Tomas' log of stuff

I figured I'd do a little series of posts about which applications I install on my PC after a reinstall, and in what order. Mostly I thought it would be a nice idea for my own reference, maybe compare it to an update list in a few years and see what the changes are.

This is definately something that will need several posts, probably I'll do one or two apps pr posting, and I'll use this post to keep an updated index of the posts.

The order of the list is based on notes I made the last time I reinstalled both my home and work PCs, and will contain a "consolidated" list, some things I might install on the home PC, some on the work PC, and most of it on both. Where it makes sense I'll mention if it applies to just one of them. I'm including assorted utilities and helper apps, but I'm leaving out drivers and such. Still, some tools might be more or less hardware specific.

So, time to get on with the list! And the first thing that gets installed on all my computers is...

1. Opera
   

People that know me know that I consume digital storage space at an incredible rate. I have no idea what happens to my free space but as soon as I get some more; it's gone. Quite a few years ago, I built a RAID5 setup in my server using a Promise FastTrack SX4000 RAID controller (with onboard ram and a XOR chip) and four 200GB disks. At the time it was quite a lot, but over the years needs have outgrown the RAID and I now have too much data on non-redundant single drives. Also, I'd like to separate some of the storage from the server, both for cooling, noise and placement reasons. So for a long time now I've been watching the NAS/external eSATA device market with interest, waiting for prices and performance to reach acceptable levels.

Finally it looks like the market is opening up, with several of the big players like Thermaltake (Muse NAS-RAID) and Promise (Promise SmartStor NS4300N) entering the SOHO segment with products of their own, challenging existing players like Stardom and Buffalo who have either traditionally been overpriced or only sold with disks preinstalled at awkward size configurations.

Among all these new and exciting products, one in particular has grabbed my attention. It's the Infrant Technologies ReadyNAS NV+. First of all it's getting good reviews regarding noise levels, something other units like the Thecus N4200 have struggled with. But most intriguing is the promise by Infrant that their proprietary X-RAID technology will not only allow you to start with few disks and gradually increase the number while at the same time growing the volume AND maintaining redundancy, but that you will also be able to incrementally replace the disks with larger drives and actually get the benefit of increased volume out out of it.This might not sound like much of a revolution but if you've dealt with devices like this in the past, or even RAID cards, you'll appreciate this since most solutions seems to force you to destroy and rebuild RAIDs to make any significant changes to them. While some solutions like the Promise SmartStor NS4300N feature online expansion and replacement, I've yet to find anyone other than infrant that will go into details about what their RAID extensions will allow you to do in terms of flexibility and expandability. Also, Infrant seems to be on top of the disk size inflation, with officially supporting 750GB disks while many still list "up to 500GB" (this might be due to outdated product specs, but are you willing to take the chance? I'm not).

The price is still a little above what I'd like to pay for such a device, but considering the ease of mind it brings and the feature list, I feel the time is right to start building a new storage vault based on 750GB disks. And thanks to the virtues of X-RAID, I can start with just the NAS unit itself and another disk (I have one already), and then extend it as I can afford it. That's a great bonus in itself. 2.2 Terabyte redundant storage, here I come!

After 4 years with my trusty old Lian Li PC-6099 (image) case it's time to find something more suitable for the current inventory. The new high end components put higher demands on the case cooling, most noticably the passive motherboard cooling, and also the custom coolers I installed on the cpu and gfx card depend on a better airflow than this older case provides. It was a work of art at the time, but the quadruple 80mm fixed speed fans make too much noise compared to the effect.

After several months of waiting and watching Lian Lis product lineup, considering cases such as the excellent PC-V1100BplusII and PC-S80 I finally found a case I think is just what I need. Lian Li PC-A10B is an extremely stylish case with an excellent airflow design which while it isn't specially noise dampened as such, should allow me to run with all fans at minimum speed and thus become practically silent. If there's still some resonnance or something I'll consider adding pads on the side walls.

It's also getting great reviews over at Overclockers Café and Case.Closed, which is no disadvantage either :)

I also took the opportunity to add a card reader to the system so I don't need to get the portable reader from the camera backpack each time I want to read the CF cards. This excellent Sunbeam I/O panel adds e-sata, usb, and audio connectors as well as fan controls to the package.

After my rather depressing experience with Windows XP x64 I decided to wait for the 64 bit version of Vista beta 2. It took longer than expected, but finally it's out and installed. I'll be trying it out over the next few weeks and see how it works out.

Well, it's been about a week since I installed the 64 bit edition of Windows XP, and yesterday I decided to give up and go back to the good old 32 bit edition. As I mentioned in my previous post, there was just too much weirdness. What I've done is repartition my drive a little, changing one big boot partition into one 35GB for XP 32bit, and reserving a small 15GB partition which I plan to install the 64 bit edition of Vista beta2 on when it's released. Hopefully that's not too far off. I have to say, for now Windows XP 32 bit feels much more comfortable, and I can't really point to any performance difference at all. That said, I didn't really find any 64 bit edition of an app I rely on regularly.