Showing posts with label hardware. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hardware. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

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.