Now I haven't booted my machine to Windows in quite some time (over a year), so I downloaded SP2 as I don't really care what it breaks as all my real applications run in Linux. I then unplugged my machine from the network and rebooted. I giggled a bit at my MOTD "Why are you using Windows?".

Anyway the SP2 installation was smooth as a baby's bum. It whined that I didn't have an anti-virus package so I installed Rhodes' FSecure. It still didn't recognise that I now had an anti-virus package and I manually turned that warning off when I realised it was just an advertising ploy. I had a look around the new "Security Center" which was pretty straight forward. Apart from some icon changes and better warning in IE the only other time I have noticed a difference is when I started Quake3 and it asked if the application could open a port. Nice. However, I have heard other stories particularly relating to SP2 turning raw sockets off.

Next I turned the machine off, installed my new graphics card and rebooted. This time with networking. After 20 minutes to download some shiny new NVidia Detonator drivers I fired up Doom3. My excitement was lessened somewhat when it took about 15 minutes to fix some minor graphics problems. Once that was done, I positioned my 5.1 surround properly and got into the game. It was the middle of the night and Glenn was there with me. I was scared, so very scared. It got to a point where I thought I was seeing things, in the game. Virtual Reality eh?

After that I went through all my old demos. Particularly those from Farbraush and Haujobb. FSAA makes things very pretty. I also managed to get 100fps in Quake3 at 1024x768, full detail in timedemo 1. Wow.