trials of the green machine

A quick update on the monstrous alienware and it's rebuilds. As you may recall, I wasn't that happy with Vista- it made the machine run at least three times slower than it ought, primarily because nVidia weren't able to develop a driver for the SLI video cards. That would be hard, since the video scuttles around the bus encoded, making splitting it to two video cards a tricky proposition.

So over a weekend, and on the phone to alienware help desk, and borrowing a work licensed XP pro install disk I re partitioned the disks (keeping them as Raid 0) and put on XP and Vista. And then, a week later, I borked XP, so needed a full reinstall, so lost the dual boot. So for a month I've only had XP. And guess how much I have missed Vista.

Now, my only gripe is that the little alien eyes on the back of the lid have stopped lighting up. Totally non- critical, but significant- in that they signify 'look at me, I'm a spanky super machine' and they've gone out. Probably a loose connection or something. Which isn't a great sign either.

On the other had, everything runs like a greased weasel, including every sim and FPS i can throw at it. Only thing I want is faster network, cos that's the lag on 2nd life. Really should get back in there too- that was, after all, the main justification for the thing.