Vista finally up….and its amazing

Vista is up an running on my new machine and I love it. Still sitting at work right now waiting till I can take it home. The last two nights its been raining here so wasn’t willing to risk carrying it to my car in the rain. And I couldn’t leave right after work because there is no stopping in front of my apartment on Utrechtsestraat till after 7 I think…and I am certainly not going to carry this thing far because it weighs a ton.

Getting this machine running was a bit more difficult than I expected. The first problem I ran into was getting the machine to power on. I plugged in the standard 20 or 24 pin power cable and didn’t realize I also had to plug in an additional 6 pin cable as well. That took 2 hours to notice. Then the machine was TERRIBLY slow. And each time I wanted to try rebooting, Vista wanted to install an update. But since it was running so slow, each update step took over an hour. Two days of trying different things later, I solved it: I waited for the machine to power down, took out one of the 2 GB memory chips (its not a chip but a….what are those things called….they aren’t DIMMs anymore, are they?), booted it, shut it down, put the chip back in and booted again. Now everything works!!!

Anyway, its up a running now. So I am starting to load up what I need. Like Scott, I am trying to keep it to a minimal set of software. I will then load up everything else in virtual machines.

Pretty much everything else is going to live in a series of virtual machines. The two versions of VS (2005 and 2008) go into different VMs. Each of the Captaris products will go into one or more. And the Hardware Virtualization features of this Core2 Quad processor make these VMs absolutely amazing.

My main complaint is that the video card is so damned loud. Its the one thing I can hear in the case…from 15 feet away, with the case closed! Its a MSI NX8600GTS and the fan is ridiculous. I have seen forums that say I could switch to the other voltage connector on the card, but there isn’t one. I see that there are some passive cooling options, so I may try one of those instead.