www.nickhodge.com

Inde­pend­ent review, worth the read.

As the 8800GT is on back­order, time to bor­row Liam’s old ATI Radeon 1950Pro and start the install­a­tion pro­cess. Also a good time to clean up the cables a little inside.

Good news. Gen­eral Melchett boots. BIOS finds all the hard­ware bit first time around. The CPU is not fried.

Vista takes an impress­ively short amount of time to install from DVD.

There is a tech­nique known as “feel­ing the hard drive’s vibra­tions” that few geeks know. Sort of like being a geek whisperer. You can feel the bits being installed onto the drive.

And we’re live!

It’s strange that the memory per­form­ance is a 5.6. I tried a few quick tweaky things and broke the star­tup. Back to Giga­byte defaults and all worked OK again.

Soft­ware install­a­tion and con­fig­ur­a­tion time!

Yes, I know that the cor­rect eng­lish spelling of Cen­ter is Centre.

Thanks to the gen­er­os­ity of Jeffa, I scored an old Mini-ATX case with power sup­ply. Yeah, being the junior on the team — I get all the hand-me-downs.

Some hun­dreds of dol­lars later from AUS­P­CMar­ket, and I have my first ever:

1. AMD based PC (AMD Athlan64 x2 6000+)
2. Giga­byte Mother­board PC (GA-MA69GM-S2H)
3. Self-constructed PC (only a screw­driver required)
4. Media Cen­ter PC (Vista Ultimate)
5. Microsoft Wire­less Key­board 8000

Not being a hard­ware type, the mov­ing of cables, CPUs, fans, more cables and stuff made the phys­ical con­struc­tion a little longer than an expert. There are still some internal wir­ing bits to com­plete: hard disk light at the front and CD audio. Also missed that the our Acer LCD TV has VGA and PC Audio. The cables I pur­chased were not correct.

The toughest part was installing the power to the SATA DVD/CD drive, and ensur­ing the CD eject but­ton had enough clear­ance to work.

The first PATA (this was a sur­prise!) hard disk was stuffed, so off to plan B with a 500Gb PATA and we’re away. The mother­board would not boot up with this hard disk attached; so the old disk is a throw away.

Using the onboard graph­ics and USB based TV tuner is prob­ably sub-optimal. Need to fix these.

To add/change

1. Dual chan­nel PCI DVB-T card
2. DivX sup­port (com­plete at 9:40pm)
3. TV Guide so I can record TV successfully.

Oh, and the cats love the extra space. The case and CPU are quiet and rel­at­ively cool. The cave aspect of the case make it a per­fect hunt­ing spot:

As my internal 100Gb hard disk on the Toshiba M400 (T2400) had only 5% free space: even after archiv­ing pho­tos and pod­casts, I could not reduce the free space to under 10%.

Time for a new HD. Pur­chased from Aus­p­cmar­ket, 200Gb 7200 RPM Seag­ate Momentum drive.

As much as this Toshiba has lim­it­a­tions that are start­ing to annoy me (read: screen real-estate: can I have a new XPS now, please. ta.) — adding and delet­ing the hard drive was extremely simple.

Pro­cess

1. Win­dows Vista “Win­dows Com­plete Backup” (in Backup and Restore) to second hard drive
2. Phys­ic­ally remove old drive, install new drive
1. remove two screws hold­ing in the plastic cover
2. use the plastic tab to remove the hard disk in it alu­minium bay
3. remove four screws hold­ing the SATA hard disk in the bay
4. insert and replug new SATA hard disk
5. reverse install procedure.
3. PXE boot from net­work, where we have a net­work based, Sys­tem Recovery
4. A pleas­ant UI appears; only con­fus­ing part was ensur­ing I had a copy of my disk drivers on USB
5. Restore from the backup, onto the new hard disk.
6. Reboot from new hard disk
7. Using Com­puter Management>Disk Man­age­ment, Right-click “Extend Volume” to the full 200Gb
8. Done

Per­form­ance of the disk drive: 4.9 to 5.4; that is a10% increase.

It’s nearly a week since I upgraded my iPod from a gen­er­a­tion 3 to one of the cool, uber-geek iPod Touch devices. As a 99.5% Win­dows Vista user, I am impressed.

The iPod Touch works on our home wifi. In the morn­ing I check emails and other overnight hap­pen­ings from the com­fort of my bed in Safari.  The syn­chron­isa­tion between my Inter­net Explorer (Vista) and Safari (iPod Touch) browsers works well.

