The Boss'

I thought I’d document my progress thus far with setting up my new desktop PC. One of the first things that I installed was Norton Ghost, a backup and recovery application. I’ve created one complete recovery point already, with only minimal applications installed, and I’ll make another one once all of my development tools are loaded. These recovery points will be useful if I ever need to restore the machine back to its current state. Some other must have tools that I’ve installed are…

• Windows Live Writer – The sweet blogging tool that I use to post nonsense like this.
• Crossloop – great for remotely fixing your in-laws computers. I also use it to conference with the company that I work for out of town. It allows me to share my desktop and fill others in on what I’ve been working on, and also view the screens of others as they share their progress.
• AVG-Free – Free Anti-virus software. Seems to be working every bit as good as the Norton product I was paying for.
• SysInternals – The SysInterals suite is full of great tools. Autoruns let you know exactly what is set to launch on startup on your machine, no matter where the apps are hiding out. Process Explorer is like your task manager on steroids. It allows you to see exactly what processes are running, and what system resources they’re using. ZoomIt is also cool as it allows you to quickly magnify the entire screen…it’s great if you’re trying to explain something to somebody looking over your shoulder, or viewing your desktop remotely.
• CCleaner – Formerly known as crap cleaner. Does a good job of cleaning up all of the temporary internet and other types of files that build up on your system over time.
• Foxit Reader – A great, lightweight reader for PDF files. Soooo much smaller and faster than Adobe.

No real surprises so far with Vista. A couple of the installers for the development tools I use got hung up, but I restarted the installers and they finished eventually. Visually, I like it. And yeah, the machine is a lot faster. I can’t wait to start writing code on it.

Today is the day. After using Windows Vista for software testing at work for a long time, the day has finally arrived to give Vista a try at home. I had been toying with the idea of upgrading my home PC for some time, and the contract work that I’ve been doing for AdvanceWare finally made the decision for me. It was time to get a faster PC.

I spent some time over at Amazon.com picking out exactly the components I would want in a new PC, and adding them to a special wish list that I set up. My goal was to keep the cost of the new machine under $1000. Due diligence required that I check out Dell.com to see what a comparable machine from them would cost. I’ve been loyal to Dell in the past for no other reason than their specification, order, and delivery process is so straight forward. So, last week I jumped out to their site and noticed a banner that read, "One Day Sale". It just so happened that a machine with many of the same components that I wanted, was deeply discounted, but only for one day. I had to act fast. The deal was for a Dell Inspiron 530. There were three things that made this deal a no-brainer for me.

• Intel Quad Core 6600
• 3GB RAM
• 500GB Hard Drive

It’s a pretty basic box, but it had the fast processor, big hard drive, and sufficient RAM that I was after. The best part? $310 off, for one day only. That put the base price of the machine at $499. I added a 19-1 media card reader and 128MB graphics card and the final price came close to $580. You may say that the 128MB graphics card is pretty wimpy. I’ll concede that. However, this machine will serve primarily as my software development box, running Visual Studio 2008, as well as other development tools. It’s not like it’s a gaming rig. There may come a time in the future that I’m doing more photo realistic rendering related to software development, and I can revisit the graphics card at that point.

I just got notification from DHL that the machine has arrived at my house, so I’m anxious to get it up and running. I’d like to add a pair of 22" LCD’s to this machine at some point in the near future, thereby freeing up my existing peripherals for my wife and kids. Right now, I’ll run both my old and new machines with the same peripherals via a KVM switch. The downside of this is that if I’m working my development machine, the kids can’t use the old computer for anything. I expect this arrangement to be temporary, however. I just need the right deal on LCD’s to come along.

A while back, our local paper ran a story about our family, and our coupon clipping habit. The story featured a couple of pictures, but the photographer was snapping away the whole time. We wondered what became of the rest of the photos. Well, now we know. We found them in an online gallery.

Also, be sure to check out the gallery of the E-Unit program. It features a good friend of mine, Sgt. Cal Keuning. Cal and I were born within a few hours of each other, and we’ve been friends ever since. There were four of us, actually, all born right around the same time in Holland Hospital, and our parents all became good friends. Back in 2002, the Sentinel ran a story about all of us turning 30.

Here’s a little nugget to add to your bag of tricks. You can search a particular site with Google. No need to search through a bagillion results looking for a page you remember seeing on a particular site. Simply enter site:<site name> <search term>, where <site name> is the name of the site you want to search, and <search term> is, obviously, the text you want Google to search for. Below is an example from my site.

Don’t you just hate an unpleasant surprise? Such was the case for me today. I checked my web site only to discover that all of my previous posts, all 261 of them, spread over 2 1/2 years, were in the wrong order. The natural order of a blog is to have the newest post at the top of the page. My site was showing my oldest post, a post from November 15 2005, at the top of the page. Yuck. Just what I wanted to do on a Sunday afternoon. Troubleshoot web site problems.

And, as if by sheer coincidence, I can again post pictures to my site. Weird.