I posted a few months ago about the new case I’d treated my PC to. since then I’ve replaced almost everything inside the case. I got the parts from PlayTech here in Auckland. They had really good prices for the parts I wanted and are very close to work, so I could see what I was buying. I usually buy from Ascent, but they didn’t have everything I wanted.
I got:
In fact the only things on my PC that have not been replaced recently are the disk drives – which are about a year old.
I’ve installed Vista Ultimate and got everything going, but I have noticed a few things:
The Vista Edition of the motherboard has a SideShow-like extra screen. In theory this is good idea. It could show you whether you have any emails, or the weather or other gadget-like things. In practice it’s hopeless. ASUS did not implement Sideshow, but used their own mechanism. It’s not compatible with the MS gadgets and ASUS have supplied about 6 of their own applets. It gets worse though. You have to log in as Administrator to even get these to work and I’m not about to keep running my PC as administrator. So that has gone into my spare hardware box until such a time as ASUS get the act together.
The Hauppage card comes with a remote, but that’s not compatible with anything except Hauppage’s own applications. I installed them and had so much grief with them I uninstalled them again. I am now using Windows Media Centre and that works fine, but no remote – that’s also now in my spare harware box.
The motherboard does come with a remote that is worthwhile, I can shut down the PC without having to bend down to press the stop button. This is really a gimmick though since my PC sits under my desk and is easy to get at. I think with hindsight, I would have steered clear of the Vista Edition motherboard.
However there is one big plus with the new set-up. The whole rig can be overclocked, that would be fine if I was into gaming or wanted extreme performance. I don’t need that; I run it on its economy setting with Q-Fan enabled and my PC is completely silent. I mean completely; not even the slightest hum. If I need to I can put it on max power (even using the remote), but at its lowest setting it’s still fast enough for me. Mostly the PC is a server, it’s got IIS and Apache, is running 3 Rails web-sites, 3 Apache ones and 3 IIS ones. It’s also running Cruise Control to do continuous builds of my software. It’s a file server for all my data too and I can watch TV and do bits of development on it.