Making progress......

This last month I have been surveying my compact & bijou domain and thought about tidying it up a bit..... (steady boy...). And not before time too...... B-) Some other things happened & are about to happen which forces me into some semblance of action. I may NEED to make the workshop into an OFFICE. SO, the first step is to reduce the pile of junk i.e. PC components which "may be useful in the future" ( and never have been in the past ). So I have resurrected the old BigBox (aka Phoenix) and it now sits under the desk where Fuji resides. BigBox also has a new powersupply, a FoxConn motherboard, 2Gb RAM, AMD 3200 CPU, nVidea graphics card, 80Gb SATA drive, 40Gb EIDE drive, and all of this built for about £150!!! Also, it now runs Windows Vista Ultimate, which with the extra RAM installed runs as good as anything that I have built in the last 20+ years. And there is the reall issue - VISTA NEEDS 2GB RAM TO RUN WELL. No doubt about it, more ram = better functionality. I detest a pc which splutters and churns about when all it has to do is get on with the job.

Some vendors sell Windows Vista Home Basic with 512Mb RAM installed. I've had a couple of these in to get "fixed" and the easy method is to install some more ram (1GB) and then look at what happens when the PC is booted up again. The prime culprit in my opinion is the Norton Internet Security Suite. Get rid of it. Completely. Including the Live Update options. Install AVG7.5 Free and also AVAST! as the anti virus protection. Use Spybot and Adaware to check for malware etc. Also, Windows Defender which comes with Vista is pretty good at protecting the PC.

I'm running my old 19" CRT on this resurrected BigBox and its real fine. At last I have a display which is easy to navigate and use. I have the Vista sidebar installed with some useful gadgets and everything else which I need I can find quickly. I've managed to network the printers using an Edimax Print Server plugged into the Netgear router, and running the Vista version of the server software. I'm also using NETWORK MAGIC to check the other PCs on the network are all fine and dandy. The ONLY DOWNSIDE is that as far as I know it still will not run my accounting package QuickBooks 2001, which runs on XP just fine. Oh, and webcams seem to be a nightmare of there own making. They just don't seem to work in Vista at all. Admittedly all the webcams I've tried are quite old i.e. a couple of years, but the vendors have had enough time to provide drivers for Vista. Do I use a webcam regularly ? NO. Am I likely to ? NO. So no problem there.

Hasta La Vista !