New PC: It’s Alive!

Yes folks, my new PC is now up and running. Everything seems to have gone swimmingly hardware-wise. Today I got the final pieces of the system: a Winfast 8800GTS 640MB and a Ritmo "55-in-1″ card reader.

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.