Looking good

Working with ordinary XP Home on Swish has been a real relief. I know how to fix things that go wrong in an instant, it's just... easy. It's still time consuming though, all the updates, the programs to install. I'm looking forward to just being able to sit down and use it.

One of the best things was buying Acronis TrueImage because I keep making backups to revert to and that was what made it particularly easy to sort out the Iiyama driver issue I ran into early on. I want to try and make a backup plan that will work, and to keep the computer really tidy and clean.

Home again, home again

Swish lay dormant for week after week which is such a shame for a computer with such potential. Eventually it clicked that the instability of XP Pro 64 bit was the problem. Every time I installed even the basics it would go into some kind of system failure and have to recover itself blah blah. I couldn't even tell if it was the hardware setup causing the problem.

It just made sense, with prices of OS's dropping to move to something else and after briefly considering Vista and reading up that it's actually slower and less stable than XP Home SP3 I just bought another XP Home. I know I know, it's going to be a total waste of the fancy processor but not using it at all is a waste of everything.

So I've installed Home yesterday and am putting on drivers and utilities at the moment and there's not a whiff of instability. It must all have been caused by the OS.

My aim is very much for a tidy and economically running machine, not to have bits and pieces of software installed and untidily uninstalled everywhere. So I'm trying to give thought to what I do and what I put on. At least I have this one as a living template for what I use and need.

All's feeling good in the computing world again now. Who knows, maybe I'll even get to create a bit of art again.

64 bit OS

I'm running into troubles from my Windows XP 64 bits OS. I think that's what keeps going wrong. I get to the point of installing Java and things mess up. I uninstalled it successfully using system restore this time and it seems to be back to restarting. But if I want to put Java on I'm going to have to be incredibly careful which version I pick up.

There's a few links here that I need to check through when I'm more awake

http://www.tutorials-win.com/64bit/Java-Runtime-58500/

http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=646682

Couple of interesting reviews I should have read first

XP preview

mini review

Failed installation

Well this is a pain. Something I installed somewhere along the way has messed up the Windows installation I started out with. I spent a lot of yesterday restarting and getting the error message that Windows had recovered from a serious system error. I went through all the troubleshooting but it wasn't clear where the conflict lay. I uninstalled AVG at one point and that really finished it off. Whenever I tried to start I would get masses of error messages as it tried to load AVG and couldn't. Then I tried a system restore and it was upset that I'd changed the drive letters and pagefile settings.

All in all I decided to start today with reinstallation of windows. Ha. It didn't want to put it over the top of the old one, I didn't want to just repair the old one so I've currently ended up with two installations, one on C and one on D.

For the time being I'm setting up D and leaving C alone. Once I feel relatively confident D is as I want it I can reformat C. D is much bigger than C! I hadn't necessarily intended Windows to have such a big portion of my drive as I was going to install things on separate partitions and leave Windows clean. Though actually, it never seemed easy to put things elsewhere what with the X86 section and all. I might end up leaving more with Windows than I thought in which case loads of space will be better.

I'm keeping careful note of what I change and will set up system restore points more often now. I want to try and catch a trouble maker before things get so corrupted!

diary effect

I was just thinking I should log what I change as I'm setting this up, so that I know what to do another time. Rather than start yet another 'advanced diary' project or such like I realised this is probably the easiest.

What I've done so far then, is update both versions of Internet Explorer to 7.

In trying to install NLite I found that I need the .NET framework. As I started to download version 2.0 I saw 3.5 is available. One of the things I didn't like on this one was how things like .NET and Java keep leaving behind their old versions so I'm trying to install 3.5 without any earlier versions. It's cool being able to set that going and flip back here to update. I don't know if I'll keep my KVM switch long term because I miss the scroll wheel on my mouse (I've had to adapt my USB mouse to PS/2 for the KVM switch.. didn't realise I needed a USB KVM and don't even know if they exist) but for the time being running two comps side by side is kinda fun. Burning up the ozone layer though, despite that I focussed on energy efficiency, so ideally I'll just run the other one most of the time.

Definitive answer on the pagefile

I'm glad I held off, I have finally found someone who's 'internet voice' I find sounds reliable and confidence inspiring. I will follow his advice on most of the issues on the site then at least I'm following something consistent.

Optimise XP is the page that refers to the paging file.

For sorting out my old computer once the transfer has been completed and I know what is necessary I will follow this guidance: Malware removal.

I found out all about this site and other tweaks to do or not do from AMD64 site in one of the forum threads.

I've been cross with myself for taking so long setting this up but suddenly I realise it's that I want to 'get it right' and that takes time and forethought rather than charging in and sticking on the software and then uninstalling things and leaving crap all over the place.



Today I found that there isn't a 64 bit version of Pegasus, the mailer I've used ever since I first started using the internet. I did find a site that offers a conversion addon for Pegasus so I'll be thinking about which mailer to use when I'm on the other computer and might be able to convert my old pmails to something else. Generally I'm considering Thunderbird which is what my husband uses nowadays.

Just to prove how completely random a path my surfing seems to be taking me I will bookmark the WMP 11 slipstreamer here.

Now that I am running both computers and surfing on both this page is becoming ever more important for me to manage to access bookmarks from both places!

Bookmarks

I already use IE and Firefox on this computer. To now have another computer is leading to confusion over bookmarks. I'd recently started tidying up my IE bookmarks. My Firefox bookmarks are online as of yesterday but the old version not the tidy new version where dead links are removed. So I was just looking at bookmark synchronisers.

I fancy Book Kit though I need to check that will work on the other comp... (which is STILL downloading .NET... 118MB and only 5 down, must be a very slow server!).

