Ugh, I've been so busy these past few days that I haven't had the energy to post in awhile. There's a whole bunch of stuff going on right now with the poker group at the UofA ... and it's making me go slightly crazy. Still, it's exciting. Late last week, my video card (a 6600GT) died. I think it's because the fan that was on it was just a little bit too small and it was driving too many pixels on my two 24" LCD monitors. So I think it was just overworked. In any case, I needed a new video card. I ended up at memory express two days later and bought a shiny new 8800 GTS. It is certainly a fancy video card and looks far better built so I'm hoping it lasts a good long while.

In any case, I also picked up a new hard drive. When I got everything setup and installed I wondered whether I should install a clean version of windows again. I love having a clean install of an OS - it feels so much better than a clogged down version. Windows seems especially prone to this problem, so it was certainly a tempting proposition. I decided, though, to pick up a copy of Vista from the University. The UofA has this agreement with Microsoft called the MSDNAA (microsoft developer network academic alliance). With this agreement, any staff and students of the University of Alberta get to borrow discs of almost all of Microsoft's products to take home and install on their home computer. So I went in and signed out a copy of Vista Business edition. I figured - if I was going to reinstall an OS, I might as well give Vista a shot and see if it worked for me.

Let me first give out a tip for anyone considering a reformat. The easiest way to install a new OS on an existing system with little or no risk of losing existing data is to use a multiple hard drive setup. You can, in the bios, set a particular hard drive as the boot up disk. So my advice would be to purchase a new hard drive (or use an existing one you can wipe clean) and set that to the bootup disk. Install the OS on that disk, and then mount your other hard drive(s) so you can access your existing data. Not only does this let you not worry about overwriting your data, you also get the opportunity to access configuration files and other application data for switching over to your new system.

So ... I now have Vista running. What do I think? Well so far it sure beats the hell out of XP. It feels snappier, and definitely looks prettier. Vista definitely is an improvement over previous windows versions. There are still some weird ass-backwards ways of doing some things, but on the whole it isn't so bad. Of course, it's not a Mac OS ... and I'm still seriously considering buying a mac when Apple finally releases new revisions of the Mac Pros.

Heraldk