I decided to upgrade the system I use for primarily work at home to something newer. 3.5 years is an eternity in PC technology, so I saw what seemed like a nice cheap system with which to upgrade. This was a Dell Dimension C521 w/ a dual core AMD64 Athlon processor (the 4400 series so 2.3 GHz), 2GB of RAM, 320GB of hard drive, and an nVIDIA built-in graphics controller. For $560 (before tax) it seemed like a nice system which would be a nice boost in performance for not much money. Given that I would then use my old system to replace Andrew's 7 year-old $399 Dell Special, it seemed even better (Andrew's system is so old, it won't even run Windows XP).

Unfortunately, one of the conclusions I've arrived at is that I hate Windows Vista. First, there's that ever irritating Windows issue of needing to get a new driver. Everything needs a new driver. And not every thing has a Vista driver. Arrgggh.

Next, realize that I work for Sun. One of my goals is to run Solaris on this thing. Multi-OS booting on a PC used to be pretty straightforward under Windows XP. Unfortunately, this is not the case with Windows Vista, which seems to insist on being in charge of things. It's not straightforward at all.

To get Vista to dual-boot with Solaris, fortunately, someone wrote some very nice (if somewhat complicated) instructions on how to accomplish this. With these instructions as a guide, I'm making progress. Now just need to get audio working, and the network working....

Keep your eyes on the Blog for more updates.

Tags: Technology