From new server, to new desktop
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Windows Vista, Microsoft on
Mary looked over at my desk the other day, and said, “Is the new server going to be that loud all the time?”
I looked at her in surpise. “What do you mean? It’s virtually silent.”
“So what are all those fans?”
“That’s my desktop…”
That was when I realised it was time to change the machine I used every day. Bought over five years ago, it was starting to struggle with the processing and graphics requirements of today’s desktop applications. I’d got used to the roar of the fans - but throwing more and more cooling at yesterday’s technology really wasn’t the answer. After all, it would just make the office noisier!
A little web research,and I’d found that my usual hardware component supplier was selling very nice looking PCs - with most of what I needed. I decided to be as future proof as possible, and ordered a quad-core Intel box, with plenty of USB ports, 750GB of hard disk, and 4GB of RAM. I picked up a hefty graphics card as well, all for a third of what I’d spent five years ago.
Setting up the machine was easy enough. It had come with XP Home, but I blew that away and went with a Vista Ultimate install. It wasn’t very long before I had the new box online, and hooked up to our office domain. All-in-all it was relatively painless, though I still miss the option of having an extended desktop rather than the traditional dual monitor approach.
It took me a couple of days to install all the applications I needed - with a couople of caveats. It’s important to make sure that you deactivate applications like Adobe’s CS3 or Apple’s iTunes (and that you’re careful to make sure you import all iPhone applications before doing a first sync on a new PC).
So what are my key applications? I keep a list in OneNote, so I don’t forget anything - and here a few key applications:
- Microsoft Office 2007 - I live in Outlook, OneNote and Word
- Visual Studio 2008 - My usual development tool
- Firefox 3 - What else for the web?
- Xobni - Simplifying my inbox and my correspondence
- Clipmate - Managing the Windows clipboard
- Paint.Net - Image editing for free
- Cardscan - I get a lot of business cards, and this gets them into theOutlook address book easily
- Avast! AV - One of the best free AV tools around, and my recommendation
- Adobe CS3 Web - Web design and image manipulation
- Alzip - A good, fast, free archive management tool
- Filezilla - The best free FTP tool around
- Multiplicity Pro - Controlling my laptop from my desktop keyboard and mouse
- Feed Demon - RSS reader
- Aptana Studio - A powerful (and free) JavaScript and AJAX development tool
Of course there’s more - there are clients for social media networks, and tools to manage files between desktop and server.
My files moved across quickly, and I’ve been using the new machine since Monday - and I turned the old desktop off at the end of Monday, and it’s not been on since. Four cores and a 512MB NVidia 9600GT are an ideal Vista platform, and the OS is running smoothly - and extremely fast.
One thing I’ve done, to make sure I use one of Vista’s best features, is turn off the Quick Launch tool bar. It’s making me use the search word wheel on the start menu a lot more - and that’s good.
The office? A lot quieter. I can now hear the fans on the NAS across the room.
–Simon
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