Computerfied

My Dell XPS 8700 is seventeen years old. Anyone else would have given up on it, but I nursed it along, and it sufficed until the release of Unreal Engine 5. You see, I need UE5. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to use it effectively, but right now I gotta have it.

Prophetically, the old girl gave me a goodbye wave during the cutover procedure – a disk drive failed to mount. The backup was three weeks old. I did a restart. The drive mounted. I pumped it. Crisis averted.

I assembled the new machine myself, something I haven’t done in twenty years, using a build plan published by SQL essayist Glenn Berry. If not for the plan, I would have been smarter to buy something.

Mr. Berry’s parts shopping was spot-on. There were no unfortunate component selections. But even with the plan, there were head-scratching moments. It wasn’t an easy task. I don’t recommend it for the uninitiated.

I’m using the new machine right now. I have at least forty hours invested in the migration. I’ll be tinkering with it for weeks. I tested UE5 on it last night, and the jury is out on whether this configuration has enough horsepower. At this writing, a 3D artist in Sweden is building a UE5 animation for a book promo. We’ll see.