This will be the ongoing saga of my attempts at setting up all my new toys.  Well, not all are mine, to be honest.  A couple belong to my Lil Sis... after I gave 'em to her, mind you.  And one is my next door neighbor's.  But you get the idea.

As is my usual whim, each PC has been given a nickname to go along with it's personality.  All female (because they usually end up giving me no end of trouble somewhere down the track), and most named by me.

Join me, won't you?

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Am I the only one who thinks they named it Windows because it is a major pane? BA-DUM BOOM!!

Number 1

LEELA

9th March 2009, 8:20AM.

This computer is the first I'm going to tackle, for the very simple and lazy reason that it will by far be the easiest.  Leela is my 24" iMac, so-named after the one-eyed chick from Futurama -  and anyone who has seen one of these massively big-screened things staring back at them in the early hours while on the net will understand...

I originally bought Leela for the truly insane reason that I refuse to put iTunes on any Windows PC of mine, I hate it that much... yet I need something to hook my iPods¹ to.

Leela will also be very useful as my default browsing machine while I'm setting up the others.

So, time to patch this sucker.  Plug in the net cable, go to "Software Update", and... that's it?  That's all?  No muss, no fuss?  WHERE'S THE FUN IN THAT?!?!?

Leela's Vital Statistcs

iMac 8
Intel Core 2 Duo 2.8 Ghz
2 Gb RAM
ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro
1920 x 1200 LCD Display
320 Gb SATA HDD
OS X 10.5 Leopard

¹ Yes, plural.  And it gets worse. Tomorrow, I take delivery of my shiny new iPhone.  In my defense, it makes perfect sense to have only one over-the-top electronic toy in my pockets at one time instead of the two or three I carry at the moment.  The only thing the iPhone doesn't have is a camera... but I can live with that.

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Am I the only one who thinks they named it Windows because it is a major pane? BA-DUM BOOM!!

Number 2

DAWN

9th March 2009, 7:45PM.

In my first insane spending spree I bought an ASUS Eee 901.  Unfortunately, though it was nice enough, it was crippled by the size of it's SSD - something like 12 Gb - which made it difficult to upgrade.  So, I gave it away to one of my friends, and replaced it with a Toshiba NB100, which I immediately christened Dawn after the littlest member of the Scooby Gang from Buffy The Vampire Slayer.

I have to say that Dawn is the first computer from Toshiba I've owned which has not lived up to my expectations.  Don't get me wrong - Dawn works quite well.  But there's no sense of style to her, nothing that says that this is something that only Toshiba could have done well.

Now, I've had issues with Dawn before.  When I first bought her, she had been used for a couple of days as the shop's demo machine so once home the first thing I did was initiate a complete re-install from her recovery partition.  Unfortunately there was a problem with the installation script (the recovery partition being a generic Toshiba design instead of one built for the NB100 specifically) that meant not everything was installed automatically¹.  And it took an age to do what it did do, as well.  And worse, it installed a huge amount of unwanted demo stuff on her hard drive - which took a while to remove.

After dealing with that, I've set her up as my library PC, with software installed on her to keep track of all my books, magazines, comics and especially my DVD movie and TV  collection².

But for all that, she's never been on the net, so I suppose I had better do so to register her copy of XP Home with the fiends at Redmond....  

Well, that went easily enough.  After a few rounds with Windows Update, all seems to be well.  

Dawn's Vital Statistics

Toshiba NB100 Netbook
1.6 Ghz Atom N270 processor
1GB of RAM
Intel GMA950 Graphics Chipset
1024 x 600 LCD Display
120GB HDD
MS Windows XP Home

¹ And there is still some little piece of hardware that comes up as uninstalled... can't find out what it is, or what it does. Oh, well...

² My DVD collection was large enough before... but now.... sheesh.

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Am I the only one who thinks they named it Windows because it is a major pane? BA-DUM BOOM!!

Number 3

MINX

9th March 2009, 8:00PM.

