My baby’s home!

Stardate 65787.8

Well, my computer has finally come back from being serviced, and it works quite well.

Windows 7 Ultimate (up from Vista Home Premium) is amazing, and runs almost everything even better than it did before.

Of course, there were a couple of hitches, most likely on the part of either UPS (which I used to send the computer out) or FedEx (which was used to send it back).

The lower left corner, at the back, looks like someone dropped it on a hard surface, and the 3.5 inch bays were mounted crookedly (the bottom brackets had been screwed down, but were so bent out of alignment that the tabs on the top of the assembly weren’t in the slots in the bottom of the 5.25 inch bay stack).

As for Windows itself, I’m amazed how quickly it boots.  While XP and Vista took as much as two or three minutes from POST to desktop, Windows 7 is up within 30 seconds.

The only major glitch I’ve found so far is in Windows Media Center.  While it plays DVDs beautifully (which was the main reason for having it), it won’t play TV.  I can’t watch my cable TV through it because I don’t have an IR receiver (actually, I do, but WMC won’t recognize it for TV, despite the fact that it uses it) and I can’t watch Internet TV because it won’t play Flash-based video (the screen goes black, with only the mouse pointer and controls showing, and even blacker when they’re hidden).

But the machine works again, and that’s what’s most important.

Of course, with the new motherboard, I’ll be able to expand the memory.  Though the first step is to replace the existing two 2GB cut-rate crap modules with a single 4GB quality memory module.  I’ve decided on one from G.Skill, which can be had for around $80 on NewEgg.  It’ll be twice as fast as the existing memory, too!  If they weren’t so expensive, I’d up it to 8GB modules, for a total of 32GB, but cost will limit me to 4GB modules, for a total of 16GB.

Still, stuff like Lightwave should absolutely fly…

All in all, I’m very happy with the results.

Now I just have to wait for Star Trek Online to go Free to Play…

That’s my opinion, and I’m sticking to it.