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Home >> Photography >> Digital The New Custom Desktop Computer 2007/2008
On the first day, Gates created (well, actually bought) MS-DOS and he saw that it was good (kinda, sorta). On the second day, MS-DOS begat Windows 3.1 and Gates saw that it was good (kinda, sorta). On the third day, Windows 3.1 begat Windows 95 and Gates saw that it was good (kinda, sorta). On the fourth day, Windows 95 begat Windows XP and Gates saw that it was good (kinda, sorta). On the fifth day, Windows XP begat Windows Vista and Gates saw that it was good (kinda, sorta). On the sixth day, Gates created virtual Adam and virtual Eve and placed them in a Vista window known as Eden, and he saw that it was good and gave dominion over Eden to virtual Adam and virtual Eve and commanded them to go forth and multiply their bits and bytes onto many kilobytes, megabytes, and gigabytes. On the seventh day, Gates rested and gave dominion over virtual heaven to his archangel, Ballmer. Another archangel, Jobs, was mightily wounded that Gates had given dominion over heaven to Ballmer and sought what he felt was his right by leading a rebellion against the dominion of Gates. The Gates arose from his rest and cast Jobs and his minions into the chasm of fire, banished forever from the graces of the… pearly Gates…and virtual heaven. The archangel Jobs plotted his revenge and disguised as a virus, hacked in through Port 8080 into the window of Eden. There he enticed virtual Adam and Eve and their progeny with his fruit of knowledge, which surprisingly, already had a bite taken out of it. But, no matter for Jobs promised to lead them to a new land of milk, honey and…plenty of apples. Through the millennia and despite the patience of Jobs, the exiled one merely achieved five-percent market share amongst Eden’s residents (although he has increased the share value quite nicely since returning to Apple from his real-life exile). Preamble #2 (I’ve probably written most of this section in past articles, so forgive the repetition) Back in the Triassic age, aka the early 1980s, there seemed to be an overnight bursting of the dam for a plethora of gaming and computing devices. It of course all started with the classic Atari game console with Pacman and Space Invaders leading the charge to a new era, an electronic era that no hormone-filled, soon-to-be-teenage boy could resist. Trivia: Atari was founded by Norm Bushnell, of Pong fame. My favourite console of the era was the Colecovision thanks to the number of desirable games it offered, as well as the then excellent graphics. Unfortunately, I only knew it from afar reading the reviews in the various magazines that I had access to in my parents’ little mom and pop convenience store. Shortly after the game console revolution came a mini computing revolution led by Apple with the very classic II, and for those of us with a lot less money to spend, the Commodore computers. Of course, there were computers before Apple hit it big with Osborne and Tandy being two significant names that come to mind. Remember the “notebook” computers of the age from Osborne? Suitcase sized computers with the front keyboard portion detachable from the main box but still attached via a cable. The main box housed a whopping five or so inch monochrome screen and floppy drives. These “portables” generally weighed in at 30 or so lbs. I really wanted a full-blown Commodore 64 system with a 5.25 inch floppy disk drive and dedicated color monitor, but the parents budget suggested I reach a little lower. Thus, I ended up with a Commodore Vic 20 with its whopping 5 kb of RAM – and people bitched and whined about the DOS 640k barrier, well let me tell ya how it was back when I was a kid… I had to walk up hill in five-foot snowdrifts…to AND from school! I spent hours typing up the free code in the computing magazines, offered by those far more brilliant than I could ever hope to be and saved those precious, but syntax error filled, lines of code on cassette tape. Yes, back in the day, we proletariat used the lowly cassette tape to store our files…optical, schmopitcal, you young-uns are plain spoiled with your fancy terabytes of storage in NAS RAID boxes. The more wealthy bourgeois could afford the $500 floppy disk drives and dedicated monitors, while I used whatever toss-away TV the parents gave me. At least we could (barely) afford color back then… I also traded games typed up by other friends with the same system as me and we had a blast playing Omega Race for hours. Amazing what 5 kb of RAM can actually do. I don’t think the Vic 20 lasted more than two-years. Being the dunce that I am, I never became the teenage programming genius that I thought I could become and thus was an ignoble end to the early 1980s era computing experience for me. Some years later, after returning home from my first year of university, I knew the electric Smith Corona typewriter I bought the previous summer would not cut it for hacking out all the essays a history and Poli-Sci guy