It is here!

I am going to try to keep this short as I want to play games!

My new machine finally arrived at lunch-time on Tuesday. Since I paid for a Saturday delivery I should really try and claim back the additional delivery charge – even although they were probably trying to be helpful with it being so late. It was just luck that my wife was in to accept delivery – she’d only got in 15 minutes earlier.

So I took the afternoon off to go home and get it set up …

… and the whole next day.

Each time I get a new machine there is more stuff to transfer off of the old one and since I’ve being doing this for nearly 20 years it takes a while. I borrowed n Ethernet crossover cable from the office to set up a mini network for the transfer – couldn’t get it going. I resorted to using my 20Gb MP3 player as a conduit – worked rather nicely. Remembered after I’d finished that I had disabled a whole heap of “unnecessary” services on my old machine – one of those was probably causing the problem.

So, it’s all done and its amazing – turn the graphics options up as far as they go and Half Life 2 still gives around 100fps on the stress test. Sounds good too thanks to a proper sound card and some decent matched 7.1 speaker (was using two sets of independent unmatched tinny things on the old machine).

I said I’d keep this short – so now the downsides.

• MESH were late – I’ll let them off as parts can run short.
• The extra little 4pin power connector that turns a 20pin power supply into a 24pin one had worked loose in transit, easy fixed.
• The ViewSonic 2030B monitor suffers from that well known issue of losing the signal on startup. Remembering to leave it turned off until the machine boots to the logon screen sorts it out. Research suggests a pure DVI-D cable will be a permanent solution. The monitor itself is gorgeous.
• I upgraded to 4Gb of RAM but only see 2Gb – apparently this is a Windows XP thing – 64bit XP can cope above 3Gb but not 32bit. MESH said nothing when I ordered and I’d never heard about it. Vista should sort it out.
• Not sure about the logitech cordless keyboard & mouse, might just take getting used to.

So, nothing major so far.

I’m well pleased and off to play games ….