As you might have read in my earlier post , I received an ATI 5870 video card and I had to nickname it “the beast”, because this sucker is big, and that’s just how I like it.  I’m upgrading from an ATI 4850, which is another fabulous video card, but I’m certainly not going to deny myself the opportunity to try out this latest one. 

If you are interested in all the fancy numbers, you can view the technical specs here , but here are the main features from the ATI site.

• Get unrivalled visual quality and intense gaming performance and for today and tomorrow with support for Microsoft® DirectX® 11
• With ATI Eyefinity technology get the ultimate immersive gaming experience innovative ‘wrap around’ multi-display capabilities
• Tap into the massive parallel processing power of your GPU with ATI Stream technology and tackle demanding tasks like video transcoding with incredible speed
• Feel the brute strength of more than 2 teraFLOPS plowing through the most demanding games
• Experience the speed, responsiveness and performance of ultra-high bandwidth GDDR5 memory
• ATI CrossFireX™ technology with multi-GPU support offers advanced scalability

As you can see in the images above, this is obviously a dual-slot card, meaning it’s going to take up two spots on the back of your PC.  This wasn’t a problem for me as I don’t have any other PCI cards installed, but it’s something you need to take into consideration.  Installation was quick, just make sure both slots are free, snap in the card, and hook in the power.  After making sure it was securely in, it was ready to go.  Next step was booting up and installing the latest Catalyst drivers, which is a straightforward installation and I didn’t run into any issues whatsoever.

On the card it has two DVI outputs, an HDMI output, and a DisplayPort output.  In my current setup I have two 22” widescreen monitors hooked up to the DVI ports.  I’m still contemplating on what to do with the HDMI port. Anyways, after the driver installation I had to go into the display properties and easily configure Windows 7 to setup the dual-monitors to display as I want them to which is the main monitor on the right, and the second on the left.

I just installed this a day ago, so I’m going to break it in for a bit, and then follow-up with a review on the performance of the card from a user point of view, not the super technical number crunches you often see. 

Are you ready for the weekend?  I certainly am.  Let me first mention our Impulse fleet on Star Trek Online has a great group of players, and from what I hear everyone has been having a great time playing.  Going forward, we hope to have more groups forming for our Impulse community so Stardockians and our customers can have a chance to play together more often.  Let me know what you think of that idea.

This was without a doubt a super-busy week.  We had a bunch of releases on Impulse, including our beloved Sins of a Solar Empire: Trinity, and the Diplomacy expansion.  Check the links below for the list of other releases we had this week.  It’s getting to the point there’s not enough room in this article to list them all.

If you are following the development of Elemental: War of Magic, be sure to take a look at the blogs and developer journals from this week, there have been quite a few and they are all worth the read.

Lets get to the roundup!

News and Articles:

• Impulse Weekly Top 10
• Impulse Video Guided Tour
• Elemental Q&A Update with GameSpot
• Impulse enhances its top 10 list
• Sins of a Solar Empire: Diplomacy – a guided tour
• Elemental: The Tragedy of Procipinee
• Creatures of Elemental: Hordes of the Fallen

New and Updated Releases on Impulse:

• Aveyond - Lord of Twilight
• Aveyond - Gates of Night
• Bungee Jumping Simulator
• Military Life: Tank Simulator
• Tropico 3
• The Path
• Campus
• Supreme Ruler 2020 - Global Crisis
• Sins of a Solar Empire – Diplomacy
• The Sims 3: High End Loft Stuff
• Sins of a Solar Empire Expansion Bundle
• Sins of a Solar Empire – Trinity

Weekend Impulse Buys

We created this for a page on the site, but I think it’s very useful so I wanted to share it with others here as well.

Another week is wrapped up, this one being the first week in February.  It started off great with the release of Star Trek Online, which we also formed an Impulse fleet where community members are invited to join us play.  Check the article links below for more on that!  We also had lots of Sins of a Solar Empire related news this past week including a gameplay video of Diplomacy, and more info on the coming releases of Diplomacy and Sins: Trinity.

Enough chit-chat, lets get to this weeks roundup!

News and Articles to check out:

• A Look at Upcoming Games on Impulse
• Elemental Beta 1-G plans
• Gameplay Example: Sins of a Solar Empire: Trinity
• Elemental February Status Report
• Join the Impulse Fleet!
• Pictures of our visit with ObjectDock 2
• Life at Stardock – the happiest place in the world
• Atari Adds New Titles to Stardock's Impulse Platform

New and Updated Releases on Impulse:

• Star Trek Online
• Sherlock Holmes Versus Arsene Lupin
• Sherlock Holmes - Nemesis
• Frontline: Fields of Thunder
• Fire Flower
• Sherlock Holmes - The Awakened
• Sherlock Holmes Versus Jack the Ripper
• Purrfect Pet Shop
• Tales of Bingwood
• Evochron Legends
• Satisfashion

Weekend Impulse Buys

This month the ObjectDock 2 beta is scheduled to begin. I got to visit with it today and took some pictures of the trip.

End of the first month of the year is just days away!  January was a great month for Impulse, and for gaming in general.  Mass Effect 2 was released this past week, and response to it has been spectacular to say the least.  This week wasn’t all about ME2 though, as the pre-orders for the upcoming Battlefield: Bad Company 2 opened along with the beta.

Of course any Star Trek fan should be ready as the head-start weekend opens today for Star Trek Online, available to anyone who pre-ordered.  Keep an eye out for me patrolling the Regulus Sector.

