And on, and on

Halcyon days: Shit worked. Maybe not perfectly but it fucking worked. Today: Take a fucking guess.

Spent the last X hours fucking about trying to bring vmware/nvidia/xorg performance back to levels it was at...in December. What has changed since then, exactly? A few apt-get dist-upgrades, maybe one nvidia driver version, and fuck all else. Hardware accel seems to be disabled altogether with twinview given the performance I'm seeing from xorg. Oh, try 'UseEvents'...and 'RenderAccel'. Neat, now give me something that makes a fucking difference. My bright idea: Well, since twinview performance is now terrible, have the second card use two different screens. Yeah, that worked well. Fucksake, all I want is dual-screen XP that doesn't crash if I have 4 tables of FTP with PAHUD. You know, like I had before Christmas?

Yeah, I've downgraded to previous xserver-xorg packages...No help. I've googled and not much help there either. May try reinstalling vmware afresh. If that makes no difference, I can try installing Workstation (but that probably won't recognise the server images).

The Good: XFCE. Trying it instead of Fluxbox for awhile. It really is pretty cool. Everything good from GNOME without the huge overhead. At least that's my impression so far. Oh, just spotted a 'niggle'. It would be nice to change alignment of the panel applets on a panel. I have sort of accomplished what I intended using spaces but still.

It's times like these when I'm tempted to throw money and hardware at the problem. Just configured a Dell Dimension C521...wow, £204 not including VAT and shipping, not bad. Including VAT and shipping, £300. Are you fucking kidding me? Not a bad config but, wow, what a rip on shipping. See some others on ebay but I'm not convinced.

Reinstalled vmware and applied latest any-any. Wow, was that all it fucking was? Are you kidding me? So far showing a load average below 0.2 with PAHUD on 3 tables. Xorg hasn't gone over 7% cpu yet. Wow, time to move back to xorg.conf.2p2 and abandon .four by the looks of things. Just waiting for some stats to show up on the 4th table. Wow, just saw runner-runner quads versus bottom set...and neither of the players managed to move a significant portion of their stack in. Way to get value there fellows.

Okay, we're good: 4-tables, HUD up, PT importing, and vmware-vmx is using ~20% CPU with Xorg staying on ~7%.

Time to restart X.