Vista stuff
I've not been doing much coding this week as I was busy on Monday, at ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif)
biphoria on Tuesday and the pub on Friday, leaving two days to achieve stuff. My Vista install has been a bit unhappy, so I took the opportunity to rebuild it onto the new Hitachi SATA II disk I had. It has, afterall, had a load of SP1 builds and drivers on it.
I've also upgraded from 2GB of PC640 DDR2 non ECC RAM to 4GB of ECC (non buffered) 5300 RAM, and bought a 2GB ReadyBoost compatible USB2 flash drive at the same time to see if it had any effect.
Overall, I've managed to move things into a state I'm reasonably happy with, thoughts :
ReadyBoost (cacheing disk swaps onto a fast flash device) seems to clear the cache every time it powers off. This seems suboptimal : I'd suggest that sticking a SuperFetch cache on the flash device so that it can retrieve commonly accessed applications quickly on startup might be valuable.
Vista's performance index seems to assess hard drives properly, by testing transfer rates on various parts of the disk (outer is faster than inner). I wonder if things like diskkeeper enable you to relocate programs to faster bits of the spindle - AIX certainly used to have sophisticated partition placement tools and suchlike.
The Windows Easy Transfer tool is utter shit. It won't let you take an existing Vista install on an external disk and suck all the data off it. It will let you backup from the old to new system, however it seems to miss out lots of application settings. I had to manually copy files over. Rating : -1/10 (negative, as it can potentially allow you to lose data..)
I strongly disagree with comments elsewhere that 'style is substance'. I'd quite happily use a much less blingified system as long as it runs all the programs I want at decent speed. As such I've turned off all the crappy menu, window and animation transitions that actually slow down bringing up programs. My one concession is to have pretty wallpaper on my desktop, although I may even turn that off soon..
Then again, Vista seems less happy with the DWM turned off and everything returned to classic. There are repainting errors, which might of course be a fault of the Nvidia drivers.
The much improved event logs (that seem to equate to an unrelated comment by customer at work that it 'logs if a dog farts in the general direction of the store') keep reminding me that the graphics cards are being stressed. This could be Vista, but I would again suggest this is fucking Nvidia. Yes, it isn't common to have 1920x1440 and 1280x1024 monitors on one card, and 2048x1536 on the other, but modern cards have fast RAMDACs and lots of memory. This is not acceptable. Graphics cards should produce high quality 2D first, and 3D second..
I'd look at buying ATI instead, but a) I can see the exact same symptoms reported for some versions of Catalyst and b) their Linux drivers are much worse.
Windows Media Player remains slow to start up regardless of operating system or hardware. It's said that third party alternatives are much improved, but in my experience they fail in other areas, particularly synching audio and video tracks..
Write cacheing seems to be turned off by default for many drives, which is suboptimal. I realise most people don't have a UPS, but it might be an idea to at least alert them and let them make the choice.
Thunderbird needs a spring clean, as it's beginning to hang. This may be to do with having well over 15,000 messages in its inbox..
I can't seem to see a way to index zip files by default... must research that.
Relating to external drive boxes, ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
spride noted he didn't trust fanless external drive boxes. I echo this, and in particular do not recommend buying an IB-361-STUS-B black Icybox SATA to e-SATA/USB 2 caddy. First, the mechanism uses an easily losable key that can't even be attached to a keyring, it doesn't fit thicker SATA drives, they get rather hot, and the power adaptor and cable are of poor quality. Buy something else..
On the other hand, I do recommend the caddy less internal Icybox IB-168SK-B. There's also a version with a fan, or things like the Scythe Kama Bay can be installed above it. If you need to swap drives in a case, this is strongly recommended!
Still, at the moment everything seems to be nice and fast - which it bloody should be, considering the amonut of hardware it's got.
