Vista didn’t like me simply dropping my hard-disk into the new rig so I had to reinstall Vista. Not as bad as it sounds becasue the USERS and PROGRAM FILES folders are saved by the install routine. So after a fresh build and some driver updates, I simply created the user accounts from scratch and copied-in the relevant copy of C:\WINDOWS.OLD\USERS that was needed.
Sure the registry is blank and I need to reinstall all my programs again but clever apps like Firefox and iTunes picked-up my old settings and didn’t need to be tweaked at all.
All-in-all the computer is now much faster. WinTV has even decided to work proerly which is actually a relief because I realised that I would be dropping my Audigy 2 sound card in favour of the on-board sound and that meant no “line-in” to patch the TV card into. But it just magically works without the cable now.
Old Vista rating 3.0. New rating 4.5. So now the slow thing is my 1GB of 667MHz rather than 800Mhz memory that the board can take. But I’ll put that in my wish-list for Christmas 2008 along with a processor upgrade, a pair of SLI grpahics cards and a SATA disk. What I’m really saying here is that I do have upgrade options over the next 3-5 years whereas my old board was pretty much at the limit.
So, all I have to do now is get my old board into another case and build it for one of Julie’s friends. Until then the living room is a bit cluttered. She hasn’t complained yet but I don’t want to push my luck much further.
