Shiny as Chrome
Alright, yesterday I downloaded Google's new browser, Chrome. It's kinda nice, Google being such a large company, doing everything, and now even making a browser.
At first glance, the browser looked kinda weird. Very slick, custom themed, e.g. no default windoze layout. This is positive. The fact that it doesn't have a lot of bullshit is very appealing to me, at least.
The real cool thing about it is that it's multi-processed. This means every tab runs in a separate process, which both makes it multi-threaded in a nice way, as well as making sure that if a tab should crash (whcih is very unlikely, but can happen), the whole browser doesn't crash.
The download functions are also pretty slick, as well as being efficient. And the browser looks good!
The main reason that made me stay with it (Yes! I actually thrashed Opera and made Chrome my default browser!), was that it uses VERY little memory. In fact less than Opera. It's also extremely fast.
Even though it is still beta, I recommend everyone to go and get it! As a little side note, after one day, the browser already has 3% of browser usage in the world. BEAT THAT!
Graphics…
Allright, it looks like my PC is breaking down step by step. A year or so ago, one of my hard drives smoked, same goes for my mouse, then my keyboard, and now it appears my graphics card is saying goodbye too.
Well, it still works, but it looks like the memory is being fucked. I noticed this while playing a HL2 mod called Age of Chivalry, pretty cool idea, actually. Well, suddenly my FPS dropped from about 25 to 10, I had no idea what the cause was. A quick investigation using the +showbudget command revealed the "Swap Buffers" field going through the sky. At first I thought this was because of my RAM or hard drive, and notcied my hard drive was excessively fragmented. I tested several mroe games, including a couple mroe mods, Garry's Mod, and even HL2. They had the exact same problem. So I reinstalled everything and reformatted...
And guess what? It's the same problem still. After some more investigation I found it to have something to do with fillrate.
It's not a surpirse my GFX card is having issues. It's pretty old, a GeForce 6800. But it hasn't had the problem before!
I'm getting kinda pissed. Just... Pissed. I guess I'll have to test some more apps before drawing a conclusion, but it looks as if I need a new rig...