Yep, you're right about the Atlanta temps...summer gets here and the weather forecast becomes a repeating lack of rain...the weather has to have more variation where you live. Sounds like your hubby adapted pretty well from Alaska, though. For me, it's not so bad. I get my t-shirt damp, that's for sure but I usually knock off about 2-3 in the afternoon.

I don't mind mowing. But our 19-year-old kid (my step son) is pretty lazy when it comes to doing anything. Even though we offer hiim $28 to mow the grass (which takes about 1 hour 15 minutes), half the time he says he doesn't feel good. I keep telling him to let me know next time he gets a job offer for $25 / hour.

And, yep, the army probably "taught" me to be on time. You got in trouble if you were late to formations. I guess that's a good thing, though. I did well in the army, very well, I think. Several medals for service and selected for the sergeants major acadamy at a very young age (18 years in) but I turned it down and retired. And over half my military career was spent in the intel field (I even worked at NSA for a while) and I was trained in computers from the beginning. So, the army was good to me.

I'm so happy right now!!! No, computer hasn't arrived.... But vue 9.5 infinite just arrived!!!!!! Hubby tortured me for several looooong minutes, taking his time opening the box, then the case, reading EVERYTHING... And then sitting there with it in his lap before FINALLY handing the case over to me.... I can't stop hugging it! :)

you lucky thing you !!!! (not that I'm at all jealous - 8.4 still works :sad: )

chuckles lucky me... I have to wait another week for the computer that can run it! But yes, I'm lucky! I have to pay hubby back for the computer over time, though lol. But I'm soooo excited! I cant stop bouncing! Been running 7 infinite for soooo long and drooling over the new versions... And all that they can do :). I finally get to play with them! Yay!!!!!! And now i'll have a computer that can run vue without me ripping my hair out two minutes after the program FINALLY loads! Ahhhh, bliss :)

Congrats on the birth of your...oh, wait a minute, software, not a baby. Sorry. wink

I couldn't justify Inf 9--too much of a putz with the other versions, I'm afraid. So I got Complete 9 for $199. They wanted something like $700 to go from Inf 6 -- Inf 9.

My wait will be over today!!! Or it better be, else heads will roll at fed ex, cus we scheduled the delivery for today ( it was supposed to arrive Tuesday, but we were 300+ miles away)... I'm now doing everything I can not to jump outta my skin with excitement! Cleaning house, unpacking and putting away the truck-load of stuff we had in storage at my parents...(amazing how much crap one can accumulate!)... bouncie bouncie BOUNCIE-THUD! .... Rubs top of head. Mmm, maybe shouldn't bouncie so much? Lol. Ok, enough fooling around.... Back to dealing with unpacking/cleaning while I wait (im)patiently!

The Alien has landed!!! She's making herself at home on my desk... Hubby finished hooking up cords (that was hilarious to watch) and is now putting all the things I need on it... AVG, Vue, Poser, Firefox, etc. No, I haven't gotten to touch her yet... At least hubby let me cut the tape to get her out of her "spaceship" lol. FedEx guy thought she was a new skateboard and couldn't figure out why she was so heavy lol! Soon, I will get to play! What's amazing is after the first reboot, the keyboard glow changed color from blue to red to match the glow on the tower! WOW! Yes, pics will be forthcoming, once I allow hubby to put iTunes on her and can get the pics off my phone! She's soooooo beautiful... In a strange way! Lol. She even came with her own alienhead mousepad! eyes huge. I was glad to see they even threw in the Win7 disk! Oops, he needs help again lol....

LOL...I'm guessing you at least got to smell the newness. That's always nice. :)

Yup... Even been allowed to drool a little now... Been allowed to touch the mouse, too... Other than that... Nothing lol. But, watching hubby install programs... WOW. She is FAST! The entire adobe creative suite 4 took only 7 minutes... On my old machine - 30! Don't get me started with how long on some other machines I've had to struggle to work with over the past year! We even discovered how to change all the wicked cool lighting effects - not just on the tower, but keyboard & mouse, too! Had a great 15 minutes just playing with that lol. But right now, hubby is using it to try to hunt up drivers to fix a dinosaur of a laptop that belongs to housemate's sister... Long story, but in trying to fix problems, he created more (housemate, not hubby). After over an hour of hubby getting frustrated by drivers not installing, he FINALLY tells me the name of the "missing" file... Microsoft.net. Yep... That lappy is one big headache. I had a computer I had to do a complete wipe of the HD before and had XP... I had problems with Microsoft.net file missing. In my case, once I fixed it, it just refused to work whenever I tried to install office. Dunno why... But I finally gave up, set office aside (and lost the $$ I spent on it cus the disc ended up damaged... Note to all of you... Do NOT set cd's, dvd's, or the like on top of a hot heater....). Anyways, letting hubby do his best to fix that stupid laptop... And trying NOT to shove him outta my chair so I can see how fast Vue flies!

hi melikia,

welcome to the high end club :). Some tips:

• install HWmonitor from CPUID or similar (freeware), to check out your CPU and GPU temperatures when rendering out.

• use some RAM for RAM-disk (B:), and set the windows TEMP to that. Vue writes / reads scene info to TEMP and it speeds up things a lot. There are some nice free/cheap RAM-disk utilities around. And every start you get a clean temp.

all the best
aRtBee
running: i7-990X @ 4GHz, Win7-64, 24GbRAM, 3x2Tb disk, 560TiOC, PoserPro2010 and VueComplete 64-bit. Great stuff.

It has liquid cooling; it also came with a thermal monitoring program, but I have noticed its hard as heck to access it when even rendering in poser lol. It's part of alienware's dashboard (command center? Lol). As for ram-disk... I have no idea what that is or how to go about setting something like that up. Can you explain more? (will look up that other hw-monitor thing, too. I haven't seen my CPU hit above 86F so far, but I haven't managed to access it during a render)

In general terms, a RAM disk is just a "pretend hard drive" that is created from RAM (memory). It's faster than accessing magnetic tracks on a hard drive and why it was suggested.

I'll leave any good driver or utility suggestions to the original poser. ;-)

AHHHH, makes sense =D  Basically a virtual drive that uses RAM instead of hard disk space.  (had a virtual drive before... never done one using RAM before, though LOL)  it does make perfect sense that using the RAM would make it a lot faster.

I start the thermal monitoring, then I hit the render key. I got the thing as hot as 80C (=176F) while running LuxRender at about half an hour using all 12 CPU threads plus all GPU power at 100%. The fans really took off.

Tip: When you use Task Manager, and right-click the application (before rendering) you can assign it a lower priority. This will make your machine more responsive to interactive tasks without really sacrificing rendering power.

RAMdisk means that a portion of your RAM behaves like a diskdrive, it's the fastest disk you can ever get (RAM-speed), but it's gone at shutdown as is all your RAM contents. I got RAMdrive from QSoft

http://members.fortunecity.com/ramdisk/RAMDisk/ramdriv001.htm

which comes free or cheap, whatever option you pick. I use it for temp-files, to speed up Vue, Photoshop and the like while editing, and I never have to clean up my disk. Love it.
To do so, the RAM-disk got driveletter B: and the windows environment variables WindowsTemp, (user)Appdata...temp, and even the Temp Internet files from IE etc were changed into B: