Before I get on to the main point, a bit of history, well my history. Since the age of 6 we’ve had a PC here, one that generally has gone through a replacement every 2 years, and each time it has been quite a bit of a significant upgrade. The first computer had a “very powerful” (for the time) Pentium 133MHz processor with a “MASSIVE” 16MB of RAM (factory upgraded from 8MB, quite a nice upgrade at the time) and everything was fine. It was acceptably fast, and as i remember, was characterised by the sound of the floppy and hard drive that ran in there. The amazingly massive 1.2GB of storage, something you’d never fill up. That was replaced with a new machine with an AMD 300MHz processor in 1998, I can’t remember how much RAM and a 6GB hard drive, which was a massive upgrade across 2 years, I actually even needed to use partitions at the time, due to the limitation of 2GB partitions under FAT. That was my main machine for a couple of years, 4 even maybe until being replaced with a 1800MHz P4 with 256MB RAM and a 40GB hard drive, still a massive upgrade for the time.

That was the past, this is now. I currently use a 2530MHz Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM and depending on what’s in there at any time, somewhere between 500GB and 3000GB storage. I built this machine in 2008 and the only changes have been the hard drives, as my capacity has grown and then moving the drives off into a different machine better suited to serving files. It is now 2011, approximately 3 years after building the machine, it is usually now that I start looking at what it’s replacement will be.

So lets look at PC technology over the past three years, I could move from a Core 2 Duo to maybe a Core i5, or even a Core i7, that would provide a speed upgrade, of course that’s just the Intel side, there is also the AMD side of the same fence, mid-high range systems would give a speed upgrade. As for RAM, the standard is either 6/12GB with a i7 or 4-8 with others so we’ll take that, and I’m happy with my disk capacity so we’ll leave it at that. I use my current PC mainly for gaming so I’ll add a graphics card to that. And for the sake of not doing too much maths (as the price changes all the time), we’ll assume it comes to £something.

So what do I really get for my money in 2011? A small upgrade speed compared to my current setup (compared to upgrades of the past), and more RAM, but what for? I have plenty already. As for the graphics update, I don’t really see anything being that over-taxing on my current system, so that’s a useless upgrade. Beginning to notice a trend? None of these updates are really worth getting, in fact in my (possibly bigoted) opinion, I haven’t seen an update in the past 3 three years to the PC space that’s been really worth it. Maybe solid state drives somewhat, but they are far too expensive for their capacity at the moment. It is this that I think is the issue with PCs these days, it has reached a point where it has matured and is at a stage that is “good enough”, and while that is good for most everyone, it has made the space boring, no really exciting developments, nothing really taxing a machine to make it worth getting an upgrade in the near future.

Now back to the point I brought up in the title, why I might not build a PC again. Put bluntly, there’s no point. Why put in the effort when for little to no cost difference I can just buy a PC that does what I want? Ok, so its “tradition” to build your own PC, especially in the gaming space, but really what’s the point? Where is the real benefit? It is also clear that the PC space is changing, the gaming space is changing, the technological world as we know it is changing. I sometimes like to make predictions for what we shall see in the few years ahead, I will write that soon, most will be clear why I think that, some maybe a little far out, but we shall see. But for now, this PC I am writing on will likely stay my PC for a long time, or at least until I change form factor.

Well, as you may or not be aware, I recently bought a new laptop, a HP Pavilion tx2530. It doesn’t have multi-touch or any of the other naff that the latest TouchSmart tx2 series has, but who uses multi-touch after two days of use anyway? It does however have single touch and pen input, as Windows keeps reminding me. It also has a Windows Experience Rating of 4.3, which isn’t bad for a laptop I reckon.

The laptop came with Windows Vista Home Premium, but hey there’s a release candidate of Windows 7 floating around here, so why don’t I install it? So that’s just what I did, and now I will discuss what works and what doesn’t.

Installation

First step of any system, installing the operating system. In case things went south, I decided to keep Windows Vista installed as well. This would allow me to at least have a working system if things went wrong. So the first thing I did was to take an 80GB chunk of the main hard drive and called it my Windows 7 install, as you can see in the image of Computer.

Now that has been installed, it’s time for some driver installs. But wait, Windows 7 isn’t released as RTM yet, so what drivers to go for? Well, Microsoft claim to have 100% compatibility with Vista drivers, so a nice trip to the HP Driver Download site to get some drivers. Looking down the list, I grabbed everything, apart from the ATI graphics drivers which were very out of date, so I grabbed some dedicated Windows 7 drivers from the AMD site. Good hour of installing, and only one catch, the drivers for the sound chipset wouldn’t install because I’m running an “old” version of Windows. Thankfully Windows Update is a dream so that just fixed that problem.  Now that everything’s installed, lets see if it works.

Testing Previous Features

Now, the first thing that I need to make sure of, is that I have not lost any functionality by this move, but have indeed gained functionality, so I will test original features.

1. Sound buttons
   Now, as you may or may not be aware, the tx2530 has backlit buttons that are blue by default, but the mute button turns orange when the sound is muted. Before installing drivers, muting the sound did not cause the colour to change. After all the driver installs, this appears to work perfectly. Orange to blue and blue to orange, button or mute via windows, it all works. Not a stopper if it didn’t but nice that it does.
2. Tablet and touch
   The main point of the laptop, the touch screen and (more importantly) the tablet. After testing in Windows Journal, the pressure sensitivity from the pen, the rubber on the pen, right click, having touch enabled, all works perfectly. However I have one problem with it, and that is pen flicks. Basically you use gestures, throw up and down to scroll up and down, left to go back, and right to go forward. But wait… in Windows 7, left is forward and right is back. Sorry that doesn’t make any sense at all!?!?!? This is easily fixed however by enabling the 8 directional pen flicks and changing them manually, but that is just weird how it is in reverse by default.
3. Multimedia Remote
   This laptop comes with a tiny remote (that is almost guaranteed to be lost). Before the upgrade it used to control everything perfectly, it controls Windows Media Centre and also the QuickPlay software. After the new install, and mashing of every button on the remote, this still works perfectly, which is good.
4. Screen Image Auto-rotate
   A feature that at times has been a pain when I haven’t wanted it to automatically rotate the screen around. But heck, its still useful if you want to switch to tablet mode and not want to rotate the laptop. Shutting the screen here causes the same correct effect to happen which is good.
5. Other Features
   I have tested other features, but they are not worth of a full note, and all work perfectly. The SD Card, the monitor connection, TV out, network all work. I haven’t tested if the modem works, but then again I don’t use dialup or a modem for anything, so this really doesn’t need a test for me.

Now that these have been checked, let’s see what’s new.

New Items

The first item is quite useful, the new tablet pc input screen. Firstly, the on screen keyboard has some nice effects, firstly the buttons look nicer, and they now have a nice effect when you press them, which makes it easier to tell if you have hit the wrong button.

The pen input differs from Vista as well by as you write it does text recognition on the words and shows it where your writing once was. There are new gestures to split and merge words, and the best feature (in my opinion is if you click on a word you can view it in character mode and change letters as you go.

Summary of Part 1

Is Windows 7 worth it on my laptop? I would say definitely. Installing this has been very good so far, and in Part 2 I will be comparing battery performance as well as other features in Windows that should hopefully make it worth the switch from Vista to 7.

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This is the end of part one of this post and I will get back to this. But for now there is more Windows 7 testing to do on my laptop.

I use a Fedora 9 server, which I can’t get to, so the normal method of putting a disc in and letting anaconda do all the work just isn’t suitable for me, so using yum I “upgraded” by telling yum to use the Fedora 10 repos and then getting the system to update from this. This method is somewhat risky, but for this case it seemed to turn out well. Previously this method has caused funny problems with X-server, but as I don’t use any x applications (everything is just command line for me) this wasnt an issue.

The steps I used to set up this system was as follows.

1. Firstly, make sure your Fedora 9 installation is as up to date as possible. This is done in the normal way, and for this, it is probabily best if you clear your cache of any repos.

   yum clean all && yum update && yum clean all

   You will notice I clear the repo cache twice, this is to make sure that when we get it to do the upgrade, it doesnt try to use any old F9 repos.

2. Remove any extra repos other than the default Fedora ones, to minimise package conflicts even further. These files can be found in /etc/yum.repos.d/
3. Run the following command into rpm to get fedora to believe it is Fedora 10 and then to update itself to it:

   rpm -Uhv http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/10/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/fedora-release-10-1.noarch.rpm http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/10/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/fedora-release-notes-10.0.0.1.noarch.rpm

4. Run another yum update, this time it will download a lot of packages as this will now upgrade you to Fedora 10
5. Reboot using the reboot command
6. Pray (a little)
7. Say hello to Fedora 10

You should now be running a proper version of Fedora 10. Note however that using an installation disc and upgrading using anaconda is still the recommended method of upgrading, but for those that cannot do that, at least this offers an alternative.

Note however that due to to some changes that happen between versions, you might notice some slight bugs running a new version upgraded in this way. I have yet to see any of these probems, but that is not to say that there aren’t any. Problems that are found will have to be fixed some other way, and I cannot be held responsible for any of these. Basically, here is a method but it is unsupported so it’s at your own risk.

I hope these instructions will come in handy to someone at some point, but basically if you need them, they are here.

Right now I am using the Planets theme, its offering me quite a good mix of image and transparency, though I think I may settle on the Shiny theme or some other theme that resembes a normal Google blank page.

Anyone else seeing this at all? To see, go to your Gmail settings page, and look for the “Themes” tab.

Edit: This is only showing on my Gmail account, not my Google Apps account at the moment, so it appears its a gradual rollout (I have give me beta stuff turned on in Apps)

Firstly, the parts that I ordered:

• Corsair Memory 2x1GB 240-Pin DIMM XMS2-6400 CL5 Corsair Memory 2x1GB 240-Pin DIMM XMS2-6400 CL5 – £29.84
• Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 2.53GHz – £75.18
• Gigabyte S775 Intel P31 DDR2 ATX Audio Lan Gigabyte S775 Intel P31 DDR2 ATX Audio Lan – £41.46
• Gigabyte Radeon 4850 512MB PCIE 2xDVI 625MHz/1.9GHz – £115.13
• Grand Total: £261.61

Now, firstly my parts had arrived in a box that surely was too big for what it needed?!

A big box

And the parts inside the box:

The CPU:

The box for a processor

45nm, “You are so small, it’s funny to me!” I believe would be the heavys reaction.

Top of Processor Box

Surely such a big box for this small processor?

Back of Processor Box

Ooh it spins… hopefully enough to cool it down so I don’t melt my new processor.

The Motherboard:

Motherboard box

Well, the processor fits on there, thats about as much as I know lol

Graphics Card:

Motherboard Box

Shiny box… let’s hope the graphics are as shiny

Graphics Card

And the shiny graphics card, not as shiny as it’s box, but defnetly better than the nVIDIA 5200 that it replaces.

RAM:

RAM

2GB should be enough to let me actually use this thing lol

Ooh, maps copied I’m gonna now test this system and put more pics later