a socket AM2 one by mistake - that needs to go back for a refund. My bad; I was insufficiently exact in my purchasing advice and Froogle's results change in a matter of hours.

It worked and started, but the PC died after 10min or so. I've swapped the motherboard - free replacements from Misco. I've swapped the chip - exchanging elderly single-core 3500+ for new dual-core 3800+. I've replaced AMD's basic OEM HSF with a whizzy Artic Freezer 64 Pro, winner of an award in CustomPC. (I used to write for them, know the team and think they're pretty clueful.) Plaudit to Aria PCs, who were not only one of the cheapest vendors on Froogle, they shipped so fast the unit was received the evening of the day after ordering. That's pretty good.

So I swapped the PSU. Result: perfect stability. Which does make me wonder if maybe the M/Bs and indeed older CPUs weren't at fault after all, but hey, new M/Bs cost no money and the chips were, by current standards, a bit past it.

So now, only 6mth after I started, Lisa has two working games PCs. W00t. Next step, after I have all 3 running and stable, will be to upgrade her various 3-4yo graphics cards to something modern and fast. For games, a perfectly-good 100% functional SLI array of 2 x 3yo cards is not nearly enough. The pair of GeForce 6800 Ultras - state of the art in 2004 or so - now registers in 3DMark less than a frame a second in some of the tests. Indeed, as low as 0.7FPS. Not impressive.

What's most worrying me now is that some of the newest and whizziest games are threatening to become DirectX 10 only, or even Vista only where they don't require DX10. These first 2 boxes fly in XP: 256MB+ graphics, 2G RAM, 80G PATA boot drives with dedicated 10-20G swap drives, DVD burners. I bet they'll be absolute dogs running Vista, though.

My first impressions of Vista have been extremely negative. It's clunky, dog-slow, the additions and new features are poor and lacklustre and it's not anywhere near as pretty as I expected from all the billing and cooing I've read online.

I'm much amused to see that reports matching my experience are now proliferating online. The latest I've seen is from Sam Varghese on ITwire Australia. Now, he's clearly a harsh critic - his writeup on the latest Ubuntu is pretty vicious too - but I can only agree with all his points.

Indeed, Micros~1 is getting worried about the poor reception of Vista and is embarking on a campaign to dissuade people from waiting for SP1. I confess much amusement.

Mystic monuments and chirpy chavs

I wasn't going to Leytonstone just to fix PCs, though. I also was planning to go along with twistedanimator and some mates to Stonehenge for the Solstice.

I have got involved with a number of women of a pagan sort of bent now and the notion of attending a Solstice or equinox or something at Britain's most famous ancient monument has come up several times. When I learned that Lisa was planning to go, I asked if I could tag along and she readily assented.

Two more attendees were coming all the way from the Netherlands to join us, so we waited until they were off the ferry to leave. Got to the general vicinity at about 3am, to be greeted by diversions, roadblocks, a major police presence and parking arrangements to befit a major rock festival or something. We walked for about a mile to the site itself.

I've been to Stonehenge before. In the rain, natch, to befit a properly English experience. I trooped round the stones at a distance of a dozen metres or so, fenced away. It was both moving and somehow pathetic: from even a small distance, this great monument is quickly reduced to a few standing stones.

I've never got so close before, though.

The region around the stones was thronged, as you might expect. Something like 20,000 people had attended. A tiny handful of new age types in robes; mostly, it was teenage to early twenty somethings with a scattering of older people, senior citizens and kids.

And most of them were hammered. Lots of beer in evidence - well, I say beer, I mean cans of cheap lager - and quite a lot lots of spliffs, together, of course, with garments and accessories evangelising same. We had to force our way into the crowd to try to get into the circle itself, and once we did, it was so rammed that my efforts to take photos in the predawn light were largely confounded by continual jostling and shoving and barging. Some came out amusingly psychedelic, though. Lisa should have some photos up soon. Expect to see me looking old and grumpy. :¬)

The atmosphere was very good, though. Very friendly and laid-back. At first, I confess, I got really annoyed with being pushed around by hordes of inebriated chav children. (Chavs never really grow up: unpleasant and offensive children grow into larger but otherwise more or less identical forms until a middle-aged transformation into fat, bald offensive-cab-driver types.) However, as the light grew and I learned to work around the problem, I got some half-decent pics and calmed down and started to enjoy myself.

It was completely impossible to see the actual sunrise, what with the crowds - standing on every available fallen stone and blocking any sight of the horizon - and the typical English weather: a warm, sunny and clear afternoon became a drizzly, lightly overcast night and early morning.

After the sun was (theoretically) up, the crowds quickly started to disperse - though it wasn't immediately apparent, such was the density. By half 6 or so, we could wander around and between the stones, snapping pix of the many remaining revellers. We wandered off and snacked at some of the few food stalls, then drove off to a quiet Wiltshire layby for a couple of hours' sleep.

And then off to Avebury. I've been there several times before, but not seen so much of the town. There's more to it than I realised and it's lovely: intensely picturesque. We chatted and dozed in the circle for a while until the rain began again, then retired to the Red Lion, the only inn inside a stone circle in the world, for lunch - which was very slow in arriving and of fairly poor quality when it came.

After this, we decided that we were too tired to head off to Glastonbury so headed home, for hours of joy in the intermittent jams of the M25.

Many Phenomena—wars, plagues, sudden audits—have been advanced as evidence for the hidden hand of Satan in the affairs of Man, but whenever students of demonology get together the M25 London orbital motorway is generally agreed to be among the top contenders for Exhibit A.

Where they go wrong, of course, is in assuming that the wretched road is evil simply because of the incredible carnage and frustration it engenders every day.

In fact, very few people on the face of the planet know that the very shape of the M25 forms the sigil odegra in the language of the Black Priesthood of Ancient Mu, and means "Hail the Great Beast, Devourer of Worlds." The thousands of motorists who daily fume their way around its serpentine lengths have the same effect as water on a prayer wheel, grinding out an endless fog of low-grade evil to pollute the metaphysical atmosphere for scores of miles around.

It was one of Crowley's better achievements. It had taken years to achieve, and had involved three computer hacks, two break-ins, one minor bribery and, on one wet night when all else had failed, two hours in a squelchy field shifting the marker pegs a few but occultly incredibly significant meters. When Crowley had watched the first thirty-mile-long tailback he'd experienced the lovely warm feeling of a bad job well done.

It had earned him a commendation.

Summary

Overall, it was an interesting experience and I'm glad I've done it. I'd quite like to try the midwinter one now, too, which androctonus fancies as well. Far fewer crowds, then, so one might hope for only the purists.

However, even though I am generally as receptive to the numinous and spiritual as a concrete bollard, there was no hope of that there yesterday. It was a giant piss-up in a field without even the excuse of a few bands or a load of bikes to ogle or anything.

Apparently, Avebury offers free camping and had about a thousand celebrants. That sounds rather a lot more like it. Might try that next year.

I'm very, very glad that I got to enter the circle. From within, it's very impressive; the bluestone blocks tower over you, radiating age and stolid endurance. I feel honoured to have touched them.

So: fun, but entirely mundane and quotidian. Overrun by the legions of the housing estates, the spawn of a welfare state that makes breeding an easier, more lucrative and more fun alternative to work.