Sync2It is another possibility.

There's a list of bookmark managers here.

Zinkmo seems a possible too. I found a thread where there was a discussion of this issue and it seems a lot of people are at ease with revealing their bookmarks to the world at large. I've got nothing to hide but somehow my bookmarks feel very personal to me... a bit like a bookshelf of books shows you the interest

Oh darn, there goes one of my favourite utilities to the 64bit compatibility issue. Filenote, now Shell Tools, is no longer giving me options when I right click. All may not be lost, there is some registry editing that may work. Nope, deeper reading shows that's not related at all. Red herring.

Tidy room, Swish computer

I made it a rule that I would not bring the new computer into this room until I had organised and cleaned it thoroughly. I'm not one of the world's most enthusiastic houseworkers (understatement) so this has taken a little while and a lot of procrastination.

But here we are, today Swish has moved in here.

Never having built a computer from scratch I've been a little hazy about what first...

Cabling! Darn, no matter how long you've been computing I reckon that despite the mound of cables and adapters you accumulate there's bound to be one you do not have. I've bought a KVM switch so I can run both computers from one setup. I forgot I have a USB mouse... need a USB to PS/2 connector...

Dug out a bit of LAN cabling but couldn't set up a connection... duh... look at the device manager and see that nothing's properly installed as yet.

Installed the graphics drivers while I had a look at the CD that came with the motherboard. Nice, there's a lot of drivers there, read the readmes and started. Seems to have gone smoothly.

Now what?

Yup, my display adapter now correctly says GeForce 8800 thank goodness... nothing like the misery of buying a nifty graphics card only to find it labelled 'Standard VGA adapter'.

The LAN is now working - Generic Marvell Yukon Chipset based Ethernet controller. Well whaddya know!

Uh oh, 21 days left to activate, ok, good job I got the LAN going then, there that's done.

I chose the option not to install the audio. It told me to. I went to the Microsoft download center as instructed in the readme but as I suspected, service Pack 2 has already adressed whatever issue there was. The audio is still disabled so ran the installation of the Realtek HD audio river R1.58.

More on things like Scratch Disks

So another issue to bear in mind is the need for a lot of scratch disk space and that like the page file, it will benefit from frequent defragmenting.

Just collecting another set of links that I might need to refer back to here'

Scratch disk

Scratch disk full

Some rosity threads

PS and scratch disk

In PS forum

another

Computer built

Well the computer is all put together, Windows XP Pro is installed and I partitioned one of the hard drives. I paused before doing the other one because I thought perhaps I should have a plan for how I use the space.

Bleugh, that's where it gets confusing, different people with different advice.

I could set up a partition just for the page file. But how big does the page file need to be on this system? I don't know in advance as I've not used it for anything yet.

Here's some things to think about

Microsoft page on XP 64bit

Roy Longbottom's page on remapping the bios to use more memory.

Then a page on optimising virtual memory that is written pre XP so I'm not sure how relevent it is to a 64 bit OS.

A Renderosity thread on fiddling with memory settings in the ini file

Ordered at last

Yay, after a morning's work I have put in the complete orders. I had supply problems where some of the bits went out of stock, especially the motherboard... rather a crucial item!

I hope I got all the right bits, they all fit together and mke a complete computer. At the moment it's a little like one of those jigsaws you do blind but with millions of bits and not knowing which ones will belong to your jigsaw and which won't.

My husband is going to be away on Sunday so it would be great if we could get it running before he goes.

My three suppliers ended up being Aria (used them before and they're very good), Komplett (motherboard and RAM only) and Amazon for the PSU.

I posted these specs to Tom's Hardware forums. They're talking me into getting a different graphics card. I found Aria had it on special offer but can't quite commit to buying it yet.

Tom's hardware thread

Building a computer from scratch

This is supposed to be a blog about my learning in more depth how to use my 3D graphics software, at the moment Carrara 6 Pro.

However, the first thing I'm learning is how to build my own computer from scratch as my current version really is not coping with the demands of Carrara, C4D or even the latest version of Bryce.

Here's my current shopping list:

Case: Antec P182 Advanced Super Midi Tower

Motherboard: Abit IP35-E Intel P35 LGA775 Core2 Quad

PSU: Torn between two here - Antec Neo 550W at only £69.44 or Corsair 620W at £81.08

CPU: Intel core 2 quad Q6600 with or without heatsink?

GPU: I want an Nvidia 8 series.

Probably the MSI overclocked 8600GT based on this HardwareSecrets Review coming in at £65.74 when they get them back in stock! An alternative is the non overclocked version by Nvidia at £53.70 or my original choice before reading teh hardware secrets review the XpertVision at £47.35.

A comparison here is:

	MSI	NVidia	XpertVision
Core Clock	540 MHz	540MHz	500 MHz
Memory Clock	800 MHz	700MHz	600 MHz

Ok, I think I'll stick witht he XpertVision, it's not enough of an improvement and I am suspicious of overclocked things in case they run too hot etc.

Hard Drives
Maybe get two Seagate Barracuda. It's what's in this and it's going well. My plan is to put in two hard drives, one for backing up. Whether I really need two 500GB ones is kinda hard to say. I once thought I'd never fill up a 32o! I once thought an upgrade to 1GB was a big step!

OS. I've been told that I really do need 64bit to make the most of the componants I've chosen so far so I'm going for the 64bit XP Pro. Really not keen on Vista. £81.02 is the best price I've found so far.

DVD writer. Sheesh, I've got to the point where I really don't care! I'm out reviewed and out studied. Just some cheapie thing really. I only burn DVD backups most of the time.