like me would have to write. Manual typing and error correction is mind numbingly tedious and it would sometimes take me the whole night just to type up an error-free 15-page essay (typed the night before it was due, of course – being a two-finger typist didn’t help either). My dad used to have an old school manual typewriter, the type that had no “1” key; you had to use capital “I” to denote “1.” If I recall correctly, it’s the same kind that Angela Lansbury used in the opening credits for her show, Murder She Wrote. I wish I still had it as a keepsake and antique display piece. It would make for quite a contrast sitting beside my 24 and 30 inch LCDs. I might still have that old Smith Corona around, but its gunmetal grey plastic and rather “modern” look doesn’t have the same appeal as the much older unit. My parents were quite reasonable with the wallet when it came to my education and my dad didn’t blink an eye when I suggested that he spend $3000 to buy me a computer. He gave me the Visa and said go buy what you need. I kept cool and I think the total cost of the initial purchase was under $3000, but within a couple of weeks, I blew more of the Visa’s limit when I traded in the original monochrome monitor for an EGA graphics card and color monitor. Total cost, probably around $3600 in 1989 dollars, which included a 9-pin Epson dot matrix printer. I can barely recall the details now, but I’m pretty sure what I ended up with was an 8 MHz XT PC with not only a 5.25 inch floppy drive, but one of those new fangled 3.5 inch floppies too. I was only 18, but I was already thinking ahead to the future J As I got to know MS-DOS and MS Works, one of my cousins and I also spent many hours playing Gauntlet on that box and I’m sure the little kid missed those sessions when I packed up and went back to Victoria for second year, especially since I wouldn’t return again to Kamloops until well after I finished school. Years later, when that little kid grew up and got his own gaming toys, he brought over his Sony PlayStation for us to play and one of the first games he popped in was…Gauntlet. My own son, now nine years old, is an expert with the X-Box (original version) and can pretty much wipe the floor with anyone that challenges him in a game of EA Sports NHL hockey (any version). He’s always nagging me for Internet time to play games on the Teletoon website, as well as for some general surfing of his favourite preoccupation. He’s got so much more than when I was a kid and what ends up being his big interest? Surfing the ‘net and checking up the stats on every team in the NHL…in the summer for God’s…er…Gate’s sake. He’s definitely all Canadian. During university, I fell in with a group of guys that were also into computers and my first PC didn’t last a year in my hands with the Jones syndrome that raged almost as badly as the hormones did. I sold it off and later that summer, bought one of the next generation PCs becoming the rage, a 386, albeit, a rather lowly one with only a 16 MHz SX CPU. That one didn’t last long either for whatever reason that escapes me now and after going a semester with no computer, I talked to the loans officer at the bank of Mom and Dad and got myself a pretty fine system for the day. A 386 25 MHz (no stinkin’ SX chip for me now) with full VGA color and graphics and, almost unheard of back then for a Kraft dinner swilling poor student, an Okidata LED printer for my essays. Total cost, somewhere around $3600. That was back in the beginning of 1991 and that 386 lasted for a while until 1995, when I got caught up in the Windows 95 craze and bought an original Pentium 120. That 1995 system was another where I was thinking forward and bought a 17-inch monitor, because I knew 15-inch monitors were on their way out. I also bought another Okidata LED printer to replace the original that eventually crapped out on me – probably needed the drum replaced, but I thought it made better sense to just buy a whole new printer instead of trying to fix the old beast. Total cost, somewhere around $3600. I’ve had or used various desktop computers since then, ranging almost the full gamut of PII, PIII, P4 and Xeon. At work, I used an older IBM Centrino notebook, but last summer, it was upgraded with a 14-inch Dell Core2Duo notebook, but since this unit is for work, I can’t use it for photo editing with Photoshop or Lightroom. However, later on, I’ll have more to say about using another C2D “notebook” computer for photo editing. The last box that I had custom built was back in the beginning of 2003 and its total cost without any peripherals was somewhere around…$3600. Notice a trend here? Some say that the computer you always want is $5000. For me, that price has always been a bit lower as I usually recycled various parts such as optical drives and monitors, but today, I can’t say that, as the box I’m writing about now has a parts cost alone of over $5000, minus any peripherals and software. Also, I’m talking about $5000 wholesale, not retail price, which would be even more dollars.
