I thought, as I havn't posted anything for a while, I would give you a little update on my hardware woes. I had been surviving with a duel xeon 2.8 and 2GB of RAM on an Intel SE7525GP2 mother board as my primary workstation and decided that it was time for an upgrade. My new specs are as follows:
So in theory, I now have a top-spec machine that will be great for development. In practice, I have probably lost about 40 hours messing about trying to get it working. Why? Well for starters, the mother board is absolutely disgraceful. I should point out that I don't know who to blame on this one - Nvidia or Asus. I am blaming both! Maybe I have just been spolied by my Intel board but there are a few things that I expect from a motherboard:
- A RAID system that doesn't "lose" the hard disks (it can be fixed by unpluging the power and hard disks and pluging in again - maybe just a dodgy connector).
- If a driver is required for RAID, it should not show the disks as removable in Vista!
- LAN ports that don't require drivers to achieve the advertised speed (1000 Mbps). Even now, the LAN works at 100 Mbps most of the time.
- LAN ports that work! I only manged to get the LAN ports working by installing a spare LAN card, installing the Nvidia drivers, then downloading Microsoft's drivers (via Windows Update) and manually setting the driver to the Microsoft version.
The next problem was with the graphics cards - yes they are very powerful but what a surprise, the drivers are/were buggy. My system does now seem to be stable - as of driver version 175.16 which was released on 13 May 2008 - yes, that is nearly 2 months after the release date of 18 March 2008. I wanted the best graphics available as I am working on a mod for Crysis (excellent game by the way). Now as I have quite a common setup (for power users) I do not think it is unresonable to expect it to work. All I had to do to make the system crash was to run the Crysis benchmarks a few times (that was with driver version 174.53).
The good news is that now, after 2 months I have a fairly stable system that gets a Windows Experience Index of 5.9 :-) I say fairly stable because the Nvidia drivers still crash every once in a while although Vista does recover from this.
The system is very fast - Visual Studio loads instantly :D and I would recommend a striped pair of Western Digital Raptors to everyone.
To add insult to injury, I recieved my new keyboard and mouse today - a Logitech G15 KB and a Logitech G9 mouse. The G9 is amazing - very accurate and very smooth (on a Steel Series 4D mouse mat). Unfortunatly the only way to get it to work is to install Setpoint 5.0 (I hate Setpoint - possibly the worst software I have ever come across) and then enable the mouse in device manager. The G15 is, frankly, a POS - it is not regognised as a keyboard. The lights work, the additional keys work but the standard keys do not (A - Z, 0 - 9, etc.). I supose that this is technically Microsoft's fault as the KB works fine under XP, Vista 32, and BIOS but as soon as the login screen appears, it does not work. While this maybe Microsofts fault, if Logitech choose to advertise a product as compatible with Vista, it should be. It is certainly not plug and play.
With regards to the actual shopping - some parts I got from www.dabs.com, other I got from scan. Dabs were perfect (as always). Scan were not - the Q9450 was not in stock even though the website reported that is was. I ended up waiting over a month for the processor and had to order an Core Duo E8200 as a temporary part (so now I have £100 sitting on my shelf). I don't use many online shops but scan decided to take my money as soon as I placed the order (rather than on dispatch - which is normal in my experience). That meant that they had nearly £2000 of my money for nothing!
/end rant
I also now have a Samsung SyncMaster 2493HM as my primary monitor (this is excellent - 24" @ 1900*1200) with an Iiyama 904UT on either side. To any purchasers/managers: coders require a minimum of 2 * 17" displays. 1 is simply not enough if you want us to get any work done!
Next post will be a bit more technical ;-)
Update: The only way I could get the keyboard to work was by doing a full reinstall of Vista.
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