The Vista Experience...

[Martin Naef]

Ok, I gave in to a craving for a bit more processing power. It was 
triggered by the need to replace Ilona's 8 year old laptop with 
something more up-to-date, providing me with the excuse to hand down my 
old desktop to her and get something shiny for me... Having had good 
experience with Dell in the past (they're not the best, but they 
generally work and are cheap enough...), I got a slightly used XPS 420 
with 2.4GHz Quad core, 4GB RAM and big fat graphics card (8800GTX) that 
I expanded with a 1TB disk. Although not advertised as a low-noise 
machine and equipped with a beefy graphics system, it is actually 
surprisingly quiet - a good deal better than other machines I used that 
were advertised as "low noise" and cost a good deal more.

This being a 2008 machine, it obviously came with Vista Home Premium. So 
how is it?

First of all, I should mention that Vista was a surprisingly painless 
experience so far (exception later). Essentially, everything just 
worked. I can't tell yet how much of that was due to me getting rid of a 
lot of old software in the process - many small bits and pieces 
accumulated over the year that are simply no longer required. I also 
gave in to the craving for a flashy experience, turning on the full 
treat of visual effects - with the super-fast graphics board, the 
machine doesn't give a sweat. Vista has a lot of neat little details 
that I greatly enjoy, particularly the new explorer works well with my 
multi-GB photo collection, but also the neat pen features when using a 
tablet.

Of course there were also some victims on the way. The first was my 
trusty old HP Laserjet 5P with a parallel port - well, the XPS only has 
USB. So it's been passed down as well, of course it's still on the 
network... A more expensive problem turned out to be my audio system: 
The MOTU PCI-324 card only works in 5V PCI slots - so that's a 
non-starter. Luckily, I scored two used 1224 interfaces that came with a 
more recent PCIX-424, which I just installed and tested successfully, so 
my MOTU rig works again and got even better... Then came the two emagic 
AMT8 interfaces. Since being bought Apple, there obviously wasn't any 
more development, so I'm stuck with drivers from 2001 - even before XP. 
While they installed fine, there are some issues. For a start, I have to 
go and hack the registry to change any settings - that's fine with me. 
But more annoyingly, I can only let an application open the drivers 
once, then it hangs on the second try, requirig a system reboot. It 
seems that I can get the thing running ok if I keep turning off the 
interface between application starts, but this is clearly not good.

So after about two week of playing around with the new machine, I'm a 
happy man. Especially photo processing (RAW->JPG conversion) is 
blazingly fast, and while I haven't really put the audio rig through the 
paces, it seemed rather bored when I run the last big mix that was 
clearly pushing the limits of the old system. Even at 2.7ms latency, 
there was absolutely no problem - and I'm curious how much further down 
I can go before it drops out (the fastest setting is less than 1ms). Of 
course, long-term reliabiliy has still to be determined...

Bye
Martin