Lets take a look at what else was going on this week!

Articles to check out:

• The Spells beta is coming
• Applying Skins/Themes with WindowBlinds 7
• Elemental, one of the most Promising Games of 2010
• Stardock at GDC 2010
• The iPad: Not living up the the hype
• Spells & Magic
• Impulse Weekly Top 10
  

New Releases on Impulse:

• Mass Effect 2
• SHMUP
• KrissX
• Battlefield 2 Bad Company Limited Edition (pre-order)
• KeepSafe 2.01
• Grand Ages Rome
• M.U.D. TV - Mad, Ugly, Dirty Television
• Death to Spies Gold
  

Weekend Impulse Buys:

The month is starting to wind down, and this has been a really exciting week especially with the pre-loading of Mass Effect 2 starting today!  Last week I mentioned we needed a nickname for the Impulse publishing team, and our fan on Facebook posted some good suggestions.  Some of the suggestions were “the Impulsinators”, “The Impulse Drive”, “The Impulsives”, and “The Impulsers”.

I personally favor the “Impulsinators”.

Well anyways, lets take a look at the weekly roundup on Impulse !

Articles to check out:

• The importance of optimization
• Windows 7 Superbar Stomps the Old Taskbar – Part 1
• DeskScapes 3.1 Supports Multi-Monitor Wallpapers
• Elemental: The MUST HAVE 2010 TBS requirements
• Impulse gets jump lists
• This Week in Skinning - January 22nd
  

New Releases on Impulse:

• Bob Came in Pieces
• LogonStudio 1.7
• DeskScapes 3.1
• 4x4 Hummer
• Classic Car Racing
• 1C Racing Mega Pack

Coming Soon:

• Elemental: War of Magic
• Command and Conquer 4
• Star Trek Online
• Mass Effect 2

Weekend Impulse Buys:

		Most Kalypso Games 50% off!

LogonStudio 1.7 was released recently, and for most people they use it to change their Windows logon screens to their favorite wallpaper or image.  That is great, but speaking with a good friend yesterday he told me about how they use LogonStudio and I thought it was a fantastic idea that I wanted to pass along.

I will just quote him here:

“@IslandDog It's a fantastic branding tool. We use it on all client systems with our own small logo inserted as well, so they remember us ”

That was from my friend John Obeto from www.absolutelywindows.com and Logikworx. 

Whether you have a business that works on client systems, or if you do some side work on friends or families PC’s, what a great way to help spread the word about yourself or company!  Open up your favorite graphics editor and place your logo, website or social media text link so it’s there when people turn on their PC’s.  Take that image and drag it into LogonStudio and you now have your own personalized logon!

Of course, this is a simple and quick solution, but if you are looking for corporate solutions, be sure to click here for more info.

In Windows, one aspect of the user interface that most people see all the time is the taskbar.  It is obviously one of the most useful pieces as it contains the tools to launch and monitor applications and other sorts of various data.  In the skinning world it’s also one of the most important areas to skin as it’s a huge part of the overall UI.  The evolution of the Windows taskbar has come a long way, but Windows 7 has taken it to the extreme and literally stomps all over the old style taskbar found in Windows XP and Vista.

First, lets take a look at the Windows XP taskbar.

It’s pretty simple, it does what it was intended to do.  There wasn’t much advanced functionality here, at least not by default.  It was possible to add some very cool features using something like WindowFX, which in the screenshot below, it was able to add previews for minimized windows in the taskbar.

In comes Vista, which brought some much needed improvements in the taskbar area, but overall it wasn’t that much different as far as functionality.  The most exciting update was live previews in the taskbar as shown below.  It was a nice addition but still nothing groundbreaking to speak of.

With the release of Windows 7, we saw a huge update in the Windows taskbar, now dubbed the “Superbar”.  Not only was this a visual change to a point, it also introduced more functionality than we have ever seen before. 

Lets take a look at some of the new offerings.

Jump Lists

If I had to pick a personal favorite, this would be near the top.  Right-clicking a program icon in the taskbar gives you an expanded menu with a variety of options depending on the application itself.  This is a quick way to access items like recent files, quick tasks, application functions, etc.

Take the jumplist for Impulse for example:

Right-clicking the icon gives you quite a choice of options.  You can select recently played games, favorite applications, common tasks like going to the Impulse Store, and more.  Not all applications support jumplists yet, but more and more are being updated all the time.

Visually, this will be one of the most noticeable changes in Win7.  Gone are the days of the taskbar with the optional small quick launch icons.  Now the icons are bigger, and more accessible.  One of the most handy features here is Aero Peek.  If you work with a bunch of different windows open like I do, you will appreciate this. 

Just move your cursor over the icon of an open window icon and you will see a thumbnail of that open file and can easily switch between windows without having to minimize or move any of them.  It also works well with applications like Internet Explorer, which will show each open tab as a separate window which you can go directly to.

Today we have covered the basics of the Windows taskbar, and just a couple of the cool new features in the Windows 7 Superbar.  Stay tuned for part 2!

DeskScapes 3.1 is currently in beta for Object Desktop subscribers, and should be released in the very near future.  One of the main new features is the support for multi-monitor setups.  There have been tons of forum posts asking how to have different wallpapers on different monitors as this is something not supported in Windows by default.

DeskScapes 3.1 is now giving you that ability.  Remember, this will also work for static wallpapers, not just animated wallpapers.