Ole Switcheroo

Yesterday I was just sitting around typing on IRC and basking in the glow of my 1247 career points round (double distinguished combat pins and two silver badges) when my computer completely froze up. This was rather odd, but no big deal. Unfortunately upon reboot, I was told that there was an Error Loading OS. I waited a bit and tried again with the same results. Uh oh, sounds like hard drive problems…

I tried searching for a way to diagnose if the main SATA drive had gone bad, but apparently booting from a USB drive doesn’t work that well and I didn’t have any floppies. When I booted from my Vista CD, it found no installation of the OS and said I did not have proper partitions. This I found odd, since my IDE backup HD and my SATA main HD only have one partition each. I also found it strange that when I went to the menu to look for some drivers to load, I still saw both my hard drives available. Even stranger was the fact that their letter designations were reversed, and the IDE was the C: drive while the SATA was the D: drive. Hmmmm…

As I suspected, somehow the BIOS options had changed themselves to try and boot the IDE drive first. I had seen a few things online about Vista doing odd things with the boot order, but after I set the BIOS options to boot the SATA hard drive first I had no problems rebooting. I wonder if this is from the recent pushing of Vista SP1, since I know SP1 changed some of my other computer settings, but it seems odd that the OS can alter your BIOS like that. I ran CHKDSK last night on the SATA, and it fixed some orphaned files, so hopefully my Seagate drive is OK (considering it is only about a year old).

More On Vista

Well it’s been a few days now, and to be honest I actually like Vista more than I did initially. Of course I am easily swayed by the slick UI and my computer is pretty good (although not as good as some people’s backup servers apparently)…

I haven’t yet tried to fix the printer driver problem yet, and I still do get prompted to put in my password a lot (I left the UAC on, because I know I am stupid). I haven’t noticed any performance decreases, but nothing really feels any faster either. However, Vista did do a better job of recognizing my hardware than XP did. This is pretty odd, and when Bunky first got her computer with Vista (which barely gets used…), Vista Vanilla had so many bugs and driver incompatibilities that it was intolerable. However, with SP1, it seems like most of the bugs are of slight-annoyance level.

I like the various system utilities that come with Vista as well. There are lot of cool things that weren’t in XP, although I wouldn’t classify any of them as must-haves. I read all the hate online and I understood how bad it was to be an early-adopter, but my experience with Vista so far has been positive. I would recommend Vista to anyone who has good hardware and can get it for cheap. I wouldn’t have paid full price for it, but I got mine “free” from the MBA program.

The step from XP to Vista is not that dissimilar to the step from BF2 to BF2142. It doesn’t seem like much of an improvement at first, but once more of the bugs get fixed, Vista should shine. I believe it has leveled up to “Usable” now with SP1.

Hasta La Vista

Prior to Hellgate having its way with my computer, I had been noticing some general slowdown and such with my XP installation. I am not sure if this was general cruft building up or a result of using programs like TuneUp, but I decided that this was as good a time as any to try out Vista. Since I was going to be reinstalling an OS anyway (and Vista SP1 just came out), I decided to take the plunge.

The way was filled with obstacles from the beginning. First, my USB keyboard is recognized when the BIOS starts up and when Windows starts up, but in that brief moment when you have to “Hit any key to boot from CD” it does not work. So I actually had to go downtown in a snowstorm to buy a keyboard with a PS/2 attachment just to boot from the Vista CD (I returned the keyboard the next day of course). Naturally my wireless mouse did not work either, but fortunately I had a wired mouse to fall back on.

Whoever at my graduate school made the student CD that I got for Vista made sure to put a note on the CD that this was an “Upgrade Only”. This was a lie. After I installed XP fresh and put Vista in to upgrade my installation, I discovered that the Upgrade option was disabled and the CD was for fresh Vista installations only. WTF… It wasn’t that big a deal, but it was a waste of time. The DS really shined in these moments.

Installation went smoothly for the most part after that. It is annoying to have to type the admin password for everything (even deleting icons…), but supposedly this will decrease with time. On Bunky’s computer, it doesn’t seem to come up that often, so I am hopeful. A number of programs will not work unless they are Run as Administrator, which is also annoying. It took many tries just to get BF2142 to install, and then I had to tweak the permissions to keep PunkBuster from kicking me as soon as I loaded in.

I am also having a problem with the driver for my HP Laserjet 1012. It simply will not work with Vista. Vista looks for a 1010 driver, and HP seems to only have a 1020 driver that should work with 1012, but neither works correctly. I partially blame HP for this, however, as this printer had driver problems with XP as well, and that is not acceptable.

Other than that, Vista doesn’t seem too bad. It may just be because it is a fresh install, but startup seems a bit peppier now. I like the UI overall, and the gadgets are nice (I wish you could resize them, though).

Computer Armory

For my own future reference, here are the specs of the recently ordered computer:

Case
Cooler Master Centurion 5: I like how it looks, although I do worry about the possibility of having to clean a lot of cat hair out of the foam… I like that the internal bits can be swapped around without needing tools. The one I ordered supposedly has a window, which is nice. I swapped out the under-powered 350w PSU that comes with it, per Velius’ (and other peoples’) suggestion. The new PSU is a 550w Legolas Logisys. I hear the cheap ones can fail just as easily as the really expensive ones, so I went cheap.

Motherboard
Biostar I945GZ-M775 mATX with Intel 945GZ chipset and 8-channel audio: Pretty much the cheapest motherboard that would give me a PCI-e 16 slot and hook up to an Intel Core 2 Duo processor. Only supports 2×1GB of DDR2-533 RAM, but I’ll probably need a new computer by the time I need more than 2GB RAM.

CPU
Intel E6300 Core 2 Duo 1.86GHz processor: I really didn’t want to get a Pentium D, and I am a little shy of AMD this time. I like what I’ve read about the Core 2 Duo line, so I got the cheapest one…

Hard Drive
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 SATA 250GB: Nothing too special, although it’s amazing how cheap space is these days. I more than tripled the amount the HD could hold for $30.

Memory
Corsair Value Select DDR2-533: I got two 1GB sticks of the stuff, and I’ve read that it’s a reasonable bargain without too much performance loss.

Graphics
nVidia GeForce 7100GS 256MB: Not really very good; supposedly the 7100GS is just a reworking of the GeForce 6200. Oh well, what’s the point of paying much for a DirectX-9 card anyway?

Audio
Random onboard 6-channel audio: I never splurge for a sound card.

Optical Drive
Random CD/DVD thing: I already have two reasonably new CD/DVD Read/Write drives.

I didn’t bother getting a monitor, keyboard, mouse, or OS because I already have all those things. I’m going to wait on Vista, as per Catnip’s suggestion; perhaps the Vista purchase will accompany the purchase of a new DirectX-10 GFX card in the future. Other than that, I totally cheaped out because I’m finding more and more than computers are becoming disposable after only a few years.