Over the last couple of days I finally had some time to put together my new server test machine. I recently bought a new motherboard, CPU, memory and finally got around to just swapping out Mobo's on my secondary server box. The performance difference on this machine is staggering - running a dual Core Duo 3Ghz processor vs the old Pentium M 2.4 makes the new machine fly! I suspect most of this is due to the dual core and the extra processor keeping Windows from locking as much as it did.

Usually when I rebuild a box I tend to reinstall everything but this being my secondary and test box that has 4 different OS's installed on it, I just booted the new machine into Vista. I've never actually tried this before but to my surprise Vista just came up first try even though all the innards including Video were swapped out (new Mobo couldn't use the old video card drat). Vista booted right up and installed drivers for about 5 minutes after which I was left with a working and very speedy machine. Dig that...

It's been a while since I've installed a new machine - things have gotten a lot more complex over the last couple of years it seems. I ended up picking up an ASUS P5B Premium motherboard and it's almost ridiculous how much add-on stuff comes with - a motherboard. Heck the thing has a freaking remote control so I can turn the overclocking settings on and off. Jeesh.

I had a bit of trouble getting the MB to see the full 4 gig of memory I put into the machine though. The BIOS screen showed only 3008MB. It seems odd that the default settings wouldn't allow for seeing all of 4 gig. I had to enable the Memory Remap Feature. You figure that this is a common enough scenario today that it would be the default.

Besides being a test box one partition of this machine is dedicated to run my as my Audio Work Station for recording, running Sonar and a few other studio tools. I ran through a few of my more complex songs that were choking the old CPU and disk bandwidth and with the new box it's barely scratching 10% CPU and disk usage. Right on. I suppose I'll have a lot less drop outs to contend with now... Now if I can only find the time to actually start playing music again. Grrr...

Memory Lane - 4 gigs in my Laptop!

Yesterday I also got my 4 gig RAM update for my laptop - installed that as well and man that too made one hell of a difference. Since installing the extra 2 gig I don't see a fraction of the disk activity that I saw previously. The machine is running noticeably faster and quiet er with the disk not spinning up nearly as much. I haven't been closely monitoring my machine, but I was probably running just at the limit of physical memory at 2 gig with multiple copies of Visual Studio going at time, Outlook, my documentation tools and who knows how many browser instances going. Virtual memory probably was strapping and kicking out to disk. Now - life is smooth again. Another winner - especially for the ridiculously cheap $80 that it cost to replace the memory of the machine with 4 gig.

Now if we could only get faster hard drives into the laptop - the disk is still the biggest performance bottleneck it seems. I have 160 gig @ 7200RPM drive but performance compared to the desktop is still lagging mainly - it feels like - for the disk. Anybody using any of the 10,000 RPM laptop drives that are slowly coming forth? Are they doing noticably better? In the past first generation high RPM drives often end up being only marginally faster...

Vista Perceived Performance Tweak

BTW, speaking of performance - or maybe perceived performance - in Vista: I made a small tweak in my UI settings to disable the zooming/fly-in effects in Aero recently. The settings can be set here:

I realize this is purely subjective perception, but Vista sure 'feels' a lot more snappy without the zoom in and out operation. I've been running this way for months on my main machine, and when I ran the  on the new server machine the window animation feels extremely noticeable. Flipped off and life is good again. Interestingly on several occasions when I've used Vista around some non-techy folks that haven't seen Vista, they've actually commented on that Window fly-in and it being distracting. The timing of the effect is too slow or something especially in some situations when it actually freezes in half transparency and ghosts on the edges of the screen.

Oh and no - I'm not going to turn the rest of them off. We gotta leave something to do for that expensive GPU that I otherwise don't need, no? <g>