New Development Machine!

[n4gix 4,947]

Well, after suffering along with my three year old "development computer" and watching it becoming slower and crankier, and lately having to "cold boot" it up to six times everyday just to get some work done......I finally broke my piggy bank and bought an inexpensive eMachine (aka: Gateway made in China) as a replacement. It's by no means any sort of hotrod, but it's considerably faster than the lamo P4 2.8 GHz machine it's replacing!eMachines ET1161-05, AMD Athlon 64 LE-1620 2.4 GHz, 2GB DDR2, 160GB, DVDRW Flash Reader, with Vista Home Basic.I slapped in my trust ATI X700 I had lying around so I can run dual-monitors. While rearranging my desk, I swapped my 22" 4:3 LCD with a 22" KDS Wide-screen LCD I had ordered several months ago. My second monitor remain a 19" Sony 4:3 LCD. I'm noticing an occasional flicker on the 2nd monitor, so I suspect I will need to increase the cooling by adding another case fan, and while at it replace the crummy 250 Watt power supply with something more robust... :( I've spent the last three days getting all my development software installed, GMax, Max8, Photoshop CS 8, LithUnwrap 1.3, DXTBMP, and WinOffice 2000.What a pleasure to burn off a new FS9 build of the CJ1+ from GMax in a mere 9 minutes versus the 20+ minutes the old machine would take! I can't imagine how much faster buring an FSX model will be! :oWhat took so long of course was being very careful to copy across the entire contents of my dedicated E:\ DATA hard drive to the new machine's E:\ DATA drive I added. By doing this, I don't have to update any paths for GMax or Max projects! :( More tricky was managing to transfer all my email archived messages that have been so carefully sorted into their own project folders. Funnily enough, I simply installed a fresh copy of Netscape V7.2, then copy/pasted the entire folder structure from the old machine to the new machine... B) In any case, beginning tomorrow I'll be able to get back to work. I've got a lot backed up waiting for me! :(

[Varmint007 2]

Congrats Bill! Yeah, the speed of MakeMdl was the first really impressive difference I noticed when upgrading from a P4. Build times went from "go make a pot of coffee (and wait for it to finish)", to "pour a cup of coffee". Absolutely amazing.--Jon

[dragonflightdesign 98]

I'll give you two months before you're back to 'this thing is soooo slow!' :(-Dai

[n4gix 4,947]

I enjoyed your colorful description of the "wait times" for MakeMDL.exe compiling...One of the most interesting observations is that even when using the correct procedure to remove unwanted programs, a LOT of dross remains in the Registry...I installed and (re)registered RegistryFix7, ran it and located 936 obsolete Registry entries, every one of which referenced software and/or files that had been "Uninstalled" properly... :( You may well be right, Dai, although I do intend to be far more discriminating about installing/testing stuff on this machine... :(