Of Flop Sweats and Vista

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Well, I’ve been off for a few days. I got a cheap HP tower at a computer show, and I’ve been making it work.

OK, so I got myself a brand new HP/COMPAQ DC7900 tower.

Intel® Core2® Duo® CPU E6550 at 2.33 Ghz, 4 g RAM, one 80 & one 500 G hd, and an integral video on the mb.

On the physical level everything went together with an ease unimaginable a few years ago, without the level of tools, PITA and knuckle scraping that would have been required.

I added the 200 G HD and modem from the old machine, and added a floppy drive, and copied the files off the old 5 G HD.

This required an IDE to SATA adaptor for the HD, a floppy cable (witg a twist), and power adaptors from SATA to IDE and floppy, found local at CyberGuys.biz.

I can do this, but I really hate it. As soon as I crack the case, I start to sweat profusely….and stink.

The machine has 3 (whisper quiet) fans (!), one on the power supply, one exhaust for the case, and an inlet fan blowing over the plumbing (!) of the heat sink.

It appears very solidly built.

The big winner in this process is Firefox Portable. No backup, no reinstall, just copy over the directory, like in the good old DOS.

It’s designed to run off a memory stick, which I don’t generally do, because there is a performance hit doing that.

Running it on a hard drive, there is no performance hit once running, though it loads about 5 second slower.

Honorable mention here goes to Feedreader 3, which can be setup to do the same thing, but the folks at PortableApps.com get the gold medal because they have made this work for a number of other people’s software, including OpenOffice.

The big loser, the 10 yr old HP 6200C scanner. It died over the past few months, confirmed through 2 computers, operating systems, and USB cables, in all combinations, and nothing recognized it.

As to Vista, the machine is blisteringly fast compared to my older machine, so I can’t compare performance, though it seems stable on new and powerful equipment.

Vista dislikes:

  • Downgrading to XP appears to be a labor of Hercules.
  • Too much nannying….I have to tell the computer that I REALLY want to do this a lot.
  • Can’t figure out how to turn off wallpaper, so I used a solid color to approximate it.
  • Had to JFGI* to figure out how a DOS path is set up (setx). I miss autoexec.bat.
  • Still can’t figure out how to share the data drive on the network..
  • It puts up a security warning for F-Prot anti-virus, because it does not like how it talks to the OS. It still works, but it needs to change how it reports that it is running to the OS

In any case, this is the first thing that I’ve posted in about 4 days as a result.

So over the past 4 days, volume was down, but the quality of the writing probably increased.

*Just F%$#ing Google It.

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