[VikingPhotography]

Soooo the components for my new build arrived yesterday - a week to the day since my old system fried and died on me; it was a tough week reverting to the old, slow backup PC that I cobbled together from spare components... and just as well that I didn't have much work on at the time!

Anyways, the new components spec are as follows

Intel Core2 Duo E6600 processor (2 x 2.4GHz, 4MB cache)
2 x 1GB Corsair XMS PC6400 DDR-2 RAM
MSI P6N nForce 680i motherboard
MSI GeForce 8800GTS 640MB graphics card
Antec TruePower 650W PSU
Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit OEM

I already had a good chassis, four hard drives, 19" LCD and two DVD±RW drives so there was no need to purchase any of these

First off:

I had a few head-scratching moments when installing Vista which I'll attribute mostly to user error. My old rig had a pair of 200GB S-ATA drives installed as a RAID 0 array, and I wanted to effectively de-RAID by formatting them in the new system - using one for the OS and the other for application software.

I installed both drives in the chassis, hooked them up to the motherboard and set about installing Vista from the DVD. When it came time to prompt me which drive to install to, only one showed up - and it wouldn't let me select it for an install. I tried deleting the volume, formatting it etc. but still no avail.

On a whim, I decided to shut down the system and disconnect the power and S-ATA cables from just one of the two drives. I restarted the system and this time it allowed me to re-format the disk and install Vista... a strange glitch but one that had me worried for a short time.

Once Vista had been installed, I hopped online to snag the latest drivers for my motherboard, graphics card and peripherals. What surprised me was how fast everything opened up - and this with Vista running in it's lowest performance state owing to using generic Microsoft drivers for my new hardware. With the correct and up-to-date drivers installed, it absolutely flies

The new user interface took a few minutes getting used to but it's easily navigable and a fair improvement over the Win XP user interface. For folks new to PC's it will be a boon since it's very easy on the eyes and quite logical.

Most important to me were that my two key software applications - Photoshop CS2 and Nero 7 - worked flawlessly under Vista. I've yet to re-download the PS CS3 trial and am looking forward to a trial version of Lightroom v.1 in the next few weeks.

One thing that took me by surprise is the "new" way to connect to FTP sites - something that has to be done within Windows Explorer. I've not yet found out how to save FTP connection details... but I guess this will be a moot point for editorial photographers, who largely use dedicated FTP software.

I'll post back to this thread sometime next week once I've had more time to get used to Vista and put it through it's paces.

[Dave]

Originally Posted by VikingPhotography

.....What surprised me was how fast everything opened up - and this with Vista running in it's lowest performance state owing to using generic Microsoft drivers for my new hardware. With the correct and up-to-date drivers installed, it absolutely flies

This was one area I had concerns about, so it's great to hear this feedback

[VikingPhotography]

Dave;

I'm prepared to attribute a good deal of that responsiveness to the new hardware - to be truly objective about Vista's speed, I'd have to install it on a system identicall to the one that I used XP on before it died... that said, it's still very quick off the mark

One interesting anomaly that I noticed was to do with my internet connection: I use Sky Broadband MAX, an ADSL2+ connection that is capable of around 16mbps.

I live just a scant 700 metres or so from my telephone exchange and my Sky connection synced at 15,323 kbps - almost the full rate possible from this line. When I was on windows XP, my download speeds would peak at around 1.1 Mb/sec, which is about equivalent to a 10mbps connection.

Now, using Vista and my new hardware, my downloads are almost rock-solid at 1.5 Mb/sec - that's quite the jump. I don't know what to attribute this to since I've changed OS and hardware, suffice to say that I'm quite happy with the increace

[orangepeel]

Think you may find you'll need more RAM once you get into doing some proper work. as i understand it, vista itself will eat a gig and a half of your two gig. that'll make your pp work a bit more painful.

btw, to get a better idea of a comparison speed, just dual boot xp.

as for your inet speeds, 2k and xp have quite conservative TCPWin, MTU etc settings - hold overs from dial up. It's possible vista just has more aggressive defaults - that is of course assuming you had the defaults on xp. I found changing mine on 2K made a couple of hundred KBPS difference on an 8MB line.

[sejanus]

"Think you may find you'll need more RAM once you get into doing some proper work. as i understand it, vista itself will eat a gig and a half of your two gig."

Dear gods - and to think I used to believe that 64KB was more than anyone could ever use!

[VinnyP]

I was just about to say the same PS3 and Lightbox together are sluggish with 2GB. 4GB is the new 2.

[VikingPhotography]

Originally Posted by orangepeel

Think you may find you'll need more RAM once you get into doing some proper work. as i understand it, vista itself will eat a gig and a half of your two gig. that'll make your pp work a bit more painful.

On the matter of Vista being a memory hog... well, yes - a bit; I'm only running IE7 at the moment and task manager reports 960MB of my 2048 is in use

I fully intend to get another 2GB in the next few months... the memory was only a shade over £120 ex VAT (I'm VAT registered, y'see) and, as such, was an absolute steal. I'd have bought 4GB to start with but couldn't stretch that far with everything else I needed to get.

Nevertheless, PS CS2 still manages to be blazingly fast; no doubt this is down to the Core2 Duo having 4MB of cache and very fast PC6400 DDR2 memory with timings of 3-4-3-9.

Originally Posted by orangepeel

btw, to get a better idea of a comparison speed, just dual boot xp.

I considered doing this but, frankly, I'm not going to bother. I was initially cautious since I'd heard so many bad things about Vista + nForce 680i motherboards but (fingers crossed) I've not had a single show-stopping issue so far.

Originally Posted by orangepeel

as for your inet speeds, 2k and xp have quite conservative TCPWin, MTU etc settings - hold overs from dial up. It's possible vista just has more aggressive defaults - that is of course assuming you had the defaults on xp. I found changing mine on 2K made a couple of hundred KBPS difference on an 8MB line.

Maybe, and perhaps it's something to do with the Gigabit Ethernet network adapters built into my motherboard - my old PC only had standard 10/100 Ethernet. If the network controller chipset is more efficient / aggressive on this new board that could explain a lot - but who knows?

[Sonsey]

Thanks for the early hand's on views, very good to know.

Originally Posted by VikingPhotography

Nevertheless, PS CS2 still manages to be blazingly fast; no doubt this is down to the Core2 Duo having 4MB of cache and very fast PC6400 DDR2 memory with timings of 3-4-3-9.

Now your making me want to upgrade!... must resist

[VikingPhotography]

Originally Posted by Sonsey

Now your making me want to upgrade!... must resist

Not to tempt you more, but everything that I purchased - motherboard, CPU, memory, graphics card, PSU and Vista OEM - was had for under £1K including VAT

[Dave]

Then take into account oyu'll be writing that Computer off against your company for next 3 years, then sell it to yourself for peanuts........ the thing would have hardly cost you a penny by the end .......I'm not jealous