Setting drive letters in Windows

Windows sucks at drive selection. When I first installed Windows I had two drives in there that had already been formatted. These came up as C: and D: and the newly formatted drive, after taking into account two DVD drives and my card reader (that comes up as four separate disk drives), my Windows partition was listed as K:. The C: drive, for some bizarre reason was a “system drive” even though I hadn’t installed anything on it.

I understand the Windows drive system is a legacy but it’s really just downright crazy. Why can’t I use A: and B: as drive letters? Why does a card reader come up as a set of drives even though there are no disks in it? Why is the drive letter so damn important? I much prefer the Unix way of mounting partitions as directories in the filesystem hierarchy – it’s far more logical and has responded better to changes in the way we use computers.

Antec Sonata III

This is one very, very fine case. Currently it’s on the floor next to my desk and I can barely hear it. Quite impressive considering there’s a quad-core CPU, a massive graphics card and four hard drives in there!

I highly recommend this case for your next PC.

Getting Windows working

I’d forgotten how much stuff you need to install to make a Windows system actually workable. Multimedia codecs, an office suite, a PDF reader, an archive program (eg. WinZip), CD/DVD burning software, iTunes for managing my iPod, a desktop search application, decent web browser and email programs, a proper text editor, a calendar and so on and so forth.

Being Windows you also need anti-virus, anti-spyware, a firewall and other anti-malware programs. Even though these degrade the functionality of your computer rather than enhance it.

Almost all of these things come included with the base operating system (or are not needed at all) on Linux or Mac OS X. Most PC vendors have to make up for this problem but end up bundling in all sorts of crap so personally I’m happier if Microsoft choose to include fewer programs rather than give me more crap I don’t want. Such as Internet Explorer.

Cables everywhere!

Even with the Sonata’s nice internal layout you still wind up with cables running all over the place. I wish all PSUs could be like Antec’s NeoPower? Detachable cables are the way to go.

I’m just glad I went with the SATA DVD burners. Nice thin cables are so much nicer than the huge IDE cables.

The more things change…

Even with all the crazy fast hardware in the computer, for day-to-day operations I don’t notice anything different from my old computer. Boot up and program start up is slightly faster but that will probably change over time. I can watch 1080p videos now but I don’t have many of them anyway.

Video encoding and playing games are really the only two areas I’ve noticed the massive increase in hardware power.

I must admit I was unprepared for just how huge the graphics card actually was – the card is longer than the motherboard! Not to mention the huge heatsink and fan on top of it. Thankfully the card fit in without any problems; there’s a tight fit in the case now but nothing too drastic, although I would advise people install the graphics card last if you’re going to get one of these.

I am so far unimpressed by the card reader. I haven’t actually used it functionally yet but from my play around inserting my camera’s SD card, it doesn’t seem to be as nice as, say, the card reader on my laptop. The card doesn’t actually slide all the way in and so sticks out, which is a bit of a pain as my case door must stay open.

The main problem I’m having right now is that I’d forgotten just how mind-numbingly awful the Windows XP installation is. I can’t believe I have to sit here and babysit the damn thing for the sole reason that it asks questions every 10 minutes. Why oh why did no-one on the installer team realise that all that information could have been gathered at the very start and then the process could run uninterrupted.

Don’t even get me started on the “Installation will complete in 39 minutes” thing.

Sigh. Oh well, this will most likely be the last time I need to install Windows XP on a computer so I guess I should look at it with … something less than the sheer loathing it deserves. To cleanse myself I might get around to installing the 64-bit version of Ubuntu 7.04 later.

Case: Antec Sonata III (including 500W PSU)
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
Motherboard: Gigabyte P35-DS3R
RAM: 2 x A-DATA DDR2-800 2GB Kit
HDD: 2 x Seagate 750GB
DVD: 2 x Pioneer 212BK

Not bad for $1585!

For the astute members of the audience I am only missing a graphics card to have an operational system. Which is really aggravating, let me tell you: I want to take my baby out for a spin and see what a quad-core processor and 4GB of RAM can do!

My plan for the video card is a Leadtek 8800GTS with 640MB RAM, which should have enough grunt for playing some recent games. However, I do have the problem of whether to go with NVIDIA or ATI for the graphics card: I like to take Linux compatibility into account and I plan on dual-booting Windows XP and a 64-bit Linux distro (any suggestions?). In the past this would mean an automatic slam-dunk for NVIDIA seeing as they’re the only one that seemed to take Linux seriously and provide decent drivers. Recent events have forced me to reconsider this though since AMD/ATI have released hardware specs for their GPUs so we should soon be seeing open source Linux drivers that are kept up-to-date by the community and integrated fully into the kernel or X.org. This makes ATI a very tempting option. At the end of the day though I think NVIDIA are still releasing slightly superior hardware and their Linux drivers work now, not in a year’s time, so I’ll probably go with the 8800GTS.