YAY! New Computer
So, I have been gathering pieces for a new computer, guided by the fine folks over at ArsTechnica and their System Guides. I have been trying to build something to use as a decent workstation and gaming rig for home, so that means some fairly high end recent parts. For my Christmas present Becca decided to get me all of the remaining parts on my list, including a few parts that were much better than what I had asked for.
So, now I present to you the unboxing and assembly pictures of my brand spanking new computer.
Since it’s a brand new box (my last computer was about 5 years old, and was still running on SD 133 RAM, lol. I am such a dork… man this is one really long parenthetical statement) I decided that it would be a good time to start using Vista. What? You say it hasn’t been released for retail yet? Bah! Why would I let a little thing like that stop me?
You can see a picture of the vista installer in that photo-set. It’s really a very slick interface, they did a good job of imitating the refinement of OSX. The worst part of this is the confirmation dialogs. Windows asks you to confirm or allow anything and everything. Any time you want to run an exe, there is a confirm dialog, any time a system setting or properties sheet is opened there is a confirm dialog, the number of clicks is really getting rediculous. If you want to rename a file in a Program Files directory, it takes no less than 6 clicks! I understand you dont usually want people renaming files in there willy nilly, but 6 clicks?!?
I will start hunting for the setting to turn some of those off soon. But in the mean-time it makes an aweseome gaming machine. BF2142 runs like a charm, averaging 41 FPS at very decent settings.
Oh, and I was able to get a decent stable overclock of the Intel Core 2 Duo 6600 at 2.7 GHz, up from 2.4 GHz. I had a little instability at 3 GHz, but the overclocking sites said it shouldnt be a problem, oh well.