It's been quite a new technology week for me.

Ok. My home office took a huge power surge, and even with a big PDU, my main desktop took a beating and wouldn't boot - the hard drive was flaking out.

I finally had a new drive installed and I cloned the stuff off the old one so I could recover e-mail, music and financial files. The backup software I was using was working... but Murphy's law being what it was, I hadn't backed up in about 2 weeks and the previous day, the backup had failed.

I decided to try out Vista.

Vista SP1 has been released and I took the plunge - I have way too much software to fully go over to the mac, and now that I can load safari onto windows..... at least I don't have to deal with all that embedded Active-x from my mac. (may sell my 12" g4 powerbook and get a newer one later this year).

It hasn't been too painful. For $650, I bought a quad core AMD with 3 GB of memory, a lightscribe DVD burner and a 750 GB hard drive. The performance blows away my Dell dual core Intel with XP pro and 2 GB of memory. It's incredibly fast.

All of my data - including mail and quicken files ported easily. Most of my files are external drives anyhow, so I can't see filling that 750 GB drive.

A new project for me will be to build a consolidate music library - itunes and windows media player.

Also, for those of you who are not backing up your files, check this out. Mozy was purchased by the company that I work for.... and makes backing up your PC very easy. No more excuses.

http://mozy.com/

You can back up 2 GB for free and try it. For a home system, it's $4.95 per month, unlimited storage.

Hey Kat-

I may soon be looking for a new computer...it's the old conundrum; I need to upgrade to stay competitive, my computer's a couple years old now, and it has some issues needing repair...but if I take a "real" job, then I won't be needing such a high powered (and relatively expensive)graphics oriented machine as I would to replace this one. However, seeing as how I have a lot of contract work and no real job offers on the table, I may just bite the bullet and go for it.

The software I'm running (Solid Edge, and I-deas 12NX) use OpenGL for hardware rendering, and I've heard major horror stories with Vista and OGL. I'm assuming the service packs have dealt with most of that, but I'm leaning more towards XP64 to play it safe.
Are you familiar with it?

Here's a harder question for you, though, since you're a hardware guru .... I'm looking to use a smaller (80 to 150 gig) 10,000 rpm hard rive for the OS and applications software, and a 500 gig or so normal hard drive for file storage. What I've noticed is, the 10k rpm ones are listed as ATA 150, and the 7200 rpm larger drives are listed as ATA 300...does that really mean anything? The MoBo and processor I'm looking at is the Core2 Quad 2.5 ghz (q9300) and an Intel X38BT mobo. It says it supports ATA 133.
Do you know of any websites where finding performance specs for that sort of thing (hard drives etc)that is reliable?

Anyway- sounds like you've done well there, and I'd really like to go with Vista if it's stabilized and compatible.

As for backups, sheesh....I am so bad about that. Time to burn a couple dvd's. I've thought about the online storage, but I'm also required to have hard copies of stuff for my customers.

Later- a gray day here....need some sunshine to restart my motor

TonyY

Vista seems very stable. I only had to apply 1 patch to the service pack, because my screen saver wouldn't turn on with a laser mouse attached.

Most of my XP software was compatible and loaded/started. The only exception was Adobe Acrobat Professional - and after I installed it, it downloaded a huge update and basically upgraded itself. So I was pleasantly surprised that I could postpone major software upgrades to all of my webmaster products.

As for the ATA drives.... I am working for a storage company.... while the company doesn't manufacture drives.... it is the largest buyer of drives in the world.

Basically it's physics and geometry. The more capacity a drive has, the denser the bits are packed on the track on the platter - that's to keep the small form factor and not add any more height (due to # platters. So to read all that capacity, you have to slow the rotation of the drive from 15,000 RPM down to 7,200 RPM. The lower the capacity, the faster the rotation.

Also.... all drives these days are pretty much the same capacity. The manufacturer "turns off" some capacity to make 150 GB or 300 GB drives. We call it a short stroke - basically the read/write heads only reach about 50% into the platter. The servo mechanisms are then adjusted to spin the drive faster.

Does not matter to me how much capacity is on the hard drive in the cabinet.... I usually re-format the file system to present multiple drives. That way it's easier to back up the smaller, "virtual" drives.

If you're looking for better performances by separating the OS and page file from everything else, the diff between 7,200 and 10,000 RPM will not be noticeable on your new Vista PC. You're better off sinking your $$$ into 4 GB of memory for better response time and performance. The only way you would benefit from a separation is if you undersized the memory - and were forced to page out from memory to the page file. (That means that the OS writes memory blocks to a file in order to free up RAM to use it).

