Originally there was no plan to head down to Raleigh last week, Vinney was on her spring break but I had a ton of work to tend to up here so we had decided not to go. But, given Vinney's incredibly hectic schedule this semester, she needed to get out of CT so we decided to head down for a couple of days. That couple of days turned into five when some NDAs got shifted around for me, meaning I could enjoy the comforts of Raleigh a bit longer. We spent a good amount of time trying to get somewhere with a lot of the initial house decisions, but ended up being a bit overwhelmed by it all. Personally it's tough for me to envision individual details like tiles, bricks, etc... on a large scale, so I end up having absolutely no clue of how things will look, just a general sense of what I like. Luckily, Vinney and I have identical tastes so I rely on her to be the more visual one.

We had a great time in Raleigh with family and friends, unfortunately a downside is that we came back to piles upon piles of work - most of which is the subject of today's blog.

I'm well into the testing for a World of Warcraft performance article; I'm hoping to make this article all encompassing, looking at CPU, GPU and even Mac performance in WoW. If there are any particular requests, fire away and I'll see if I can get them included. I've tried the game and it's not nearly as addicting as I thought it would be, but then again I guess I never really got into things like Diablo much. I need another day or so to finish up the WoW tests.

I've got the ASUS Pentium M adapter test bed all setup and ready, I'm simply waiting on a CPU so I can begin testing on that. My Pentium M 770 (2.13GHz) should be here tomorrow, which will greenlight me for the tests - I'm hoping to have that review turned around by Friday.

In between those two I've got the Theater 550 project as well as another MCE article I've had on the backburner. I doubt I'll be able to get a thorough Theater 550 review out this week, but I will keep working away at it as time goes on.

With OS X Tiger nearing its release, I am also working on my review of that OS. I've been playing with the developer builds and have been taking notes of my likes/dislikes and overall experience over the past few months. I needed to make sure that my Tiger test bed was something I'd use every day, and while I wasn't willing to install a beta OS on my main work machine, I made the sacrifice and did so on my notebook thus ensuring that I would at least use Tiger in contrast to Panther every day. The results are interesting and were a bit frustrating to gather, given the usual issues with any beta OS. If the rumors are true and Tiger will ship next month, then you'll see an article here on AT around the same time.

I haven't given up on a regular schedule for this blog, it's just not quite there yet.
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  • hopejr - Wednesday, March 23, 2005 - link

    At work we're developing for Tiger (specifically voice-over), but as of yet have only been able to watch our supervisor use it as we technically aren't supposed to yet. It looks quite nice. All I've seen though is voice-over and the dashboard, to the extent that they are shown on the Apple website. I'm looking forward to actually using it (whenever that will be).
  • Ghandi - Tuesday, March 22, 2005 - link

    lol, I love Anand's job, "Ok well my EARTH SIMULATOR super computer should be arriving shortly" rofl
  • Anonymous - Tuesday, March 22, 2005 - link

    Could you compare an almost equivalently clocked (like 1.86 vs 1.8) Pentium M on the 855PM chipset vs the new Alvisio chipset? I know the graphics cards will have to be different, but it would be interesting to see if the system improved as a whole.
  • Jono - Tuesday, March 22, 2005 - link

    Great to hear about Tiger. AT is always my go-to place for info, so I'm on pins and needles. Always glad to hear of another convert to the "cult of Mac." On a side note: Tiger is supposed to have built in distrubuted computing via XGrid - kinda curious to see how well that functions. Having a 3d modeler/animater for a wife has yielded some rendering issues that are always getting in the way. Keep up the good work guys!!
  • Patrick - Tuesday, March 22, 2005 - link

    Sweet! Can't wait to read the Tiger review. Can you at least give us a thumbs up or a thumbs down on it? Ahh, who am I kidding. I'll buy it as soon as it comes out, regardless. ;-)
  • Eug - Tuesday, March 22, 2005 - link

    "If the rumors are true and Tiger will ship next month, then you'll see an article here on AT around the same time."

    Oops. Missed that line. So it's the rumours.

    Regardless, I'm looking forward to it. Not being a paying developer, I have not seen Tiger yet in the flesh, just the various screengrabs online, and Steve Jobs' demos, etc.

    Apple's gonna have a hard time keeping up with the Pentium 2.13 though. Hopefully, a G5 PowerBook (for the fall?) will be in spitting distance of Pentium M performance and power characteristics.
  • Eug - Tuesday, March 22, 2005 - link

    Looking forward to the OS X Tiger and Pentium M reviews.

    Hmmm... Either you have inside info or you're buying into the rumours (or a bit of both), but I'm glad to hear Tiger is coming sooner rather than later.

    I'm still amused that your main work desktop and (main?) work laptop are Macs. ;)

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