One of the nice things about having unforeseen money is being able to share it with family.  My Lil Sis has a two-and-a-half year old Toshiba Satellite M50 that has seen sterling service... and better days.  The battery is dying, the DVD drive is making funny groaning sounds, and the screen has the odd flicker.  So a couple of weeks ago I decided to get her a replacement notebook¹ and settled on an ASUS M51V - which she promptly called Minx. Go figure.

Minx has been sitting on the kitchen table ever since, because Lil Sis won't use it until her iPod is authorized on the machine...

So, I've been tasked with doing all the boring net stuff to it.... and yet again, it seems to go on without a hitch.  I'm setting up Dawn at the same time, and it's slightly confusing going from one OS to another.

I've had to uninstall the obligatory MS Office '07 Trial that has been installed on EVERY NEW PC REGARDLESS OF MANUFACTURER I've bought in the last 3 months - even on tiny little Dawn!  In it's place, Open Office 3.0, which is free and less bloated.

Because this is my sister we are talking about, once I've set up all the security and updates and system settings, she immediately takes the machine off of me and starts filling it full of crap... by which I mean iTunes, and Google Toolbar...  But at least it's out of my hands now.  I must say it is a nice machine - what I saw of it...

Minx's Vital Statistics

ASUS M51V Notebook  
Intel® Core 2 Duo T5800 2.00Ghz
2GB RAM
ATI HD3470 ⁄ 256M
15.4" WXGA LCD
250GB HDD
MS Vista Premium

¹ Okay... let's be honest - I'm not totally altruistic here, because I'll get to keep her old Toshiba laptop for myself.  Ubuntu, here I come...

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Am I the only one who thinks they named it Windows because it is a major pane? BA-DUM BOOM!!

Number 4

TRUDY

March 10th 2009, 8:25AM

Now, this one is a little off the beaten track.

First off, this PC is not mine.  I'm calling her Trudy, because she's an intruder on my free time.  She belongs to my next-door-neighbor, and has been on my coffee table for the last 5-6 weeks waiting for my broadband access to be turned on so I can deal with her.

Trudy has been in the wars - no battery, a distorted display in one corner, and worst of all, she's been "fixed" by a truly incompetent I.T. guy who managed not only to screw up the recovery partition mechanism, but accidentally switched on the disk quota system... not to mention erasing SATA drivers required for efficient operation.

My life isn't made any easier when I find out the the recovery discs given to me are scratched, and one of the custom format CAB files is corrupt - on the recovery partition AND the recovery disc.  Luckily, the corrupt file is not required for recovery of this system.

However, I decide to take a different tack.  I install a separate, clean version of XP Home, and locate all the drivers for the nasty little beast on H/P's website.  That takes about an hour this morning.  Once everything is installed, I let Windows Update do it's thing... and a few hours later... she's all set.  I've even used Partition Magic to create a second partition so my neighbor can use that for her data and make restoring her system easier and more risk-free.  I also make new copies of her recovery discs, and create a disc containing all her drivers.  And, as a final bonus, I realize that I have 512Mb of suitable RAM sitting in a drawer that I'm not likely to need anytime soon, so I throw that in for good measure.  

I'm not too sure about Trudy's specs, but she is definitely running a lot sweeter than she was 24 hours ago.

Trudy's Vital Statistics

Compaq Presario V6126TU
Celeron
1 GB RAM
Intel GM45 Chipset
MS XP Home

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Am I the only one who thinks they named it Windows because it is a major pane? BA-DUM BOOM!!

Number 5

TABITHA

March 10th 2009, 8:25AM

If there was any doubt that I've got a buy-something-just-for-the-hell-of-it streak in me, this next PC proves it and then some.  I've always wanted a tablet PC, and now I've got one.  Think of it as the world's biggest iTouch...!

I call her Tabitha (naturally...) and she does have a couple of real uses.  First off, her touch-screen is quite responsive, so with the digital pen supplied and the right software, she's perfect for photo retouching and editing.  I'm using gimp at the moment, until I buy something a little more comprehensive.  Second, being a tablet PC means using her display in portrait mode is child's play - and very, very handy when reading PDF files and ebooks.  It's also nice that her screen can be used in a normal laptop configuration.