If you're separating for better file system management, the diff between 7,200 and 10,000 will not make a difference.

A 150 GB drive does not cost that much less than a 750 GB drive these days. You're better off carving up the disk via NTFS.

BTW, we're selling 1 TB drives - with 1.5 TB due by the end of this year, 2 TB around February of 2009. Many years ago, 1 TB of disk storage filled a data center the size of a football field and would take 96 hours to backup to tape. It's amazing that we can have these capacities in our homes.

OH NO! More geek speak...RUN AWAY; RUN AWAY; RUN AWAY!!

yeah Billy, we speak geek fluently.

Kat-
Thanks for the info, I was going to use 4 gig anyway...Tiger Direct has a lot of stuff with rebates right now, IF I pull the trigger today or tomorrow. Dropping the 10k hard drive knocked 149 bucks off right there, which almost pays for the 2 more gig or ddr3 12800 memory. I have to convince the "treasurer" of my business (my better half) that I'm trying to go as cheap as possible and get something that will do. I won't mention the 150 for the sound card that will allow me to make much better recordings

Anyway, thanks- I'll check into that backup service, that's pretty cheap "insurance". A good buddy of mine who works for Cisco, we had talked years ago about how cool would it be to have an online backup service...now that bandwidth has "arrived" around here anyway, it actually can be done.

Thanks for the info- BTW, the opengl issue appears to be resolved....apparently Tom's Hardware ran some tests that had everyone up in arms about 50% less performance, etc, and after UGS did their own tests with updated drivers and turning off some feature, I think it was user account access something or other, it actually ran better than XP pro.
Major stain on Tom's reputation...it appears he has a bias, well duh....most reviewers do.

They also said don't bother with the 64 bit OS, unless your specific software takes advantage of it, or you want to use more than 4 gig memory...right now, that sounds nice, but not gonna happen- I'd love 8 gig.
Another also, one guy said most hard drives don't have transfer speeds high enough to overload the ATA 100 bus, much less the 300 unless it's a 15k rpm scsi or something.....and who has the bucks for that...main reason I was thinking about it was, for faster loading and software operation, as in faster response times to icon clicks- but like you said, most of the program should be residing in memory anyway, so the higher disk speed won't help unless it's paging.

Well, back out to get some sun (while staining my deck, gotta get chores done while the sun shines...)

We just upgraded to Vista at work. I'm still running on XP Home at home on all 3 computers (2 desktops/1 laptop). The only major problem we've had is our database. We run a customized database that is on an Access platform. The Vista Access has different file extensions and converting has been a nightmare. Also we had an issue with more thanone person being allowed into the database at a time. We've worked through most things, but our biggest issue are macros, especially ones that write to new tables. Ugh...a nightmare.

there are some subtle things.... mostly due to the changed security model. Yes, Vista is more secure, but if you always run in "administrator" mode.... you're still installing programs and most likely clicking OK when you access something on the Internet.

The differences in the Office Professional products are subtle, but as you point out Bonnie... if the programmer hard coded some things (like file extents), it has to be handled after the upgrade.

I hit a file ownership problem. All of my webmaster files are on external drives, and the files were all marked with my XP owner number (a big long honking number). I could read the files and edit them with my programs, but could not save them to the same file name. I had to change the owner permissions for the entire hard drive.... took about an hour to go thru 500 GB.

My computer crashed on me Wednesday after Vista Service Pack 1 was installed. It might have also been because I put new memory DIMMs in. Either way, a technician came on Thursday and took the computer back to the repair place I had called. I got the computer back on Friday, but the keyboard and mouse would not work once Vista had started up. This is because a different technician used a different keyboard and mouse during the repair process. So, now I have to wait until tomorrow to call the place and have someone take my computer and the keyboard and mouse. I'm under a 30-day warranty. So, the extra repair work is free. I hope to have my computer back on Tuesday and I'll have it back to normal by Friday at the latest. There's tons of software that I need to re-install. Only the essentials were installed during repair.
In the meantime, I'm using the computer in the guest room, which is next door to my room where my computer is. I moved my three 250 GB external drives in there. It's a good thing I decided a few years ago to put the majority of my files on external drives.
Other than that, overall I've been fine with Vista. I use the Windows Classic display mode, which is made to look like the Windows 95/98/ME/2000 display.

Installing memory is not as straightforward as it might seem. For most computers, manufacturers require that the memory cards are in symmetric pairs... ie. (2) 1 GB plus (2) 512 MB = 3 GB, etc. Anything else will probably crash the computer and possibly corrupt the OS.

Sounds like the repair place needs to install a couple of device drivers.