Had a couple of free hours last night after the kids went to bed so I went up to the attic to sling together my latest and greatest cheapie Windows box. This one, based on an ASUS T3-M2NC51PV all-in-one, barebones case and an AMD Athlon 64 X2 3600+ Brisbane processor (actually running at 1.9GHz ), replaces my Shuttle/Intel Celeron D box that went over to mom’s house for tax duty and other chores that required something more than Windows 98.
As I mentioned the other day, I decided to go for the ASUS box over Shuttle because in the sub-$200 price range, Shuttle’s competing box was missing some features like gigabit ethernet. In retrospect, I might have been better off waiting for a Shuttle sale. I had some problems reaching screw holes, the hard drive cage wasn’t as carefully crafted and things didn’t quite ease into place as easily as when I built that prior Shuttle. But the ASUS, while looking a bit homely, is quiet and operating just fine now that I’ve got it built. I also picked up a super-bargain copy of Windows Vista Home Premium edition as CompUSA’s local store closing sale. It’s proven fun to experiment with, to say the least. The new kid on the block also took in an ASUS EN7600GS video card and 2 GB of RAM. The “silent” model video card has no fan but fit easily in the case’s single PCI-Express slot despite its giant heat sinks.
Getting some of the screws in to hold the Sony DVD writer was hellish. Ever drop a tiny screw inside a computer case, in a crevice between several sheets of soldered metal? No fun. Eventually, I recovered all the screws and got them in but only with the DVD player sticking its nose out a bit, ruining the pretty but otherwise superfluous door and spring contraption that is meant to hide the front of your DVD player. Oh well. I removed that door sucker until someone invents a DVD player miniaturizer.
I encountered the only slightly dreaded “processor not recognized” warning on startup, as customers predicted on Newegg’s review board, since the current ASUS BIOS predates AMD’s latest line of 65-nanometer, lower power chips. There’s a beta BIOS out but I’ll have to find that in my next late night session. Installing Windows Vista was pretty dreamy versus installing older Windows versions. It immediately recognized all of my Maxtor 160 GB SATA hard drive, completely installed itself in under 20 minutes and got everything running without needing any of the drivers provided by ASUS on a separate CD. In fact, after I activated Vista, it went off and found updates not just for Windows but also for several of the Nvidia components on the ASUS motherboard.
I must say that my first impression of Vista is that it’s awful. I was perpetually assaulted by the UAC, or “User Account Control,” which grays out the whole screen, freezes everything and asks for permission before such high-risk operations as changing the monitor resolution. Also, the gadgets on the gadget bar can’t be resized. Want to keep a list of more than three stock prices visible all the time? Out of luck unless you install a second incarnation of the stock gadget. Many of the icons around the edges of the screen are too tiny to be believed and the Start menu seems more confusing than ever. Maybe I’ll get used to it?
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