New System Migration Complete

I’ve finally done the big move.

It took 2 weeks of on again, off again configuration, installation, and migration, but at last, I’ve migrated to my new system!

Hardware:

* CPU: Intel E6750 CPU (Dual Core 2.66Ghz / 1333 FSB / 4MB Cache)
It has some great grunt! I don’t remember seeing Windows take 10 seconds to boot. The dual cores certainly work very well. I’m seeing temps with SpeedFan at 17oC for each core (using Zalman 9700LED from old P4-630 machine).

* RAM: 4 x 1GB 800Mhz DDR2 RAM (4GB)
And it’s worth it.. 3GB was at a level where I could nearly peak it over a few days. You can never have too much RAM!

* MB: Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3
Well worth the dollars, feature rich, better than my previous Gigabyte, and has on board RAID.

* GFX: Nvida GeForce 8600GT 256MB dual head PCI-E 16x
Recommended from the many over at Whirlpool as having the processing power, when compared to a 512MB card. Seems to have a power expansion slot on the side, though I don’t have a plug for it. Running fine without it, but .. well, must investigate true purpose of said plug on card.

Graphics perform nicely though.. Ran 3DMark05 and it kicked both my fx5200 and 6200 cards by MANY FPS.

* Case: CoolerMaster CAC-T05
Best case I’ve purchased. Expandable, “toolless (and requires no hand tools)”, keeps cool, in fact, blows cold air! PSU stats are more stable in SpeedFan too, showing the voltages to be more .. stable, more .. capable. Than that supplied from the idiots over at CAT Computers 2 years ago..

Oh, and I will mention, I did live up to my promise, not going to them again, I spent a little extra and shipped in from QLD.

* HDD: 2 x 250GB SATA 2 3Gbs in RAID 0 configuration
The best part of my motherboard thus far (of features I will use) is the RAID feature. It’s made the system that much more responsive, that much more kick arse!! 2 x 250GB = 500GB.. I’ve partitioned all ahead and it all seems fine, its very quick at disk access too.

* DVD: Just my ol’ Pioneer for now..

… And all this connected to my 2 17″ Philips LCD monitors that my loving fiance got me for my birthday.. I still love her for these! They are soooo coooL!

My system is fantastic, I’m very happy with it.

OS: Windows XP x64 again.
Yes, you can’t beat tried and tested, though the peaks I had at Vista were fantastic! They’ve done a good job to some extent, though one would argue is all that candy worth it, or have they gone too far and started wasting system resources? I think the latter is true, because there was so much unnecessary crap running.
Oh, and I got very sick of the prompts.. Are you sure you want to allow your self to do this? Are you sure you want to allow yourself to do that – I wouldn’t have tried to if I didnt want to!

XP x64 supports > 3GB of RAM from my reading of Whirlpool… I just chose it last time cause I had a 64bit CPU..

I chose it this time, tried and tested, turns migration time down a fair bit!

I might take some benchmark stats one day soon, but for those curious, it did score 5.5 off the shelf (no modifications) from Vista’s tool (of questionable accuracy).

The painful part of moving? The downtime, the keeping everything synced up, the… “Did I forget anything”..
Not easy to do all that at the same time, troubleshoot a failed ghosted hard drive issue.

The situation: 2 x 200GB drives, 2 x 320GB drives, 1 x 200GB failing (motor issue), 1 x 320GB drive new drive.

I ghosted the 200GB to the 320GB using Norton Ghost, failed first time for some.. UNKNOWN reason, I suspect it’s to do with the 137GB limit affecting XP. So I go into Partition Magic, and use it to do the copy, but, the wrong 320GB drive got involved, and I still haven’t heard the end of the data loss. It’s nothing valuable, but sure enough, it’s a fair whack of data to blow in one hit because of confusion between the drives. I had plugged the new 320GB drive in, and that was at drive 0 in partition commander, so I turned off, plugged in the 200GB, forgetting the 320GB IDE was still there (had data on it) and 2 hours later, … you fill in the blank :(… Hopefully she’ll get over it soon!).

And to make issues worse Tonight: Skype is down for what can only be considered the biggest outage in .. ages: Skype Broken.

(I use Skype for text chat to some people).

Enjoy!