New PC

I type from behind the keyboard attached to my new computer. While the first choice in PC was out of stock, I ended up with a rather nice second one. It’s got an AMD dual core CPU and 5GB of RAM so it moves pretty swiftly. Aside from the goofy green design on the front, the most noticeable feature of my new toy is how exceptionally quiet it is. New case fans are good that way.

My adjustment to Vista goes fairly well. The biggest thing is the new iteration of Windows Explorer which doesn’t have my dear toolbar with File, Edit, View, etc. I am still not sure how to open Folder Options without doing so via Help and Support.

Hey! There it is under Organize. (And not Tools.) Will wonders never cease?

I see 4 Removable Disk drives here and have no idea what the hell they are…wait…I get it. They are the multiple media slots that adorn the front of the case. You know, you can just slip the memory card from your digital camera in one of those. Another mystery solved.

My two biggest gripes:

1) I don’t get a Vista CD and instead the image resides on a partition on the hard drive. So what happens if the drive dies?

2) The confirmation prompts. I get 4 prompts asking if I really want to move the fucking mouse. There must be a registry hack to get rid of those.

Also annoying is the fact that I have no idea how to modify the Start Menu other than by accidentally dragging a shortcut to the Desktop from it that I didn’t mean to.

Here’s how it all started. After getting the tower out of the box and plugging everything in, I power up. I stumble through an annoying HP intro/setup thingy before getting to my desktop. Despite having Service Pack 1 installed, I am immediately told by Windows Update that I have 31 updates waiting to be downloaded and installed, some 20+ of them being security patches. Frustrating but hardly surprising. Windows Defender also barks at me that it needs to be updated so I proceed to give it what it wants. At least I can forego installing Ad-Aware. (Or so I think.)

I am using the shiny new Aero GUI. While I can’t say that I am really using the new features much, I do appreciate how icons are bigger and more detailed. Also, icons for pictures use a thumbnail which is handy.

There are some nice troubleshooting features here but I haven’t putzed with them. Yet. I did, however, get most of my applications installed and only a couple really gave me a problem. Perhaps best of all, Murder in the Abbey got past the spot where it hung on my old PC so I am going to say that it now works. The Dulcinea is currently tying up all of our IP address’ connections to Charter’s news server so I can’t setup my newsreader. This is especially odd since she’s never ventured over to Usenet until today. My podcast reader is all setup with my feeds (except one) and I have to get some folders copied over to my new hard drive so I can get DC++ up and running again. Firefox has my bookmarks now but I’ve got to reenter info into my FTP client. In other words, there’s still some tweaking to be done but so far, so good.