Windows Vista x64 & Me: Day 1 Wednesday, November 14 2007

Yesterday was a long day installing all the components into my new computer, which took a good couple of hours (I had to make sure I did it properly). Once that was done, I excitedly turned it on, and after spending a minute or two in the BIOS changing some settings, it just powered itself off! I can tell you, the feeling you get in your stomach when that happens isn't nice. So after playing around a little, checking cable connections etc. I turned it on again and took a look at the hardware monitor in the BIOS. The CPU temperature was already at 105F after only a few seconds, and 30 seconds later was at 160F. Something was clearly very wrong. As soon as it hit 212F (100 Celsius), it shut down again. After more poking around in the case, it seems the processor heat sink was very marginally skewed and wasn't doing it's job, so I removed it and reseated it, and all was good in my computing world. Well, nearly.

A few people had replied to my previous post and I had decided to install Vista x64. The first warning sign of what lay ahead was when the Vista install took around and hour to complete. Then, during a restart when you get the progress bar only on the screen, it would take several minutes before a blank screen for another minute and *then* the login screen. After much playing around and a couple more clean installs, I found the cause of all my problems. Once I removed that 1GB stick of memory and installed Vista (again), things were good. Very good. Very, very good.

So those problems aside (I'm not sure if they're Vista or hardware related; a solution on an Intel motherboard is to downgrade the BIOS so I'm leaning toward hardware) I'm very happy with Vista x64 so far. Things are fast, nothing has crashed yet which is more than I can say about my x86/laptop experience and all hardware/software is running fine. I'll be starting some work shortly so I'll get a real world taste of how things are, but the verdict so far: Great!!

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