New hardware, new software

Posted by Dave in General May 12th, 2009 | Comments

After a brief honeymoon with Ubuntu I have decided to move back to Windows. I loved Ubuntu for its power and for being indepedent and free, and I stil do. I’m managing a small in house webserver now and will be building a media center soon, but Xorg and it’s ilk is just not for me. I went back to XP for a few weeks but it just wasn’t the same. Fortunately Windows 7 is in RC and I’ve heard good things so I took the dive last night and tried it. The installation was smooth and took just 26 min from inserting the disc to arriving at my new desktop. All of my drivers were already working with the exception of the video card, for which Nvidia has provided great Windows 7 support.  I’ve installed about a dozen small applications, the essentials, and everything works great. I am really enjoying the new taskbar; it is more usable like a dock, but still done in Microsoft fashion. There are also a lots of small treats like the fact that Windows Media Player has DivX/Xvid playback support out of the box! And while it still looks a lot like Vista, the overall interface has been subtley refined and I think it shows. I left off last night with setting up Steam to download and install some games overnight and am looking forward to trying them tonight.

I also decided to pickup a new video card, and a new 600W PSU to go with it. My 6800GT has treated me well, from the days of UT2 and Doom3, and even through a fan/heatsink replacement, it has soldiered on. After 4 years I am replacing it with a GF GTS 250. Not exactly a quantum leap forward, but at just $135 it plays almost every game on the market today at high settings and at high resolution, can’t beat that!