Ultimately Vista
My trusty old PC started another round of hardware issues this week – primarily cooling based this time. The heat-sink fan was getting sluggish and one of the case fans was having a rough time as well. I’ve limped this thing along through a series of cases, motherboards and upgrades for almost 6 years now…
Remember the old joke? “Sure, this is George Washington’s axe! We’ve replaced the handle 3 times and this is the 4th handle…” That’s my home PC.
Since it needs a ton of fans to keep cool it is obnoxiously loud. The CPU has always ran hot — in fact, it acts like a loud little space heater in my home office. Therefore, this time around, instead of repairs I ran some back ups and then finally retired it.
The “new” machine is based on a “borrowed” Dell e521. Still old hardware, but at least 5 years more modern than what I had. Powered by an AMD 64 3200+ and 2GB ram. A co-worker and friend donated his PCI-E ATI 1650 pro card to the cause as well. I pulled my Raptor and other SATA drive from the old one and loaded up the Dell last night.
Since I received a free copy of Vista Ultimate earlier this month, I’ve decided to give it a shot for home use. After all, the reasons I’m not going Vista at work don’t really apply to my home use.
I’m pleasantly surprised at the “Experience Score” this old’ish machine cranked out:
Think that Raptor drive helps with the primary hard disk score? I’m not sure I expected the CPU to my weak spot, but I guess it makes sense.
I’ve run the Windows Update a few times and am a bit stumped by a couple things though.
- Vista Service Pack 1 hasn’t been offered yet. I wonder if I have to go get it manually? Seems counter-intuitive…
- I made sure to grab all the ultimate “extras” but I can’t seem to find ‘em. I’d like to at least try DreamScene. Update assures me it is installed. [Update: Heh, I should've checked Help first!]
My home office is already cooler and quite a bit quieter due to the change. Now to see if I can adapt to Vista… I definitely still love the Start menu search action! Best feature of the entire OS I think.
Gosh Darn, I’m Worth It
The home server flamed out last week eating its own boot and apps drive. I’ve used that as the starting point of simplifying the home network. No more domain controllers, simple profiles and sharing. My home PC will host the shared printer, music library and such.
However, the server’s death left a (relatively) large gap in the amount of shared storage available to us. Switching from domain based user profiles to non-domain is a pain in the keister and has caused some annoyances. I’ve decided that all the home machines are going to get reloads over the next month or two.
You can see me lining up the rationalization for a new hard drive for my PC right? And heck, if a guy’s going to buy a new drive, maybe the guy should take advantage of newer technology? My trusty old Asus mobo supports SATA and I’ve never even had a drive to use it!
I do now. I went for speed over size and picked up a Western Digital Raptor this afternoon. 10,000 RPM. SATA. 16MB cache {insert Tim Allen grunts here}.
Ran into a small snag: Since my boot drive is SATA, I needed to give the XP installer a floppy with drivers (ugh). It wouldn’t see my trusty USB floppy drive so I had to scavenge up a working floppy drive/cable from some relics in the garage. The floppy drive has 1995 stamped on it…
But hey, if Atwood and Hanselman say this is a good idea, who am I to argue?!? Well, I’ll disagree with Hanselman’s rush to Vista…
I’m going to load OS and apps on it to keep everything zippy. The former boot drive is another Western Digital, the once hot 80GB Caviar JB and will now be the data drive. It’ll also house “My Documents” just to isolate things a bit.
It’s a bit silly to put that drive in a machine sporting an AMD 2500+ (barton core), 1GB of RAM and a mighty GForce 6800 GT video card, but hey — I’ll just upgrade one step at a time. Besides, how much horsepower does it take to crank out blog posts and build simple little apps and plugins?
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a machine to set up.
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