A timely delivery from Newegg.com gave me most of the last few components I intend to add to my new PC. Some, like the 1TB internal HDD I desperately want, are going to have to wait just a little longer before they make it in, but for now, he is pretty complete.
First, I got the cold cathode UV bulbs, as well as the UV reactive cabling and fans I was eagerly anticipating. If there was any doubt before that the box resembles an ascendant AI, it is gone now. I received my packages at 10am and had everything installed, cables tucked where I wanted, etc by about 2pm. When I turned on the machine, I discovered a few Easter eggs: my RAM slots are UV reactive, as are my two 120mm case fans. This was nice, because I had replaced the two 80mm fans, but chose to wait and see if the bulbs were bright enough to even reach the other ones, and sure enough, there's a circular cloud of soft glow at the back of my case. The sleeved PATA cable looks like some albino cave-dwelling python, unraveling itself in my case to present a greater threat. I haven't purchased the UV-reactive detailing paint, or the plasma bulb (for fear that its light would overpower the UV) but they may be just around the corner.
Also, I finally hooked up the front LED "eyes", and while they are blue--not traditional Cylon red--there are red HDD activity LEDs embedded behind them, so if it's dark, and he's thinking, you see a flicker of crimson in his electronic gaze. Is that malice....?
As the sun slowly set, the interior began to glow more and more, a subtle luminescence from within. By the time night had fallen and my eyes had adjusted, I was very pleased with my work. The bulbs are velcroed to the underside of the interior roof of the case, so they are not visible, but the combination of my power supply's blue LED and ultra-violet light make the inside eerily visible.
Did I mention my new LinkSys router looks like a Cylon device?
When playing around with some other things to make the final conversion (so that I use him for everything except BitTorrent, instead of just gaming) I discovered some other fun nuances. For instance, iTunes 8's visualizer is like watching stars have sex--which is fucking awesome.
The Windows Vista sidebar has some incredibly useful gadgets that are, oddly enough, exactly the things I have always wished I could see at any given moment. Right now, I have the day/date, the temp, and a CPU/RAM tachometer set, all faded to a 20% transparency, so they don't distract, but can be read easily anytime I need them. I think I can safely say this is the first time MS has given me exactly what I wanted from the next OS version. Here's hoping for Windows 7!
Which brings me to Vista. I am surprised by how much I like it, from the 4-second to sleep/wake features, to the next-gen "glam" UI options. Some of this is the power of too much RAM and a quad CPU, but it still has a very efficient vibe to it. I'm fortunate enough to not have had the driver and compatibility issues many talked about in the beginning, which I'm sure would have soured the milk. So far, there have been few hiccups. I miss the info pane from XP that allowed me to instantly create a slide show from all the images in a folder, or play all the movies/mp3s in a folder. While these can still be done, I haven't found a way to bring that simple "one-touch" functionality back just yet. I've had some trouble getting the folder views the way I want, but I think I'm almost there. We're trying out Avast AV on this machine to see how it goes, and I plan to play with Open Office once Ubuntu is up and running. If all goes well, I'll install it on Vista, too.
Windows 7 made it onto my machine for about two hours when I first fired it up two weeks ago, and I intend to revisit that, but I just spent 6 hours yesterday making everything on the new box as close as possible to the way it was on the old box (bookmarks, programs, preferences, iTunes, etc.) and doing that all over again, except with hiccups and work-arounds isn't at the top of my list. Plus, I intend to be as helpful to MS this time around as I can, reporting software/hardware issues as they come up, hoping that when I pay for the OS, it will have all those kinks ironed out.
Installing Ubuntu will probably be like that time your Grandma gave you that slightly odd birthday gift, but you didn't really understand why. Once you started playing around with it, you realized that it was better than you first judged, grew up a little, and learned to respect your elders.
All-in-all, I am very pleased with my purchase. I spent more than I should have, but I definitely have what I wanted, plus more. Now I just have to figure out what to do with the old machine, so I don't have two boxes running 24/7 around here. A new CPU fan/heatsink is inbound for him, hopefully ridding me of the insolent screaming that occurs once a week. Once I get the new firmware for the router in place, I can truly make him the Torrent machine, and use Leoben for everything that matters.