Wow. Pro-tip of the year for me!

2012 is a bit better, but the project navigation window in 2011 was terrible. I'm not sure if it was my harddrive setup (I couldn't find anyone else with the same problem) but it literally took 10 seconds to change harddrives.

Thanks man.

That's true to an extent, it's more like this:

CPU - Rendering
GPU - Viewport rendering
RAM - Stops maya from crashing.

Macs are fine for what we're doing at uni, in theory. Near all of autodesk's products are mac native, as is the Adobe suite. The issue is the cost as was said earlier, and also it's usespan. You can expect to pay upwards of $1000 spec wise compared to a PC, and you won't be able to upgrade.

If you get a PC, you won't really be able to go wrong with the processor. You'll get what you pay for, look to be spending around $250-$350. The more cores the merrier. AMD don't have a hyperthreading solution, so you'll probably want to go Intel.

For a GPU, your best bet is nVidia. Mostly because maya is notoriously sluggish with ATI cards. nVidia has CUDA technology as well, which is pretty cool, but it's hardly supported in current apps. You don't need to spend an outlandish amount here, it's practically only used for viewport rendering. Unless you have a production specific card like a Quadro which cost a s***-ton, you won't notice too much difference. GPU rendering or at least visualisation is the way of the future though, checkout Iray. that's hidden in maya, right now.

Throw in as much RAM as possible. It's cheap, and once you start working with massive textures and massive scene files, you will use it all. I think Rowan & Bridgets project was using 2k texture maps just for the old mans face? taking into account the scene usage, windows and whatever else is open, that's probably 4gb there. If you're CPU supports tri-channel memory, go with 6 or 12gb. If it doesn't, (I think only the 1366 socket does) go with 8gb.

And x64 windows  

Nice, cheers man.

We should totally road trip to fox studios when 1 & 2 get re-released.

The rock has outstanding durability. That's what I want in a phone.

Ha! Comes out in exactly one year.

To celebrate a wholly unsuccessful semester, I bought the pixar collection and watched Toy Story 1 & 2 + featurettes back to back.

Laziest (greatest) day everrr.

Ok, so I've got a Creative Zen MP3 player. It's pretty awesome, at least 7x greater than an iPod, but as it's rather old now with a relatively low profile, support in recent times has become a bit of a nightmare. In the past, it required WMP9 (perhaps ten, I don't remember) to syncronise correctly, and most importantly to update/install the firmware. It died a couple of months ago, so I reformatted it. Don't ask me why the version of media player installed affects the firmware, but it does. I literally had to install a clean XP with no service pack to get it up and running again. Come Saturday, I left it in my car in the sun, and it died again. Once it cooled down, I did a reformat and plugged it into 7 to see what would happen.



BOOM. It recognised it, found the firmware update, then automatically synced with the my music folder. And it shows battery remaining as a percentage. The player doesn't even do that. Yeah.

I was reformatting my laptop this weekend, so I installed Windows 7.

It was probably the smoothest install in the history of the universe, every driver was either already in the library or was obtained through auto install. It's so much smoother than Vista - even with SP2. There's none of those lag issues, and my boot time is about 20 seconds better off. I haven't had any software compatibility issues thus far either, with Maya & Creative Suite both running correctly.

And Media Centre is still the s***.

I'll probably dual boot it on my desktop tomorrow.