Testing, continued.....

Being your basically insecure paranoid type who loves to worry about things to worry about, I re-ran that Windows Experience Index test to re-check the score now that I've made sure the new ATI Radeon HD 5450 has the very latest driver from that secret driver factory shrouded in the mists of deep cyberspace, and the good news is - nothing's changed! It still works just as well it did when Dwight took it out of its box at the shop yesterday, and stuck it into this Acer X3200.

But still, this new score of 3.7 beats the hell out of the 2.8 or 3.1 I got from the original card that came in this box from Acer. Acer usually gives you a lot of bang for your buck, but to do that, they can't afford to give you the best bang for your buck, so if that's what you want, it's unplug the little bugger and take it to the shop, and put in something better. And next to a whole new computer, the second best thing you can probably do for it is change the graphics card. That's become increasingly important as operating systems like Windows 7 and Windows 8 have come along with their increased reliance on graphics, and their demands on the system for faster and better handling of those graphics
while multitasking the stuff that's whizzing around inside them.

And after you've got that bigger bang for your buck, and you're looking through the files to see what's what, and you notice a gizmo in Devices and Printers with a warning symbol, and it's called a 'Co-processor' and it doesn't have a driver, and that's why there's a warning on it, don't get your knickers in a twist, because what this usually means is that (a) you've got a multi-core processor, (b) this is being generated from a part of it that doesn't know there's only one main root to that tree, and (c) it all goes back to the driver or drivers for your main chip set, and since you've probably got the latest available from either Windows or the card's manufacturer, there's really nothing to be concerned about, because this is just a false alarm, and you could waste an hour or so like I just did while finding all this out. And now that I've saved you an hour or so, why not take a coffee break, while I work on making some new Themes for Windows 8. The folks in Redmond are too busy handing out free copies of this just now to find time for fluffing it out with lots of fancy multi-picture themes like we all know and love in Windows 7. - And guess what? You could copy your Windows 7 themes into Windows 8 if you like. Same game, new O/S..... so if you have HomeGroup (and Win-8 has it too) or a dual-boot in which you can use Windows Explorer to find, see, and copy stuff from that other partition, it's easy. Or just copy them to a DVD and install them from that into Windows 8's Username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Themes folder and from there they'll behave just like they did in Windows 7.