PC versus Mac The iMac is cute, well designed to conserve space and seems like a very capable generalist computer. However, for me, it would be nothing more than a secondary (and limited expansion) computer in the same way that the Acer 9920 is a secondary, albeit still very important, computer compared to the desktop. Mac prices have fallen since transitioning from Power PC to Intel processors, but a MacPro tower is still an expensive machine to buy. Apple is also well known for, well, overly (severely?) generous mark-ups for its RAM and hard drive prices. For example, as at this writing, to upgrade a MacBook from 1 GB to 4 GB RAM would cost you CAN $935 from Apple Canada. However, if I go to a local shop, I could buy 4 GB of Kingston RAM for the same MacBook for about $130. The difference in cost to upgrade from a 120 GB hard drive to a 250 GB hard drive will cost you $247 from Apple Canada, but at the same local shop, the difference in price is only $70. Buying a fully configured, top-of-the-line MacPro would be an almost $10,000 ($9,600 actual) purchase after taxes (before software costs are factored). Even buying a barebones MacPro with the dual 3.2 GHz Quad Core Xeons would be around $5700 with another $2000 or so to finish it off with the RAM and hard drives I’d want. However, to make the comparison more, ahem, apples to apples, the MacPro configuration that’s closest to my new PC would cost about $7300 after taxes. While I can’t build a MacPro exactly like my PC, because Apple does not offer Raptor hard drives as options, I’ve not included any monitors in the price, but I have included the cost of the wireless Apple keyboard and mouse. $7300 for a high-powered MacPro is actually not too bad, but it’s still a bit too rich for me to want to buy and take a bite of Steve Job’s apple. If I start to strip away the amount of RAM and hard drives to get down to a barebones configuration, the price drops down to $4150 after taxes, which would require the same $2000 to finish it off on my own. For $5000, I got myself an eight-core Xeon PC box configured closer to the $7300 MacPro tower. I know the baggage that Windows and its users have amongst the Apple cognoscenti, but that’s a discussion that others can take up, because it don’t much matter with me. Most of the apps I use are PC and Mac agnostic and run the same way on either platform. At the end of the day, the buck stops on my desk and I need to make choices on how to push that buck the furthest. If I were to become a Mac user, ideally, if the budget allowed, I’d want a high-powered MacPro tower for the heavy lifting of photo and video editing; an iMac for light-duty, everyday computing, such as email, Internet research and website maintenance; and a MacBook for mobile carting around. As recent events have it, I now have a new desktop for heavy lifting, a (very) large notebook for light-duty, everyday computing, and a regular sized notebook for mobile use. All for about the cost of that one nice MacPro tower. Hardware
Intel Xeons are server-grade processors and as such, I figured I should use a server board with them. I ordered the Intel S5000PSL board, which met my requirements for being able to handle two quad core Xeons and a large amount of RAM. It’s lacking in some features found in consumer boards, such as a built-in sound card and Firewire support. The number of USB ports available is also a bit less than the typical high-end consumer board (four versus the more typical six or eight). One spec that just kills me now for the amount of my time and money wasted is the support for PCI-Express. Back in December, my builder informed me that I would have to find another video card, because the one he ordered in for me was not going to fit. He advised me that he would return the unopened video card to get the money back and wait for my new choice. I asked him to hold off while I reviewed the matter. Based on that information, I researched the Intel motherboard a bit more and realized why the builder told me the video card would not be compatible. The Intel board offers two PCI-Express x8 and two PCI-E x4 specified slots. Unfortunately, almost all video cards require PCI-E x16 slots. My first thought when I discovered my boneheaded mistake was, okay, just order up a PCI-E x8 video card…I’d have better luck finding the original fruit of knowledge instead. I came across postings by brave people, taking a Dremel tool to cut an opening in their x8 slots to accommodate x16 video cards. Ah…no thanks, I’m not so brave myself.
