My main desktop PC for the past 3.5 years was an ‘old’ AMD 4000+, 2gb RAM, on an ASUS A8N Premium mobo, rocking an nVidia 7800 GTX 256mb video card. I had originally built it as a gaming PC which did the job for games like Oblivion, Battlefield 2 etc, but around this past xmas, my power supply, an OCZ 520w (can’t remember the model name) shit the bed. Luckily OCZ has an awesome warranty and honored my PS’s untimely death and actually sent out a brand new 600 watt one, which BTW, is MUCH quieter than my old one, so GOOD ON OCZ, and good on my ears and sanity since Laurie is not complaining about the ‘noise’.
When I had the downtime on my desktop when waiting for OCZ to send me out another (about 4 weeks), I started to think of upgrading it. I poked around at some C2D’s but for some reason the Intel Core2Quad q6600 caught my eye due to its a.) sub $200 price point and b.) overclocking capabilities. Joe said that if you compare it to the same prices C2D, than I would get slower results with the C2Quad; which may be true, but I still think that 4 cores is better than two, especially since VM’s will be involved here, but then again, when it comes to OC’ing in the future, anything can run at 3ghz.
So I decided the q6600 was for me, and I put in an order to newegg for the q6600 proc/fan, a Gigabyte ED45-UD3R, and 8gb of OCZ F2-6400CL5D-4GBPQ RAM, which I placed on a Tuesday and was here that Thursday — salute to Newgg. Well it got here tonight and I was in a dilema. I bought 8gb ram, and Windows XP 32(not that I use windows that much at least) will only support 3.2 gb or something like that. I was using Ubuntu as my primary OS FYI. However, I decided that to utilize the full 8gb I would need a true 64 bit OS, so I decided to give Vista 64 a shot, and I installed it tonight. I have to say, its actually not that bad, and its pretty fast with this hardware. I’m not even OC’ing yet and it flies.
Why the hell did I try Vista over Ubuntu? Well one of the reason’s I wanted 8gb of ram and C2Quad is for photo work; I’m not talking about making web graphics in photoshop but real deal processing with Lightroom and Photoshop with 8+ gb of RAW files from d300 at a time. My Macbook Pro C2D 2.16 was just not up to the task anymore. Also I wanted to give PC gaming another shot and though it was high time to upgrade the PC first and buy the graphics card later. I’m thinking of an hd4850 btw. But that doesnt mean I wont still use Ubuntu most of the time :) Just that Vista fits the bill for those two main things I built this PC for.
I’m still sitting here thinking, Why the F*** did I just install Vista on this box, and what the F*** am I doing? Well, it’s not as bad as I remember ( pre-release/beta days of Vista) and its actually usable, its no Linux, but Linux is no Windows either. I’m going to replace this HD soon so that will mean a new OS install as well, maybe I’ll give Windows 7 a shot and see how that goes. Who knows?
Still can’t belive I’m running Vista.
Shoot me.