Wednesday, October 25, 2006

A 320Gb gorilla comes home

Last Tuesday I got the ok from the VP of finance (aka the wife!) to purchase a new HDD. I'd been using an old 13Gb from Fujitsu, which was the original drive in my first ever PC; an IBM PC 300 PL 6892. This goes back to 1999-2000 era, in the previous millennia!

I can hear you now, "but that must have slowed down you computer so much so!" Indeed, it did.
In my defence, I did add a few years back a second HDD, a reasonable 80Gb IDE from Maxtor. But I knew that one of my next upgrade would have to be changing the HDD with something bigger and better. And that's where the Seagate 320GB SATA2 16Mb Cache comes in. Out with the 13Gb, in with the 320Gb behemoth!

So Saturday morning, I started going over all the software I had installed and downloading all the installers I would need for the new install. Here an almost complete list of all these utilities and software. Some are common, some I wouldn't live without!

Utilities:

  • CCleaner
  • Disckeeper
  • RegistryFix
  • McAfee Security Center
  • McAfee Virus Scan
  • McAfee Firewall
  • Windows Defender
  • Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor
  • SiSoftware Sandra Pro Home 2007

Web:

  • Mozilla Firefox
  • Opera
  • Internet Explorer 7
  • Gmail Notifier
  • Pando
  • Smart FTP Client 2
  • Windows Live Messenger

Multimedia:

  • Picassa 2
  • iTunes & Quicktime
  • Divx
  • Windows Media Player 11
  • iriver plus 2
  • Nokia PC Suite
  • Roxio Easy Media Creator
  • PlexTools
  • BOINC: Stei@Home

And of course EVE Online: The Second Genesis

There is one utility I did not have to install, which was a big help during the new drive installation, the Manage utility which can be accessed by right-clicking My Computer. This is the best little drive utility I never knew about. During the installation I noticed that Windows XP only saw 127Gb of my 320Gb (137,000 bytes that is). After checking a few things and thinking there most have been a setting I did select, or selected and shouldn't, I started to search the web for help. After googling a few searches, I came across a post on a forum which mentioned the Manage utility. After having a bit of fun with it, and setting up things right, I had a a new 320Gb drive partitioned into two and a third 80Gb drive. Now cam the installation and configuration.

I have to say, overall it went pretty smoothly and by bedtime I had most of it done.

Just for fun, I then ran the Windows Vista Upgrade utility just to see if any warnings came up. None did. I'm now Vista-Ready. Bring it on Redmond. Let's make a move to the 21st century and start to catch-up to Mac Os X.

Before you go though, I would love to know if you've got any cool and practical utilities that you use that I did not mention. Any information would be appreciated.

T'ill the next upgrade!

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

EVE Online's beautiful vistas

I'm always amazed and taken aback by the beauty of EVE. This will be my desktop background for the next few days. Enjoy!