I found some PCI-E x16 to PCI-E x8 adapters from an outlet in Texas and spent $200 in parts and S&H to order up three of the adapters. One for immediate use, one as a spare, and a PCI-E x16 to PCI-E x4 adapter should I want to install a second video card – today’s high-end video cards are so massive that they take up two expansion slot spaces and will block the second PCI-E slot (if available), thus necessitating the need for another adapter. Some motherboards space out dual PCI-E x16 slots for proper installation of two large video cards. When the adapters arrived, my builder didn’t immediately give me the video card for installation. After two-weeks of wating I found out why: he had already returned the video card, thinking he could just reorder it again when needed, despite me telling him not to return anything. While I’m wondering if I should strangle him, he later advises me that the video card has already been discontinued and that he couldn’t find stock locally. A few days later, he calls again and tells me that he found one in Toronto and would have it for me within a few days. When I finally got the blasted video card, I got my adapter, took off the cover of my CPU case and peered inside and looked all three pieces back and forth several times trying to figure out why my adapter looked totally wrong. It wasn’t so much my adapter wasn’t the right one, it was that the PCI-E x8 slots on the motherboard did not need any such adapters for the PCI-E x16 video card. I looked at the board’s specs again and there it is in black and white, two PCI-E x8 slots and two PCI-E x4 slots; however, both types are double the length so that the x8 slots are x16 length and the x4 slots are x8 length. I find this weird, but feel a mixture of relief, anger and frustration. The builder went on specs alone without taking a physical look at the video card and the motherboard to see if they would be compatible – remember, the original video card box was returned unopened. This wasted much time and as I mentioned already, $200 in useless adapters. In my case, I didn’t know enough about PCI-E slots to realize that the slots were physically compatible with the video card when I looked at the main board after being told the video card would not be compatible. The use of a PCI-E x16 card in a PCI-E x8 slot makes no difference to me for photo editing, but it might for those doing video editing. The difference between x16 and x8 is just the speed that the video card runs at. I'm otherwise able to get the full resolution needed to drive my 30-inch LCD monitor.
I wanted to build an Intel V8 machine (dual 3.0 GHz quad cores), but limited availability and high price kept that desire in check. RAM – 8 GB of RAM in two 4 GB modules. I initially ordered eight 1 GB sticks to save a few bucks over the pricier 2 GB sticks. I figured that by the time I need more than 8 GB of RAM, I’ll need a whole new box anyway. When I opened up the case to peer inside, I was surprised to see only two RAM modules installed and wondered why the builder only gave me 2 GB of RAM. Builder replied that he actually installed 4 GB sticks in case I wanted to add more RAM later on. Oh…ah…thanks for the added cost. Hard Drives – Two Western Digital 150 GB Raptors for OS and Photoshop scratch disk use. The Raptors are still the fastest non-enterprise hard drives available, although there are some 7200 RPM drives that are now considered just as fast as the Raptors running at 10,000 RPM. The size of the drive to use as a scratch disk is overkill, and I expect that it will also be used for some other file storage. Even the OS drive is larger than necessary, but for the OS and scratch disk, it’s all about speed. Down the road, I may install the Gigabyte i-RAM card to replace the scratch disk.
The i-RAM is an expensive expansion card that acts like another SATA hard drive, but uses RAM modules for the storage, so it is much faster than a physical hard drive. Default size is 4 GB, but can be modded to increase capacity to 7 GB, which should be fine for scratch disk use. Photoshop apparently screams when an i-RAM card is used instead of a physical drive. $700 for those with the need for speed. Way down the road, when prices have fallen to general affordability, the flash-based drives seem like the ideal option for OS and scratch disk usage. The recently announced 32 and 64 GB Lexar drives point towards the future, although these units are 2.5-inch and meant for notebooks. They are also ghastly expensive to consider at this time with the 64 GB unit hovering at US $1500, more than the cost of some of the notebooks it could be used with. Two 1 TB Seagate storage drives are installed, but I suspect that I’ll be wanting to add a third 1 TB drive in short order. I also have a Kingwin rack mount installed in one of the 5.25-inch bays for short-term backup needs. I can rotate three 300 GB drives with this cage, but for proper backup requirements, I really should be using 1 TB drives too. If I were really gung-ho and had money to burn, I could buy a good RAID controller card and build an internal RAID 5 array with the use of a 5.25 inch cage (four 3.5 inch drives fit in the space of three 5.25 inch bays). However, my own risk management protocol says no to this idea due to putting too many eggs in one basket and risking too much data to one power supply, even one as powerful as the one I have. Better to use another external RAID box for future storage needs. Optical Drives – A Samsung and a BenQ 16x DVD Lightscribe burners fill the need for optical drive access. These are carryovers from my previous system, otherwise, I would have gone with whatever is the latest and greatest. I no longer backup my files by burning CDs or DVDs due to the length of time required and the small capacities of the discs. Even Blu-Ray or HD DVD formats don’t hold much interest given all the ambiguity of optical media longevity and changing digital storage requirements. For now, I’m with digital photography expert, Tim Grey, on using multiple hard drives to store and backup (redundantly) my files. Graphics Card – Diamond ATI HD 2900XT with 512 MB of RAM with two, dual-link DVI connections give me the graphics support I desire. Originally specified the ATI X1900XT, an older, but capable video card, but builder got me the newer HD2900, which seems just as good (if now discontinued), even if it does seem more like a gamer’s card. There’s an interesting feature with the HD 2900XT, which is that running two such cards enables ATI’s CrossFire mode to really ramp up video quality and the gaming experience...except that I’m not a gamer or HD video editor. CrossFire sounds useless for me, but I’m all for eventually running two video cards to allow for triple or even quadruple monitor support – not that I’d know what to do with a fourth monitor.