Anyway... while I'm setting up Trudy this morning, I'll do the same for Tabitha.  The same situation as yesterday, in that I'm switching between two different OS's, but this time it's not so strange.  One issue that does appear is that Norton's takes it's time setting up, but once that's done, the rest of the whole Windows Update thing goes without a hitch.

Now she is patched and secured, I'll leave Tabitha alone for a while.  The big girls are up next... and they won't be anywhere as easy to set up as the first five.

Tabitha's Vital Statistics

H/P TX2613au Tablet PC
AMD Turion X2 Dual Core 2.1Ghz
3 Gb RAM
ATI HD3200 Graphics
1280 x 800 LCD Display
320 Gb HDD
Vista  Home Premuim

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Am I the only one who thinks they named it Windows because it is a major pane? BA-DUM BOOM!!

Sure you're having fun with those toys Groucho.

A couple of suggestions:

-If you have unrecognized hardware (no drivers installed) in the control panel, go to the properties of the hardware, in the drop down box look at the ID and search for it in google, you'll find what it is and the drivers
-For scretched DVDs, if the damage is not too deep there is a solution that always worked for me: use some tooth paste on toilet paper and use it to smear the scretch in the opposite direction of it , you've to use some pressure and maybe to do the process again and again. you can safely wash the DVD under the water to clean it from the toothpaste.

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Thanks for the idea, sir.  I checked on Google as you suggested, and it turns out to be Toshiba's Bluetooth hardware.  I'll deal with it later, as right now I'm knee deep in arguing with an H/P desktop machine that... well, I'll post the whole story on that one here tonight.

Oh, and I was wrong about the iPhone - it DOES have a camera!  I'll set it up later on tonight as well.

As for the DVD, the corruption was in the original .CAB file.    I managed to get hold of a new set of recovery disks for Trudy, and they had the same fault.  She still works fine now, though.

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Am I the only one who thinks they named it Windows because it is a major pane? BA-DUM BOOM!!

You can have a replacement DVD from Microsoft if you really need it...

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Number 6

ANYA

March 11th 2009, 8:40AM

Oh dear... where to begin?

Anya¹ started off life as an H/P Pavillion 6040a that was very unwisely bought by my former flat-mate.  Unwise, because it was sold as a Vista-Capable PC when it was clearly incapable of running Vista at all well.  Worse still, H/P being the very unhelpful sods that they are were only willing to provide Vista drivers for the hardware.  So I hunted them down for my flatemate, downgraded the machine happily to XP, where it worked quite well, and left him to burn the hard-won XP drivers to disk for safe-keeping.

After the December '08 quake, the H/P started having issues with the DVD burner.  It was under warranty, but to replace it (or even to do something as simple as fit more RAM in to his computer) the chain store he bought it from said they would have to send it to Australia to have it done.  Cue copious amounts of disbelief and swearing...

Deciding to do it himself, he bought a nice new Pioneer DVD burner.  Guess what?  It wouldn't fit properly in the H/P case without removing the fascia on the new burner, and the flap on the PC that the original burner was hidden under when not in use.  Removing the facsia to fit the burner also removed the burner's eject button, so he could only eject discs via software.  (There was an eject button on his keyboard, but that refused to work under XP even with XP drivers for that keyboard!)

The final ignomy came when he bought a mid-range video card to fit in his machine... and it didn't.  Because the power supply was too puny, and H/P had designed the case in such a way that no normal PSU could fit inside without blocking the PCIe slot.  So no new PSU, card won't go; new PSU, card won't fit!

When the Lotto thing happened, I gave my flat-mate $10,000 - and he announced he was moving to Melbourne, Australia.  I offered to buy some of his toys off of him to give him a little more cash and give him less things to have to ship over there, and amongst other stuff I ended up with his H/P, and the new video card.  With all the other neat techno-treats I was acquiring, the little H/P just sat untouched in the corner of my office once we moved to my new home.

