Christmas!

New hardware is always fun. My new machine arrived today (well, I had to actually go and pick it up at my local computer vendor, EIS).

I was a little adventurous and installed Vista Home Premium 64-bit. Since the machine has 4GB of RAM, it felt less than optimal just to be able to use 3 of those. Lets see how that turns out.

The graphics card is a ATI HD4870, which takes up two slots (just one PCIE slot, though), one being used just for the fan and heatpipes. However, I was expecting the box to be full of cables, wiring, etc., but it was surprisingly empty. The cpu and cpu-fan was much smaller than I expected. The included keyboard wasn't too good though. Much too noisy and cheap-plastic feeling. I think I'll switch back to my old and battered HP keyboard.

The Antec Sonata III chassi is very nice, black and silent. When writing this, I actually cannot determine if the faint humming sound is the ventilation in the room itself or the computer case/graphics card. Excellent!

So on the list of things to do (after installing Firefox, which is the very first thing I always do on any Windows machine I get my hands on), is:

• Set up a backup solution
  
• Install Steam
• Figure out a way to transfer all my old game files (I don't really want to play GTA: San Andreas from scratch)
• Restore stuff from my old harddrive

And a bunch of other things, but that'll probably be enough for tonight.