It beeps at me when I have an appoint­ment. My con­tacts are in there.

All it needs is a mini email applic­a­tion. A slightly less finiky onscreen key­board. A cam­era and a VoIP. Oh, that’s right — that’s an iPhone!

As Larry men­tions in his post, the latest beta of Win­dows Live Photo Gal­lery is out.

After installing it, the first fea­ture I tried out is the new “upload to Flickr”. I am a Flickr Pro user: the abil­ity to see and com­ment on my friend’s pho­tos is like attend­ing slide-show even­ings from the com­fort of your own computer.

The internal buzz in the leadup to announce even got Jeff Sandquist hyped! And Long Zheng, an excel­lent pho­to­grapher also loves it.

Win­dows Vista added sup­port for tag­ging pho­tos as another mech­an­ism for organ­ising your digital memor­ies. Win­dows Live Photo Gal­lery reflects these tags when upload into Flickr. Now as a Flickr user, this was a wow! moment.

Watch and listen to my (first) screen­cast.

JohnG, the nicest man on the planet, will­ing let me into his house to film another epis­ode of The Geek Stor­ies. Mayling filmed a behind the scenes show… which will be inter­est­ing to see, too. Server racks and a com­pac­tus in the games room. Now that’s impressive!

So, do you have Australia’s geeki­est house?

Ed Bott, from ZDNet in the US recently tested Win­dows Vista Home Basic on a 2002-vintage PC with 512Mb of RAM — and found the oper­at­ing sys­tem respons­ive and usable.

Sur­pris­ingly, even the visu­als on this sys­tem were a treat. With a three-year-old video card, this sys­tem was cap­able of run­ning Vista’s Aero graph­ics. But because Aero doesn’t run on Home Basic, I was stuck with the Vista Stand­ard dis­play. It lacks the trans­par­ent win­dow bor­ders and whizzy live pre­views on taskbar but­tons, but oth­er­wise the look is indis­tin­guish­able from a sys­tem run­ning Win­dows Vista Ultimate.

(Link thanks to John Dowdell) Bridging my old world to my new world, this doc­u­ment details the sup­port for cur­rent Adobe applic­a­tions with Microsoft Win­dows Vista. It is well worth a read, espe­cially as Adobe products: Flash Player and the Adobe Reader are very com­mon installs.

Sum­mary: no Acrobat 7 sup­port for Vista, only Acrobat 8: with an update expec­ted first half 2007 for full sup­port. There are known issues with Acrobat 8 on Vista. Sim­il­arly with Office 2007; the update will have sup­port. You can make PDFs dir­ectly from Office 2007 using the Save as PDF and XPS plu­gin.

For Adobe Cre­at­ive Suite 2.3: (note that Cre­at­ive Suite Premium 2.0 with Acrobat Pro­fes­sional 7.0 is not a good com­bin­a­tion). For Mac­ro­media Stu­dio 8, the fol­low­ing seems to also apply.

we are not cur­rently aware of major issues that would adversely affect cus­tomer use of
Adobe Cre­at­ive Suite 2.3 on Win­dows Vista.

In the doc­u­ment, it is worth not­ing the para­graphs in regards to the forth­com­ing, pre-announce status Adobe Cre­at­ive Suite 3.0:

…Adobe Cre­at­ive Suite 3 is being designed for and thor­oughly tested on 32-bit ver­sions of four edi­tions of Win­dows Vista—Home Premium, Busi­ness, Enter­prise, and Ultimate.

Adobe Pro­duc­tion Stu­dio (video products) seem to install OK, but Vista is not recom­men­ded as an OS. EncoreDVD is repor­ted to not work on Vista. Shame, as I was just about to pur­chase a Pro­duc­tion Stu­dio for some Microsoft video pro­jects. 

Altsys/Aldus/Adobe/Altsys/Macromedia/Adobe Free­hand? Oooh. Maybe not so good:

Adobe does not plan to update Mac­ro­media Free­Hand to install or run on Win­dows Vista

Do go have a read, and look at the sup­port for­ums: Vista in Adobe Sup­port For­ums.

As a Microsoft Vista and an Intel-based Mac­Book Pro user, this year is a key year for Adobe products.

If you are demon­strat­ing, or present­ing screen based tech­no­logy: some­time you need to zoom in to high­light a dia­log box, or some piece of small stuff that is, well, small.

ZoomIt is your friend. Works on Vista, too. Free.