Then, a little after Christmas, I decided to deal with this little PC once and for all.  Even though it was a badly designed package, the heart of the machine is not too shabby - it is a dual core 3.2 Ghz system after all.  So I went and bought a new generic case for it, and tore apart all the useless H/P cruft that they had thrown in.  Gone was the H/P Pocket Drive and the Card Readers, gone was the nasty looking case and inconvenienty placed front USB and sound slots...

...and I found another really aggravating problem.  Thanks to a really bad motherboard design, the thing barely fits into a mid-range case.  It protrudes in such a way that you have to be extremely careful where you put any 3.5" hard disks, never mind the 5.25" burner.  

And the final, fatal flaw?  A big capacitor that sits in the way of any long-form video card.  You just can't fit a powerful card into the system.  So my idea of using this machine for gaming had to be thrown away.²

I would have binned Anya then and there, but then I realised I could use her to provide a solution to a problem I have with my DVD authoring software.  I have an old Pioneer DVD burner that has issues - it will burn DVD discs fine, but won't read any DVD's it has written.  Yet it will read CDs - pressed and burnt, and pressed DVDs as well, which is quite odd.  But the thing is, the burner came with some very useful software - DVD Lab, and TMPGEc 2.5 both of which are perfect for my uses.  But both are linked specifically to that burner.  If it's not installed, they won't run, full stop.

Now, when I first acquired Anya, we were still living at our city apartment, and still had the net.  In an unusual bit of foresight, I realised I had to obtain a copy of XP to run on Anya. But how?  Microsoft in their "wisdom" stopped all sales of XP from retailers a while back.

I thought for a few seconds and came up with what modesty forbids me from claiming is a genius idea.  I went on the net, Googled "XP PRO KEYS", and used the key to install a copy of XP Pro on an old junker PC.

I logged on to Windows Update... and waited.  Windows Update loaded up the WGA software, which promptly said "Hey... you're not running a genuine copy of XP.  ...um, would you like to?"  I click on yes, haul out my  debit card, and sure enough, Microsoft sells me a copy of XP Pro, mails me my new key, and sends an installation disc to me in the post in due course.

Cunning or what?!?  I don't activate or register my new copy of XP, of course, because I'll just have to re-activate it when eventually I install it on Anya.

Once Anya is in her new case, I start to install XP Pro on her, and hit a real big hurdle.  Drivers.  When my flat-mate burnt the disk of drivers I had so carefully obtained for him, the prat didn't bother to verify the disk he burnt... or even the Vista recover disks he also burnt.  Turned out that the DVD burner that came with his system had been flawed from the day he bought it.  Ah, well, fine.  I'm due to get my broadband on soon, so I'll just finish what I can and put Anya to one side...

Cue this morning.  I hunt down all of the required drivers, I assemble all of her bits, hook in the Ethernet cable, boot her up... and start swearing.  Why?

Because it took so long for me to get my broadband that it went over the 30 days that Microsoft gives to to activate an installation of XP!  So all I see is the "Activate Now?" screen.  And to activate requires a working LAN port.  Which requires a LAN driver.  Which is sitting on a 8 Gb flash drive on my desk.  Which will only be able to be installed once I'm logged in.  Which will only happen when I activate Windows.  Which requires a working LAN port...

AAAARRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!

Anyway...

Anya is now finally up and running after I flattened her HHD and re-installed XP Pro a couple of hours ago.  And she's working sweet now.  I have a few 120 Gb PATA drives hanging around, so I threw one in her to supplement the 320 Gb SATA that came with her.  That should be good enough to fit some raw video or animation data on.

Anya's Vital Statistics

Frankensteined H/P Pavillion 6040a PC
Intel duel-core Pentuim D 3.20 Ghz
2 Gb RAM
Intel G45 Extreme Graphics 2 chipset (shudder)
Samsung LA22A450 20" LCD TV
120 Gb PATA HDD
320 Gb SATA HDD
XP Professional

¹ I christened her Anya, because the name fits in with the Buffy theme I've got going on with my latest PC names, and because the machine is an ex-demon from hell now doing good things...

