Thread:Deathstalker666/@comment-5641163-20150522174501/@comment-5641163-20150524064204

Dogs are generally noisy, no matter what. Cats are very dependent on the breed. Mine is a common street cat so he's stealthy, friendly, but not overly demanding. He does occasionally wake me up in the morning by biting the end of my nose, but I consider that a feature, rather than a failing!

If you can type without looking at the keyboard, that's all that matters. I watch my clients type entire sentences wrong and then spend the next minute going back and correcting their mistakes, the difference when you can see what you type is massive.

SSDs are mind-blowingly fast. That's the trade-off for price and lifespan. 320GB drives are becoming standard now, which is still pretty small (I have 10TB, after all) but enough for rendering one video at a time in your case, which you can then store on a normal drive. I wasn't convinced until I saw someone else's system, W7 boots in about 5 seconds and Steam games start and load savegames instantly. It's scary, and I can't wait until they're cheaper and bigger.

I've found that the hard drive is always the bottle-neck, even on my fairly aged Quad Core, which is inferior to your i5. Most games play just fine but sometimes they'll pause just for a split-second while the game loads some sound effect it hasn't played before, and I know it's the drive. My Steam folder is nearly 700GB with half my games uninstalled, so it's not an option just yet, but one day. One day.

Incidentally, a lot of games these days use checkpoint saves, which is a big reason why I tend to drop the difficulty. You can play through an entire complex section and then get killed three feet from the checkpoint and have to do it all again. I blame consoles, which is where the concept spread from, it just increases frustration for no good reason. My keyboard has F5 and F9 keys for a reason, dammit!

Outlook is great if you're serious about e-mail, but that's it. I use the calendar for booking clients and I like rules that put things in folders automatically, plus I keep every e-mail I've ever received so it's much easier to archive and store stuff. I push all my clients onto Gmail these days (which I also use) but I'll never stop using my own domain e-mail with Outlook (the webmail for my e-mail account is awful). The biggest benefit is using Word to write e-mails, as a perfectionist I like how easy it is to make them look nice. Gmail's interface is clunky as hell. At least they have autosave now.

Heh, pays well, you say. I wish! I could charge more by the hour but then I'd get less referrals, so it's always a bit of a juggling act. And the aforementioned reliability of W7 doesn't help, I was a hell of a lot busier with half as many clients back in the days of XP, if software and hardware reliability keeps increasing I may find myself out of a job.. Thank god for teenage kids downloading malware, they keep me in catfood!

Right, my Sunday lunch is nearly ready (it's 7am here, don't ask), so I'm gonna sign off for a while. Catcha later.