Vista!

I was very excited about Vista before it came out in 2006. That quickly waned. My son Matt got a new fire breathing machine last year just as the Core 2 Duo's and Vista were becoming available. It got set up numerous times, with Vista, then XP, then dual boot, etc. but the Vista experience was something I decided I didn't need for myself. I didn't want to upgrade any of my personal machines, and for my work PC I use Server 2003.

We had a nice little laptop in my group that has Vista on it. I've dragged that around the country a bit. Most recently I stuck a 4 GB flash drive on it and ReadyBoost turned the somewhat slow 3.5 pounder (with only 1 GB RAM) into a respectable machine.

A couple days before Christmas I decided to finally build a new PC for my studio. I had two new 400 GB SATA drives (which I RAIDed) from Black Friday shopping. I also had a new 20x DVD burner (also BF). I already had a very nice full tower case I wasn't using, and I pulled the killer Antec power supply out of my old studio PC. I also sucked out another great optical drive and the firewire PCI adapter (the motherboard I bought did not have firewire and I need it for my Canon video camera and for my Edirol FA-101 audio interface). I ended up getting a E6750 Core 2 Duo, 4 GB of 800mHz RAM, and a Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L motherboard.

I bought Matt a new ATI 3870 chipset video card and took his old one. It's no slouch for what I am doing, but he is a gamer and needs the smoking hot card.

So I stuck everything in the box and turned it on. Keep in mind that is was a fairly ambitious build - lots of stuff. Sometimes when you stick so much in a new box, you end up having to remove lots of stuff to troubleshoot. Not this time. I turned it on and everything worked.

First I installed XP and Office (but not much else). Then I wanted to create a dual boot. I downloaded Vista x64 with SP1 RC1 from MSDN. Since I had created only one partition, it would not load without blowing away XP, so I resized the partition and then installed Vista (64 bit), activating it with my MSDN license.

The bottom line, is that the Vista installation was incredibly easy and trouble-free. Everything just worked as it should. The performance is fantastic - blazing fast. So far, I love 64 bit Vista! I would say that this machine is the best and fastest I have ever used, and the excellent OS is a large part of what makes it so good.