² Not that I need another gaming machine - Big Red, or Jessica to give her her proper name, takes care of all my gaming need and then some... but her story is still to come...

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Am I the only one who thinks they named it Windows because it is a major pane? BA-DUM BOOM!!

Number 7

TARA

Number 8

HARMONY

Number 9

FAITH

March 13th 2009, 6:40PM

Call me Old McDonald, 'cos I got me a farm.  Render farm, that is...

I usually have issues with buying name-brand PCs, and if you read the previous post again you'll know why.

But a web review of  the NEC Powermate X8820 caught my eye, so I bought one, tried it out for a little while, and was so impressed I picked up two more.  Not wanting to go any more nuts on the budget that I had to, these two were factory-refurbished ex-demo machines direct from NEC Australia.

These are extremely solid, well-constructed machines.  You could rupture yourself picking up one if you are not careful.  They come with Intel Core 2 Quad processors, oodles of RAM, a decent budget video card and a half-Terabyte of storage on each.  And with Gigabit Ethernet onboard, they are perfect for moving and processing large amounts of CGI.

I've been slightly brighter than usual when setting up the trio.  As I have set aside a small room just for them (so I can air-condition it and keep their operating temperature at optimum) it follows I can save a little money here by using a KVM switch.  For those who have never used one before, KVM stands for Keyboard/Video/Mouse - a small box that lets you use the one keyboard, mouse and monitor for multiple PCs at the same time.  My particular KVM also allows me to add speaker output for each machine.  To know which machine I'm using at a glance, I've replaced the desktop background for each PC with a picture of the Buffy character they are named after.  Also, each PC has a different color theme added - Blue for Faith, yellow for Harmony and pink for Tara. (Having done that for them, I've now done it for all my PCs...)

The next issue is networking.  I've decided that because I have so many PCs and consoles wanting access to network resources - or even the Internet - that I'm going to have to split them into two networks.  The first network will be all the laptops and consoles... for which I've bought a  802.11 b/g/n wireless router.  The render farm has it's own private network based on a 5-port Gigabit switch, so it is nice and fast.  The ports are allocated to Tara, Faith, and Harmony and to my primary workstation affectionately called Willow (more about her next posting...).  The fifth port is reserved for a three-terabyte Network Attached Storage box due here next week.  Apart from installation and weekly patching, the CGI network does not connect to the Internet.

As with all the other new PCs I've installed over the last few days, I've had to remove a bunch of surplus software, but because the Powermate X series are designed as multimedia PC's, I've left some of the Cyberlink stuff on.  Everything else is now patched and ready.

As for what CGI software I'm going to use... well, as much as I love 3D Studio Max, I think it's time I took a real hard long look at Blender.  I've also bought Poser Pro to go on Willow, and own Poser 7 (on Harmony) and Poser 6 (on Anya because she's the only XP desktop machine I have left..).

Oh, and here is a funny thing... Faith is not what she claims to be on the box.  While setting her up, I noticed that for some reason Faith was going along noticably smoother in general operation. So I checked the Window Experience Index thingy... and guess what?  Faith has a better processor than the other two.  Turns out that Faith is a downgraded version of Willow - an X9320 with less HDD space and a different burner.  Nice bonus...

Harmony & Tara's Vital Statistics

Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300 2.5 Ghz
3 Gb DDR2 RAM
Nvidia GeForce 8600GT 512Mb
500Gb SATA 7200rpm Western Digital HDD
Windows Vista Premium

Faith's Vital Statistics

Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450 2.66 Ghz
3 Gb DDR2 RAM
Nvidia GeForce 8600GT 512Mb
500Gb SATA 7200rpm Western Digital HDD
Windows Vista Premium

____________
Am I the only one who thinks they named it Windows because it is a major pane? BA-DUM BOOM!!

So whens the Yard Sale?

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Two wrongs don't make a right.
But six left turns will get you around the block
and back in the driveway again.