Monitors – Dell 30-inch and Acer 24-inch LCDs from the old system. Ideally, the dream system would have three 30-inch LCDs, one for Adobe Bridge or other browser; one for main Photoshop editing; and one for the Photoshop palettes along with secondary application as needed. Another 30-inch LCD would cost $1500, which is $1500 that has to be taken away from the D3 slush fund, so, if and when I decide to run three monitors, the third will likely be another Acer or other 24-inch LCD, which would still be quite dandy. There are also other more important and more immediate needs to remedy for the new computer than another 24 or 30-inch LCD. More details below in the case section.
The PC-777 reminds me of the Golden Ratio, Edward Weston, as well as B&W’s famed flagship speakers designed over a decade ago and is the basis of much of B&W’s current technology used in its highly regarded 800 series of speakers. The 800 series speakers along with Classé amps (used to voice B&W speakers) are used in the legendary Abbey Road studios, made famous by the Beatles album of the same name (Pink Floyd also recorded its best albums there). The B&W Nautilus speakers were about $40,000 back in the mid 1990s, but I have no idea if they are still available for purchase today. I thought I was set for the case, but, after a friend sent me his specs for a new computer, which included a Lian Li PC-V2100 Plus II case, I thought about the noise factor for a few moments and recalled that the nautilus shaped case had fans that are considered relatively noisy. Silence is golden and I decided that a noisy, but funky looking case had no place in my home office. Thus, I stole my friend’s idea and ordered the PC-V2100 Plus II case for me too, but, since it was a fairly new case, availability was non-existent when I was spec’ing the parts during the summer. However, due to the long delay in getting the box built, the PC-V2100 case eventually did become available during the wait. The PC-V2100 case has three 120mm fan units:
The black aluminum case (also available in white) is large, heavy and solidly built. Having casters for it is a plus for easy moving around. There are two sections for the case: a lower section taking up one-third of the space and the top section taking up the other two-thirds. The PSU goes in the rear of the lower section, which is different from most other traditional cases that locate the PSU at the top rear. The front of the lower section is where the hard drives are mounted sideways.
The top section has the mobo located at the rear while the front is where all the 5.25 inch bays are located (seven total). If you still wanted to use a floppy drive, it comes with an adapter case that fits in one of the 5.25 inch bays.
So, does all the rubber strips and insulation actually work? Well, ah...no! This computer is overall, the loudest computer I’ve ever owned and I’m already thinking that I’m going to have to scrap all the future upgrade and expansion plans and look into a liquid cooling system to kill the noise. A couple of years ago, a friend told me how his ex-girlfriend described his hotrod computer as sounding like a jet airplane taking off. I now know why she made that comment, because my box makes me feel like I’m riding a plane in perpetual take-off mode for the amount of noise it generates. When first turned on, the new box is loud, but not unbearable, but once I start doing some things, the fans rev up and really crank out the noise. The box also expels out a fair bit of heat too, which is nice in winter, but will be insufferable in the summer due to my south-facing home office. I suppose I should have expected as much given all the fans inside the box. The old HP workstation I used before this new box was severely limited for expansion, but it was the quietest desktop I’ve ever had. The goal will be to get to that same level of quietness or better with the new computer. The Enermax Galaxy PSU is rated at 1000 watts, which should be more than enough to handle all the hard and optical drives, expansion cards, CPUs and all the other power hungry devices inside the computer. Better too much power capacity than too little and risk frying all your components from a PSU meltdown. Power and data cables are always a sloppy mess inside a computer and probably a contributor to poor ventilation inside the box if left tangled up. Mine is no exception with a large tangle directly behind the PSU. Enermax does try to minimize the tangle with the use of cable wraps, which make the cables look like some audiophile grade cables.
