Woke up on monday to a dead computer. Ironically I had left it on during the night while backing up all my files and somewhere during the night the motherboard got fried and the entire system went to the great big silicon heaven in the sky. For two hours, I tried valiantly to revive the system, but to no avail. Its more than 3 years old, I guess it was time to get a new rig.

After 3 years, in the end what I am left with is just a bunch of dusty rusty old spare parts in a plastic bag.

So I got me down to Sim Lim immediately after work to shop for new parts to put together a new rig even though I had mostly planned to get a new system sometime after the launching of Windows 7. For the last couple of years I had stubbornly stuck to XP but now have no choice but to transit to the 64bit era and Vista.

The old steel casing was getting rather dirty and rusty anyway. So in the end I got a new Lian Li aluminium casing, a Core i7 950 cpu, 6 gig of RAM, a new motherboard, a new hard disk plus a copy of Vista Business and went home to assemble the new rig. Luckily I had already bought a new Geforce 275 GTX last month and didn’t have to spend more money.

Its always a little bit exciting putting together a new rig. Part of the thrill is listening to the satisfying hum of the new machine when you first flip the switch and see it come to life.

Some people like the smell of new clothes, new car or new sneakers. Me? I like the smell of a new computer . So after an hour or so I had finally assembled the system while leaving my room looking like an emergency medical center for computers- with all manner of cables, screws and miscellaneous spare parts lying all over the place.

On thing I have to point out is that while Lian Li produces top quality casing, the design of this particular one does make cable routing quite the challenge. Things are definitely not as neat as I would have preferred.

And here is my room looking like a ER for computers.

Good thing about Vista installation is that its gives me time to clean up the mess.

Meanwhile the endless round of updates that never seems to get finished-

Anyway I finally managed to get most of my stuff up and running. Basically spent the whole day configuring Vista to look like XP as I systematically found and deactivated every resource hogging crap Microsoft likes to put into their new OS so we can be reminded of how Windows is the Mac OS beaten with an ugly stick.

I am sure the engineers at Microsoft spent a lot of time writing the Aero interface, but honestly what I want in the end is a fast, responsive OS that helps me makes the best use of my time, not sliding fading halfassed transparent menu bars that annoys the hell out of you after 2 minutes.

The greatest thing about the transition to a 64bit OS is the access to more RAM. Whereas 3.5 million or so faces is about the max I can go in ZBrush. On my new system, I can easily go 12 million or more.

RAM and money. You can never have too much of both.