Not any time soon!  Any time a PC is no longer needed by me I pass it along to friends or family... or shove it a drawer and forget about it, like the mid-90's Toshiba laptop I recently rediscovered while moving.  That one may be used as a DOS box to play some of my much older games.

Basically I'm a pack-rat - with tons of old PC parts, PC software and PC manuals stored away for future use.

Mind you, my power bill is a bit of a bugger each month...!

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Am I the only one who thinks they named it Windows because it is a major pane? BA-DUM BOOM!!

Number 10

WILLOW

March 15 2009, 10:20AM

Seeing as Faith, Anya and Harmony are destined to spend their working days in a small room, I need - well, want, really - another desktop to act as my primary workstation.  With the excellent performance I found with the NEC Powermates, I went up a few notches to one of their high-range models - the X9320 - and Willow was born.

She looks like the others, with the same solid construction, and is configured more or less the same as the others in terms of software, but that is where the similarity ends...

First off,  Willow comes with a faster processor - which is nice.  Second improvement is a Blu-Ray burner - something I didn't expect to own for a couple of years yet.
  But it's her storage that floors me, and puts her into a class above.  The others came with a 500Gb 7200rpm SATA drive.  Willow has four of them - currently set up in RAID 0 configuration
 for lightning fast access.

That's not to say Willow was perfect.  There are two weak spots.  The first real flaw with the Powermate X series is the somewhat pedestrian graphics cards they come with.  And this is probably due to the other issue they have - they are only supplied with 350 watt PSUs... which can charitably be called barely adequate.

The others I own have no real problem running on 350 watts, because the nVidia 8600GT they have is not exactly a powerhouse, so sucks down relatively little juice.
  But Willow is running three extra hard disks for a start. And then there is that spare GeForce 9600GT my flatmate bought and couldn't use in Anya; just sitting around doing nothing.

As Willow will be my primary workstation, I swapped out the 350 watt PSU for a nice beefy 850 watt PSU which has the bonus feature of running quieter than the original.  That done, I removed the GeForce 8600GT and replaced it with the 9600GT.  Performance is even faster now, certainly more than adequate to run Poser in all it's forms.  Having said that, I wil seriously consider getting a purpose-designed GPU like a FireGL or a Quadro... maybe.

To round things out, I bought a laser printer and a multifunction inkjet printer to hook up to Willow.  Also added is an A4-sized touch tablet.

As we all know from experience, backing up data becomes important when you are working with CGI.  And as Willow is running a two terabyte RAID-0 array, it becomes crucial.  Should one of the drives fail, the data on all four is lost.  So, along with the NAS box I'm waiting for to use as primary storage for the render farm, I've been buying external 1 Tb drives like they are going out of fashion.  Counting all my PCs internal storage, and not counting the NAS, I've got 15 Tb of storage in total available to me.  Sounds like fun until you have to find something...!

Willow's Vital Statistics

NEC Powermate X9320 Desktop
Intel Core 2 Core 2 Quad Q9450 2.66 Ghz
3 Gb DDR2 RAM
Nvidia GeForce 9600GT 512Mb
Samsung SyncMaster 2253LW 22" LCD Monitor
4 x 500 Gb SATA 7200rmp Western Digital HDD
Matsushita Blu-Ray Burner
Windows Vista Ultimate

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Am I the only one who thinks they named it Windows because it is a major pane? BA-DUM BOOM!!

Having spent a few days dealing with Real Life, I'm now back to setting up my little render farm.  And after thinking it over, I've decided to take the plunge and go for 3DS Max - as painfully expensive as that is.

To that end, I've just this moment taken delivery of a nice new Leadtek nVidia Quadro FX1700 purpose-designed workstation video card.

It's small, relatively light on the power it requires from the PC... and has a really cool feature I didn't even know about when I ordered it - a 3D Stereo port!

Imagine that - working on Posy in 3D!

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Am I the only one who thinks they named it Windows because it is a major pane? BA-DUM BOOM!!