I finally bought a new computer!!
For the past few weeks I've been playing around with Windows Vista Home Premium on my old machine. Here are it's specs:
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA8SIMLH-P
CPU: Pentium 4 2.4GHz
Video Card: ATI Radeon 9250 256MB
RAM: 1GB Corsair Value Select DDR 400MHz
HDD: Seagate 70GB and 320GB IDE
Running Vista on this wasn't a bad experience, but it wasn't always responsive. I mean, check out the Windows Experience Index...
Yesterday I realised that I need to do something to kill the time between now and when I start my next job (plus I wouldn't mind getting some money back from the evil tax man), so I bought a new PC. Here are the specs:
Motherboard: Gigabyte 965P-DS3 Pro v3.3
CPU: Intel E6320 1.86GHz 4MB Cache 1066MHz FSB
Video Card: Palit 8800GTS 320MB
RAM: 2GB Corsair XMS2 DDR2 800MHz
HDD: 250GB Samsung and 320GB Seagate SATA2 drives
Case: Antec Nine Hundred with FlexiGlow 500W PSU
I'm pretty proud of this little beast (except for the dodgy FlexiGlow PSU, which has already caused me an unbelievable amount of anguish with its chunky cables and dodgy SATA power plugs).
After spending a few hours putting it all together, I ran up the installer for Windows Vista to load it with Ultimate Edition. The installation was really quick and painless. That is, untill it froze at the "Completing Installation..." screen where even after an hour+ of waiting nothing happens. If you restart the computer it tries to load Windows but you receive an error message saying that the installation wasn't successful. In my search on the internet I discovered I wasn't the only person running into this brick wall.
When Vista's installer gets to the "Completing Installation..." stage, it tries to configure the OS for your hardware. Apparently, there are quite a few things that can break this stage. I ended up spending about 5 hours trying to fix this little hitch. The last thing I did (which somehow worked) was remove one of the 1GB sticks of RAM and then disable all USB and 1394 in the BIOS. After Vista successfully completed installing, ran a few updates and had a couple of reboots, I re-enabled USB and 1394 before reinstalling my 1GB stick.
Anyway, now I'm proud to announce my Windows Experience Index...
Looks like some overclocking is on its way. Can't settle for a 5.0 now...
UPDATE: After a bit of overclocking, I've got my 1.86GHz processor running at 2.56GHz with max temperatures of about 53 degrees Celsius (very safe...). My Updated WEI is...
Give me time and it will keep going up... :)