Sound – This is a work-in-progress, as the Intel board has no sound card built in and I had to retire my M-Audio external sound card because there is no Vista 64 driver available for it, only Vista 32. My fix for this was to buy a Headroom Portable Micro headphone amp with a built-in DAC for getting good sound from the computer, unfortunately, this amp didn’t turn out to be quite what I expected. I thought about getting a high-end Creative Labs X-Fi Elite sound card, but since those go for about $300, I thought I might as well just put it towards the USB capable DAC that I had been thinking much about in recent months. And, this is exactly what I did in buying the Headroom amp. Unfortunately, whether I missed some detail posted on the website, or whether Headroom did a poor job in communicating how the Portable Micro Amp actually works, it’s not what I had hoped for. Sound quality wise, I have no complaints as I think the Micro Amp provides very nice, sweet sound quality through my Sennheiser HD650 with the Zu Mobius cable. Bass is deep and taut and the highs are sweet and not etched like other solid-state amps can be. Despite its small size and portable functionality, I have no qualms about the sound quality as used with the computer and headphone listening. Unfortunately, the Portable Micro Amp only runs on battery power, which is internal and not user changeable. While it has an AC input, this is only to recharge the battery and does not serve to power the amp during operation. Eventually, the internal battery will require replacement, which means sending it back to Headroom for servicing. If I had known the amp was battery power only, I would have bought another Headroom amp instead, such as from the Desktop line. Thus, I am in a situation where I have a nice battery power only amp that cannot be left on all the time, which is my preference for home audio gear. Keeping the amp on with AC connected doesn’t work, because the amp has a protection circuit to stop the battery from being overcharged, so with the amp left on all the time, the battery will eventually run out and I have to disconnect and then reconnect the AC to charge the battery again. I’m back to thinking about a dedicated sound card again, but am in no rush. Worrying about sound quality also seems a bit silly given how much distracting noise emanates from the new box. If a liquid cooling system does not work out, I may have to invest in some noise-cancelling headphones. External Storage – This is another work in progress, principally due to a lack of funds from all the Christmas spending I’ve been doing on myself and the family. For long-term storage of files, I like the security and redundancy of an external RAID box. I still have my 1 TB Buffalo TeraStation, but the capacity is only 700 GB after losing a drive for RAID 5 parity. These days, 700 GB just does not go very far and I need more storage. I’m considering two options:
Software Operating System – Windows Vista Ultimate for 64-bit and proper access to the full 8 GB of RAM. I don’t plan to install too much software on the new box, because it will be dedicated for photo editing with perhaps an occasional round of video editing of home movies. RAW Converters & Browsers
Choices Who the hell needs eight cores for Photoshop or Lightroom edits, and why bother with 8 GB of RAM when Photoshop is still 32-bit and can only address 3 GB? By the time Photoshop and other high-end apps can actually utilize all that power and performance, there will be better chips at lower prices, so you should have saved about half the cost by just building a standard Core2Duo Extreme quad core system with 4 GB of RAM. All good points and maybe I should have considered them before I lost myself to my inner geek and got carried away with the notion of building the most expensive and powerful computer I’ve ever had J However, true that Photoshop is a 32-bit app now, you don’t expect it to remain so for much longer and I would be surprised if the future CS4 is not a 64-bit app due to Windows Vista and Mac Leopard. Photoshop is updated on an 18-month time frame, so even if CS3 cannot utilize all that I have available now, 18 months (actually, probably only about a year by the time I post this) is not that far away to wait for. And, as my history has shown, I try to look forward as much as I can afford to maximize the life of my computers. This is not to suggest that my way of buying is preferred over a “buy only what you need today” approach. Each one of us has to decide what we need and what we can afford. Windows Vista Ultimate The UAC (User Account Control) was initially annoying, as it seemed to pop up for just about every aspect of use, from installing programs and drivers to simply copying files from an external drive to the Acer 9920. However, as the Acer was used more and more, the UAC prompts died down, so that they are now a trickle and I have a better feel for when they pop up, e.g. it always comes up when I run my disk defragmentation program. The biggest general change from XP to Vista is the cosmetics and finding where some of the user definable controls have been placed. I like keeping my Start list of Programs clean and tidy without having a long list like some users have, because they don’t know that they can move those folders and icons around. Similarly, I like keeping my desktop almost devoid of shortcuts with only the Recycle bin showing. Everything that I want access to on a day-to-day basis, I use the Quick Launch toolbar at the bottom of the desktop. With XP, I’d go into C drive and dig down in the Users folder to find the Start programs and then clean them up the way I want. With Vista, I right click in the actual list of Start programs to bring up the User account lists to do the same. Same basic process, just going about it in a different manner. I don’t dig deep into the OS and don’t have a desire to. As long as the OS allows me to do what I want, I’m fine with it and Vista has not presented many challenges in that regard other than the initial UAC training. The only significant issue found in first using Vista was in moving large numbers of files from one location to another. My three websites and their attendant support folders have over 40,000 files and I back these files up regularly using an external hard drive. The first few times trying to backup my files on the Acer 9920 resulted in an “Out of Memory” error message. Trying to move more files would not work until I restarted the machine. Continued “Out of Memory” messages led to moving files and folders in piecemeal sizes, which is pretty stupid, even for Microsoft. Research led to this being a fault of the Windows Vista kernel leaking memory whenever one attempts to move over 16,000 files at one time. The Out of Memory problem is also exacerbated when using Kaspersky anti-virus software, which just happens to be the one I use with my computers connected to the Internet. Kaspersky doesn’t cause the problem, but it appears to make the problem worse. Long-term, I’m sure Microsoft will release a general update to resolve the issue globally, but curiously, SP1 for Vista apparently does not. However, a hotfix is available from Microsoft by request and I received the hotfix link within a couple of hours of my request for the Acer and Sony notebooks. I’m not concerned about the hotfix for my desktop, as it will not be used for web editing or moving that many files around at once. Once installed, I had no more problems moving large numbers of files from one drive to another. I don’t know if the hotfix is related, but Windows Explorer has not crashed like it used to before the hotfix was installed and both Lightroom and Dreamweaver also seem more stable and have not suddenly closed themselves off as much as they sometimes did before the hotfix. For a user of a computer with over 4 GB of RAM installed, Vista Ultimate is really the only logical choice to make. There’s 64-bit XP, but Vista is here to stay, as much as some may hate that, so it made no sense to me to use a previous generation OS for a box that should last me to almost the next OS iteration from Microsoft. I also have no exotic peripherals that require me to keep an old box still running XP. Printers and color management calibration tools are about it for me and my HP laser printer is plug-and-play while the three Epson printers all have the appropriate Vista 32 or 64-bit drivers available. My old XP-based monitor calibration tool, the Monaco Optix XR and EZColor software are usable on the Acer 9920 running 32-bit Vista Home Premium, but for some reason will not install on my Sony NS160 running 32-bit Vista Business. X-Rite does not support 64-bit Vista, so I’ve gone back to using the ColorVision Spyder2PRO for profiling my two large LCD monitors. For wireless Internet connection to do the occasional bit of updating of the applications, I’ll need to get a 64-bit Vista compatible wireless USB adapter (my router is located outside my office, because the room does not have a cable outlet for the modem and I’m not interested in drilling holes and running long lengths of network cable in my living room). Performance – to come Conclusion – to come
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Correspondence & About this website Copyright © 1998-2008 Edwin Leong |
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Introduction – Preamble #1
Motherboard – A little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing, so goes the saying and quite true in my case in having to specify every major part for my new desktop without a more experienced and knowledgeable person holding my hand.
As you can see at right, plain-Jane for I/O ports >> 
Processors – Two 2.66 GHz Quad Core Xeon processors for eight cores. Two cores are good, four cores are better, so eight cores must be the best. Well, maybe not if your software has not been written to take advantage of multiple processors and/or cores. The best bang for the buck for those looking to build a photo-editing machine would be a single quad core, non-Xeon processor. More options available, faster clock speed (4 GHz or faster at this writing) and easier to build a good box around instead of using server grade Xeon processors.
Case and PSU – The case for the new box went through some revisions. I had originally specified a Lian Li PC-777 case that is rather unique in shape in that it resembles a nautilus shell. 
One at bottom front where the hard drive cage is located and used to keep the drives cool
With silence being one of the features of the case, I could see rubber lining used along some of the edges (seen at right), as well as insulation wadding used for the side panels.
Insulation wadding on a side panel >> 
